Maybe I have an immature way of thinking, but I thought dating and love was finding someone you love for a number of reasons and anything that comes up in the future in terms of hardships will be dealt with then.
I keep hearing and seeing people say they don’t see a future with so and so, or they wouldn’t work in the long run, or they wouldn’t be compatible with their family, why are these things so important? Most of
us will live a long time and we obviously don’t have a one year life span, but why can’t people just love someone for who they are and stop focusing on the long term and enjoy that great relationship?
What happened to people just getting to know someone, falling in love with them and enjoying all the moments they have together and appreciating that person for who they are and how they better your life and make you feel?
An example being a guy who likes a girl and finds her interesting, kind, smart and has great chemistry and passion with her may not consider her long term material if she didn’t have her life together yet or maybe his family or friends wouldn’t approve of her.
I know life isn’t like the movies, and people have obligations, cultural and social norms, and finances But I just went to understand what I’m missing and why I can’t relate.
4 comments
It’s just a different view on life from others. For me I want to settle down and find a lady that I can spend the rest of my life with. I find dating someone I don’t see a future with as a waste of my time.
Why would you want to get invested in a relationship that you know will fail?
The way you approach relationships usually changes as your goals change. There are practical reasons for this of course. Development psychology books will suggest that the teenage years about learning about yourself as an individual and asserting your independence. The 20s are about determining your adult relationships: do you want to be in a romantic attachment or not? What kind of partner do you want? What kind of partner are you. Your 30s are about family, where you fit in your family, whether or not you want children and how you raise them if you do. Of course these stages aren’t actually so neatly defined in real life. Not everyone has such a clear delineation and not all the central conflicts of the stages are still conflicts when you get to that “stage” for instance a teen mom might marry her HS sweetheart and raise her baby and have essentially solved the “central conflicts” for all three of these stages by the age of 17. More to your questions though-
Hypothetically:If a woman wants to have children at some point in the future but is 20 and in school, she might not care very much if her College boyfriend believes he wants children. When she begins to get ready to have children if he still doesn’t want any they might break up but because that seems far away because life after graduation seems like a whole different life stage, it isn’t important right now.
However if a different girl is 20, working and thinks she wants children she might opt not to even go on a second date with a guy who doesn’t want to have children.
Both are the same age. Both want children but they don’t see their current level of readiness to start a family the same way.
The student in this example has things she feels she must accomplish before she settles down. She would be happy to find that perfect match to marry and live with together but if she just finds someone to hang out with and enjoy in the meantime then that’s fine. She might plan to move after graduation and so she doesn’t have high hopes of finding someone who would stick around through all of that or whatever. Relationships are easy to start in school and begin and end easily.
The second woman is already working. She is less likely to be in an environment dominated by her own age group. She is more likely to have fewer opportunities to meet eligible men and starting a relationship is more difficult. The more effort required to begin and maintain a relationship, the more likely a person is to want to make sure that effort is worth it. This person feels ready to marry. She wants to be married young so she can have a large family. When she goes on a date with a guy who says he doesn’t want children she feels like it would be a waste of her time and his to continue, even if he is perfect in every other way because she knows she would never be happy without children. Even if she did entertain the idea of dating someone for a while who didn’t want children, if she were to find herself single again at an age closer to 30 and she was still hoping to have children it would be much more important to her to find someone who shared that opinion. By 30 she would have friends who had married already. Some of her friends would already have children. It almost begins to feel as though everyone around her is having children and there are always baby showers, birth announcements and christenings to remind her of this. Then there is the family pressure. (“Have you met anyone yet? I really do want to get to meet my grandchildren”)
Basically the student is still in the same life stage she was in during her teens, the second woman is beginning the stage Piaget attributes to the 20s and as the same woman approaches her thirties having not yet having found a satisfactory relationship she begins to feel even more pressure because she can not meet the goals of that stage in a way she wishes without first accomplishing the goals of her 20s.
I apologize for the very long answer. I also am very aware I focused specifically on women and something of a biological deadline attached but it is one of the clearest cut examples of why sometimes people do have dealbreakers when it comes to relationships.
It’s not that they’re wrong. Or that you’re immature. You both just value different things, that’s all. You may not be considering someone long term. Others are. That’s what they’re focusing on and that’s ok.