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July 30, 2008
Game-playing Difficulties When Trying To Start Healthy Dating Relationships
You'd think that things would get easier with dating personals. Since they put you in contact with so many people, it should be easy to find someone with whom you're compatible and with whom you can start healthy dating relationships. The thing is, even if you can find a person who's potentially compatible, it doesn't mean that everything's going to go well or smoothly. We've all had a failed relationship or two that we know didn't necessarily have to fail.
Milan Kundera once wrote that the form of a relationship is decided in the first couple of days. What he means is that our conception of who a person is and the patterns we use to interact with them are formed far more quickly than we realize and that people tend to be confused or let down when the other person seems to change or demands some kind of change.
OK, so I've managed to take a very poetic account of human relationships and butcher it. In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that whether or not you develop healthy dating relationships that you can sustain depends rather heavily on the groundwork you set up early on. The problem is that when a relationship is new you're so enamored with the possibilities it creates that you're off your guard, and you'll likely compromise in pretty much any way you can, because you give the other person the benefit of the doubt.
Say, for example, that you meet a beautiful Asian woman with whom you're quite taken. She nice, funny, smart and you find it easy to communicate with her, but she also has an extremely annoying propensity for being absurdly late that drives you up the wall. If anyone else kept you waiting somewhere for 45 minutes without so much as a phone call, you'd rightly be mad at them. With this new lady, however, you imagine all the possible reasons, decide to give her the benefit of the doubt and let it go because it seems too early to start commenting on another person's behavior. In one sense, that's the only sane thing to do. On the other hand, it's tantamount to saying that it's OK to be absurdly and unapologetically late. You give people an inch, they take a mile.
Relationships seem to be a game controlled by who cares the least. Whoever is less interested in maintaining the relationship or is the least tolerant or willing to adapt to the other person gets to decide the parameters of the relationship. It seems like a bad way of doing things to me, but, I suppose, that's just how the game is played.
Posted by Leon at July 30, 2008 2:21 AM
