As you may have noticed from my previous posts, I'm a traditional kind of guy. That's just the way I was raised, so was my wife and so were all of our social circle. It was just normal 'round my parts. And no, we aren't religious before anyone asks. Just good old-fashioned American family values.

In my day it just wasn't the done thing for men or women to be "hedging their bets" and dating or sleeping with multiple people at the same time in order to keep your options open. You courted one person at a time. Sure, the gals always had lots more admirers than the fellas and probably had the next one lined up for afterwards (and the next one, and the next one!), but it was still one at a time. But then again, maybe I simply had an overly-wholesome sheltered upbringing or was hopelessly naive? I don't think so, but if you do let me know in the comments!

These days it seems that expecting even sexual exclusivity, never mind dating exclusivity is completely unrealistic, especially on the part of women who obviously have many more suitors. If you want it, you have to have "the talk" now. From my perspective this is very sad and seems selfish, dishonest and shallow. Me, me, me. Everyone just out for themselves.

So, I want to ask all you young 'uns (men and women) how would you react if someone asked you within the first few dates that they wanted you to date them exclusively? Would you be annoyed? Outraged? Offended? Puzzled? Suspicious? Would you think THEY are selfish for trying to limit your options or get one over the competition?

You don't necessarily know the person well yet, or even know how you feel about them, but you would definitely want to see them again. They just want to give things the maximum chance of success and see how it goes.

If you didn't want to commit to dating exclusivity, would you go as far as lying to them (either directly or by omission) or implying that you would comply just to keep them on the hook?

And for women who often have a somewhat "loose" definition of dating because of abundance, yes dating exclusivity includes "getting to know" other men or any other thing you wouldn't do or would not want your partner to do if you were in a committed long-term relationship.

UPDATE:

It seems an important distinction between the past and the present is that because of how people meet these days, they are often strangers rather than from the same social circle. This is something I didn't think about having never used online dating or grinding into PMs or whatever the hell you young people do now. This, of course, would make it extremely odd if a virtual stranger wanted to be exclusive. Whereas, as some commenters have mentioned, in the past you already knew them, were friendly with them or at least knew of them from someone else in your social circle so the jump to "going steady" could be a lot quicker.

It also seems there are naturally two types of people here and both sides seem to think that theirs is the most obvious point of view. There are comments effectively saying "of course no one does that in real life" and "of course everyone's doing that now" at the same time.

Also, some people seem to be annoyed or angry that I've even asked this question? What's that about? Calm down folks and be civil please! People on this sub sure are peculiar - what a welcome I've had...