Serious relationships are better than just dating

Hey again, Firstly, when I mentioned a bias in my opinion of relationships I wasn't putting myself down. It's clear my opinion has a particular tendency or inclination (A.K.A. The definition of the word 'bias') based on my own subjective experience. Arguing from my personal experience and opinion is all I can do, and is what I plan on doing. I really meant my first paragraph as more of a disclaimer, essentially saying: "This is my opinion. I realize it is subjective. I'll be arguing from my position but I understand and accept that there are differing points of view from my own which are also valid" :) I concede now that a vacation was perhaps not the best analogy. A vacation of course has a scheduled end, unlike a serious relationship, and it does not require significant emotional investment. The point I was getting at though was that to do anything is to exclude many other things. If I was considering buying a violin and investing time into learning to play it, I wouldn't consider it a valid argument if someone were to advise against it on the basis that I'd be excluding myself from learning other potential instruments. The same goes with anything else you do. Would you be persuaded against studying a particular topic at university by the argument that to take that subject would be to exclude other potential subjects that aren't available at present but may become available during your course? If you spend your life waiting, everything will pass you by. Time is truly a thief when you're undecided. Regarding the car analogy, it sounds so easy to just "...earn that money back and just as easily buy a new car...", but in reality I think I made quite an apt analogy. Sure, you could buy a new car if your current one got wrecked, but at considerable expense to yourself. The same is true of a relationship breakup; You can just get into another relationship, but again at considerable cost to yourself, only this time emotional harm rather than financial harm has been done. Nevertheless, to have anything of value is to risk losing it. To point out that one would be more devastated by the ending of a serious relationship as opposed to a casual encounter is just to say that the serious relationship is more valuable, and thus undermines your argument, in my opinion. I say that conceding your point about friendship doesn't hurt my case because all it shows is that there are potential problems that can result from a breakup. No one in their right mind would deny that there are negative effects that result, or can result, from two people engaging in a romantic endeavour. There are certainly ways to be smart about who you pursue relationships with to minimize the chance of negative repercussions though, such as not dating someone from your workplace for instance. In any case though, I don't fully see how this is a point against my position and not also a point against yours. I'm sure most people would agree that casual sex encounters with friends, even as a one off, dramatically change the nature of the friendship, as well as other related friendships. The idea that you can just date friends in such a way that leads to anything from kissing to any range of sex acts and then expect the friendship will remain unchanged is grossly unrealistic, in my opinion. If, however, you're not advocating things like hugging, kissing, touching, and things of a sexual nature, then I fail to see in what way 'dating' is different to friendship with someone of the same sex for heterosexuals, or of the opposite sex for homosexuals. I couldn't disagree more with your statement that "The only rewarding investment usually received, is obnoxious children, and excessive extra duties provided from the other." Firstly, there are many cases of extremely long term relationships that have not yielded children that I know of, and I wouldn't agree that those relationships are, according to you, ipso facto without reward. I can't help but smile when I see an elderly couple of many years who are without children holding hands or laughing together or something. Try telling any of the people in long term relationships without children that their relationships are "without reward" and I dare say they'd just laugh at you :P I'd also hardly consider the prospect of raising children to be "obnoxious" either. I'm not a parent myself but I assume any parent would agree that raising children, while not without its hardships, is a genuinely joyful thing to do. In any case, if your sentiments were adopted by humanity as a whole, I dare say the future of our species would be in trouble :P The fact that the human population of the Earth has grown to 6 billion or however many billion it is today means that when you say "...but you also have to deal with a bunch of whiney annoying kids! Now who wants that?" I can respond by saying "the majority do, and we wouldn't have it any other way" :) Unlike the topic of children, I am able to speak from experience about a long term partner not becoming boring. Quite the contrary is true in my experience. In my longest relationship, which was around 2 years, far from getting bored of the same old, it was infinitely better later on compared with early on. While sex is always technically the same act, I really feel there is a difference between 'sex' and 'making love', as cheesy as that may sound. When you're together with someone you deeply care about for so long the act of sex becomes so much more than just satisfying your own sexual lust. It becomes more and more selfless. You are each willing to go to greater lengths to satisfy the desires of the other. You each learn all the intricate details of the likes, dislikes, turn-ons, etc and body of the other and can better accommodate them sexually than two people engaging in a casual affair ever could. Regarding your argument against the emotional support frame provided by a serious relationship, I don't believe that you really believe what you're saying and don't know how you expect anyone to take that point seriously. You say "...why just feel that from one person, when again, you have a world of people you can experience that from?" but I don't think you're even able to fool yourself when you deliberately fail to factor in the intensity and quality of each individual emotional support frame. Clearly the emotional satisfaction of feeling loved by a spouse of several years is not the same as what you get from feeling that someone you ate dinner with last week might be thinking about you. It's not the case that emotional support and satisfaction is automatically better when from more sources at all. You then say "Everyone wants to be loved, and where is the harm of being loved by more than one person?" That comes across (to me at least) more as an argument for polygamy than for casual dating :P Lastly, I want to propose a few problems with casual dating. The main problem, as I see it, is that dating without any longer term intentions is not a stable situation. It's my experience, and perhaps yours too, that one party generally gets more emotionally invested than the other more often than not, regardless of whether they want to or not. This leads to awkwardness and rarely ever ends well. Even the person who feels less invested still has to feel a level of guilt for what has happened. Also, I feel that a deepening emotional connection between lovers is the natural progression of things. To insist on keeping an acquaintance at a specific level is unnatural. It would be harder, and ultimately more futile, to work at restricting yourself to remain at a particular point in a relationship than to allow your connection to grow and flourish to its full potential. Regards, Rob.