It’s About Making Babies!

NML writes about the terms and conditions of a relationship. That even if you get through the fine print at the start and don’t find any red flags, be aware that your partner’s agenda might change – and if you stay, you will be “accepting” the changes. She focuses on reading the signs and what they mean, and writes well and convincingly.

I think a long term relationship is bigger than a personal choice.

If you meet someone, and get closer because of feelings, this has the makings of a decent, to great, episode of social recreation.

If you want something more, a shared life, a life partner – a mate, then you are looking at building a couple. And couples interact with their community. You will each, as a couple, be making choices and efforts outside the coupledom, because of being part of the couple – at work, shopping, at play, with friends, with family. You need to be sure that your prospect shows good character with you and with others.

Selecting a mate has to take more into account. For one thing, you don’t just have to trust and respect him when he is with you – you have to be sure that he is competent, respectful – trustworthy, trusted, and respected – with those you know and those you meet.

One really big red flag is how he treats you with his friends and family – are you a visitor or a cherished guest? Are there indications he often has “dates” tagging along (! Might be a Perpetual Dater!), or does he have no friends or contact with family (! Might be *unable* to connect emotionally!) or pets? Is he proud of you, like a trophy of some kind (!), is he possessive that you don’t talk or contact anyone (! Isolation issue!), or is he genuinely making you and his relationship to you a part of his private and social life?

Do your friends find him substantial as a member of the community, does he have a life (do you?) socially and personally, outside the dating scene?

How he behaves with others doesn’t matter much between the sheets (or it gets really kinky really quick). But if you want someone for the long haul, then you need to know where you stand with friends, family, and community – few people can sham and manipulate everyone, everywhere, and still seem genuine. That is the place, socially and within the community, to look for more red flags. Do you matter to him only skin to skin, or out in public, too?

Brad K Advice, Goals, Selection baggage reclaim, Dating, NML

NML at Baggage Reclaim writes about “I’m Successful! Why Am I Still Single?“.

This isn’t a new complaint, or a new topic. Susan Page wrote “If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? Ten Strategies That Will Change Your Love Life Forever,” back in 1988. A copy has been sitting on my coffee table since 1990. And, yes, it is the same coffee table I bought in Minneapolis, MN, in 1982. Thanks, Dayton’s.

Being successful isn’t the problem

When someone arrives at success, most often that is a personal accomplishment. One overcomes resistance, odds, and perhaps opposition to succeed. Whether success is wealth, or fame, or position, influence or power – the point of success is to satisfy an ambition. A personal drive to accomplish a personal goal.

Love and Marriage

Frank Sinatra sang, a long time ago, a song about “Love and Marriage” – go together like a horse and carriage. (Amazon.com has both the sheet music and an MP3 download). Hold on – the point isn’t the religious-civil marriage ceremony.

Even as long ago as “Our Town” came out in 1955 (the movie in which the song was introduced), America was losing sight of what makes a community, an extended family. Focus on veterans returning from World War II, and then the Korean conflict, focused on individuals. During WWII, women had left the home of their fathers and husbands, and found a niche in industry, commerce, retail – and in the community.

The modern concept of family – a couple of adults raising children to be “the best they can be” – came from an earlier time. The family, even today, is a unit of culture. Culture – an adoption of rituals, traditions, and values that express the lives and living of those in the family. This culture comes about by combining the backgrounds of experience and cultures they had lived in, to arrive at an agreed upon “home”. It is the expectations, the responsibilities and beliefs, the definitions of right and wrong that a couple use to embody a home, whether in a house, an apartment, a barn or garage, or a couple of rooms in someone else’s house.

The family is a unit constructed out of respect and honor of the families of the primary adults. That is, the extended family. The family is the unit of culture that, gathered together with all those living in a community, define that community.

We are all familiar with chance-formed communities. This is what happens when people buy a house, move into a condo or apartment, without knowing who the neighbors are (and likely never meeting them). The community is formed by chance. So we hire police and elect a mayor, and mostly things go on. In family where there is conflict often some of the affected parties rebel and cut contact, or are shunned.

Make a home, not a bed

What can we do, then, to avoid using chance to build a home – or not? We look for a mate to build a home with, to build with us a unit of culture that we can recognize, respect, and adopt. A mate that will help define our own position within the extended family and within the community.

Crowds of single people form one kind of community. Families, though, have a chance to form stable communities and combine in extended families. Changing from single to family is not a pronouncement gifted when two (or more?) adults choose to form a family.

A family forms, and the community recognizes the family, because the culture of a family is formed. The identity and roles and fundamental definition of one’s role in the world is redefined, by becoming part of a family.

Cults and many religions are similar to families, in that your life is transformed. That transformation is plainly visible to self and the cult or religious community. Or self-help group. Or military unit. Or family.

Success or family

If success is a personal achievement, family is a surrender. What we call a “relationship” is too often a chance-formed association. You find someone that you are attracted to, or is available, or is just there and you feel needy. We choose a partner because of our feelings, our needs, our goals.

When the reality is that we need a partner, to form a family culture, to define something that doesn’t exist yet – the people we will be within a family, within an extended family and within a community.

Single or coupled

It is a shame that marriage is considered to be between a man and a woman.

The reality, is that a marriage is the fundamental formation, the birth if you will, of a new unit in the community and extended family. The community and extended family are integral actors, in the formation nurturing, and ultimately accepting this new family.

The Christian Church, for it’s own reasons, long ago determined that only heterosexual couples fit the rite of marriage. That is fine, I won’t comment on that further. The state and nation have an interest in tracking the merging of assets and parentage – identity – of progeny, both adopted and by birth. But handfasting predates the Christian form of marriage, and serves the community well (except, of course, the Christians). As for man and woman – I cannot find anything in scriptures that details how many adults may be involved in a family – none of the man-and-woman scriptures mentions that either were unmarried, and would not take further spouses. But that is neither here nor their, I just explain why I don’t define a family as the result of a Christian (or “civil”) marriage.

Where the successful person is proud of her/his accomplishments, and strives to apply the strategies that were successful for them to other areas of their life – a relationship is a surrender of self and values, within boundaries, with the goal of forming a family that nurtures everyone else.

Success is something one does, is a personal satisfaction. A mate is defined by role within family and community, not by oneself. A relationship is a partial formation of a family.

Make me happy

When we pick someone because we admire or fantasize about their sexual features or provocations, we risk beginning a relationship – whether a quick few minutes or attempt at months or years, or a lifetime together – because we follow the key to success. We strive to satisfy our personal goal.

And we stumble into a chance-formed family.

It used to be that girls worried about dating and their “reputation” about being sexually active. Not just the girls and boys – their families, and entire communities. Sex obscures thinking; the community and extended family have a need to sustain themselves. That is, they need to keep families involved in the community, and to nurture those families. Extended families have the same need. Letting homes form, that fail to thrive, weakens the community.

We have forgotten that.

Few alive in modern America today recall just what an involved, community-type community could be. Some rural villages and towns, some urban neighborhoods still express the old involvement, but most have lost their young people.

Whom to choose

Suppose, for a moment, we respect and honor what our parents taught us. That we think of ourselves in terms of being part of a family, of raising children to believe as we do, as our parents did.

Who would we need to fill the other adult role(s), to make a family? To contribute to raising the children – to embrace and build the community?

We need someone trustworthy, stable, and disciplined.

Should we take on a partner to have fun, or should we look for responsible people to have fun with?

Does it have to be this way?

Up until the Renaissance, mostly matings were formed by arrangement by the parents – worldwide, that was still the most common form of marriage in the world, in 1970. The musical “Fiddler On The Roof” (and Janeane Garafolo in “The Matchmaker”) taught many of us that hadn’t known, about matchmakers. Matchmakers served the community, enriching the community with responsible pairings that also took into account similar backgrounds and likelihood of being good for each other. Many older women today seem willing to give such advice. I would stick with the happily partnered women, for advice.

Alternatively, the successful and powerful bought slaves, or bought wives, or allowed a woman or man to serve as the co-parent of their children. Sometimes as eye candy, sometimes as display spouse or host/hostess for social occasions. Sometimes these mercenary partnerings resulted in real respect and affection. Sometimes.

Dating sites and dating services

Dating sites and dating services don’t take into account the needs of the community, or the extended family. The assumption is made that each individual is unencumbered by family or friends or employer or neighbors, or current or future roles in the community.

Dating services and dating sites enable one to pick someone – to make themselves happy. That is, successful. And we are back to the ego satisfaction of the individual, rather than the “together from now on” goal that has to be shared.

If you don’t think you want to pick your partner based on whether, together, you form a unit of your community – consider where you want to live, with what relationship with your community. And whether you want a partner that makes that better for you and the community.

And consider why, in the marriage ceremony, the phrase often arises, “before G-d, family, and friends”. Picking a partner is just a blind gamble, if you are trying to be successful.

Brad K Advice, Dating, Society baggage reclaim, choosing a partner, community, NML, relationships