An interesting point came out while chatting with All of my relationships started rather abruptly. In all cases, I went from not knowing who the person was to sleeping with them most nights within a one or two week span. This would provide a partial explanation for my discomfort with the early/dating stages of relationships. I dunno. How has it worked for you, gentle reader? How have your initial dating/courtships/whatever gone?
Like yours, and now mostly rethinking that approach.
It’s generally been the same with me. Except that I’ve also had really long drawn out crushes on good friends that for one reason or another were off-limits. I don’t think I’d know what to do if one of those actually became a relationship. Except at least I’d already really know the person quite well, so that wouldn’t be hard.
Slow and steady?
I’m not sure if it wins the race, but it causes relationships to be a LOT less icky in the long run.
With every new encounter, we see something bright and shiney and like a baby to a shaking set of keys we coo and babble and drool and crawl our way into that general direction… sometime grasping onto the keys. But just like a baby, since the only thing that drew you to the keys was their initial bright and shininess… if something bright-ier or shinier comes along you’ll (and they’d) head in another direction.
Another example of a child-like reaction: a favorite blanket. Give a baby a blanket to fall asleep with and it may or may not use it. After a few dozen blankets, and much infantile deliberation, babies tend to gravitate towards one as time progresses… and while any particular blanket possesses some characteristics that the others don’t, even though it may be the same color, texture and brand as another sitting on an opposing side of a room, it is not THEIR blanket… it does not provide the thrill or comfort to which they are accustomed.
Love which starts quickly and passionately is, generally, doomed to be consumed, just as quickly, by the intensity of its own burning.
I’ve got this self-image that I’m intense and take off quickly when starting a new relationship, but I’ve never gone from zero to “sleeping with them most nights within a one or two week span”.
In fact, I’ve never slept with them most nights, even after years together. I need my own space. Maybe you also need your own space, and you haven’t yet worked out a method to preserve it inside a relationship. Try not sleeping with them most nights.
Nah, I’m clear on the fact that I love sleeping with someone most nights. Not every night, but most. But making that an eventual rather than immediate goal seems like a worthy endeavor. And if I find a comfortable spot along the way I can stop or linger as I choose. =)
I dunno … all the relationships that worked for me took off very quickly. I think people are either compatible or they aren’t. The idea of taking things slow is an excuse for staying with somebody who isn’t compatible.
Most people aren’t compatible with you, period, so trying to learn how to behave on future dates by reacting to how you behaved with past incompatible people won’t help.
i’ve done the same in the past and mostly had problems in the end. so, now ive taken a year off dating.
In all but one case, it went as you describe things: meet the person, relatively quickly become an “item” without necessarily knowing them all that well.
BF 4.0 (from Ithaca 2.0 — the one now in Minn.) was someone I knew vaguely for maybe (?) eight months and knew well for two or three months before we started dating. We were mutually attracted as soon as we started to get to know one another, but we were both seeing other people (he seriously, me much less so). When our respective other people dumped us within a matter of days of each other, it seemed a good omen for us.
So, in this case, we did have a better idea of things like how much we had in common, how compatable we were, etc. And there was a fair-sized volcano of built up sexual tension, obviously.
The interesting thing about the best of my bf’s to date was that he says he’d been aware of me for over half a year before we started up. And he thought I was cool. He even related waving to me a time or two on campus … with no reaction from me. He’d even shown up to a few of the homo group meetings, for which I was the meeting facilitator. And he somehow never even registered. When he told me about this I was kinda touched.
Seth later referred to him (at a party) as a ‘super secret sneaky ninja assassin, you bring him to a party and somebody dies, but nobody notices until several minutes later’. He was extremely quiet and unobtrusive, but no longer, as you have probably seen.
I first noticed him when he posted an even handed response to some campus republican assholes as part of the ongoing flamewar between the two organizations. Things proceeded quickly from there.