I promise this sounds a lot more extreme than I intended it to be. I don’t have anything against romantic relationships and I even think they can be wonderful kinds of relationships to have. I am not even saying I will reject any and all romantic relationships that are offered to me (although chances of such offers are slim, in my opinion). But I know with even greater certainty than before that I will not seek them out.
Much of this has to do with my extreme ideal view of romantic relationships, as opposed to a practical view. Romantic relationships serve specific purposes. Typically they are between two people who are interested in each other; they want to build a strong connection, enjoy a healthy sexual relationship, help each other out with life, integrate with each other’s families (to an extent) and then maybe have a family together. But no relationship is perfect because not all these purposes are met properly.
People start dating for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps they feel alone. Perhaps they really want to get married so they try to find people who might be a good fit for them. Or perhaps they want to get married because they want to have children. Perhaps they are motivated by physical needs. Perhaps society has conditioned them to think that they are not complete without a romantic partner. Perhaps they are afraid of being alone. Perhaps they need a partner to look after them.
For me, I had thought that if I ever formed a deep emotional connection with someone who understood me well, someone whom I felt I could trust completely, someone who made me feel safe, I would definitely want to be in a romantic relationship. That part has actually remained unchanged. I also never spent any energy trying to seek out such a relationship because this seems like a futile search. I have always been open to meeting people and socializing with them, but what I mean by not seeking out is that I haven’t liked to isolate one person and try to assess whether I can form a deep emotional connection with them. OK, I have spoken to “prospects” under pressure from my family, but you can’t really interview people to figure out what kind of emotional connection you might potentially have. For that you need organic interactions over the course of life.
My culture doesn’t put much weight on this emotional connection nonsense. From their perspective, marriage is as necessary as a career – for logistical reasons and for procreation reasons. They go about finding marriage partners much in the same way people find jobs – screening and interviewing candidates. And there even is a form of professionalism expected – for example, you have to behave a certain way when you are married, and especially around your in-laws. None of that sounds appealing to me. I’m looking for comfort. I will already have a job at work, I don’t want one at home too. I will already have to put up a professional face at work, I don’t want to at home too. Living with anyone with whom I’m not in emotional sync can be a major chore, and I don’t want to do that. But going through the marriage market is not a way to find that emotional connection.
If we look to the dating market, I don’t really know what the purpose of dating is. I am not in need to companionship or sex, so those are not motivating factors. I like to meet and hang out with people, but I have no wish to get “involved” with them. While I do wish to have a family someday, if I end up starting to date, I will just end up back on the marriage market, where I am evaluating candidates for practical purposes.
There is a thought that if you meet enough people you will hopefully find somebody with whom you do share an emotional connection. The trouble with this is that I don’t think this will work (at least for me) if I meet someone with the intention of assessing the strength of our emotional connection. It takes time to build an emotional connection and you can’t predict how long it takes. If I date with an objective, I will get impatient about assessing the progress of achieving that objective. And there are no good measures I can use to assess that objective.
When I have formed emotional connections with people, they have been under conditions in which I wasn’t actively trying to form an emotional connection. Starting to date with the hopes of eventually forming an emotional connection, to me, is the same as trying to form an emotional connection.
Then there is the fact that romantic relationships do function more like jobs and careers rather than family. If one relationship doesn’t work out, you are expected to go find another.
If a parent dies, no one expects us to go find another. But to be fair, sometimes when a child dies, society can expect you to have another.
If two people are not a good “fit” with each other, they break up. If we are not a good fit with our families, yes, sometimes we get estranged from them, but those are only under extreme circumstances.
I don’t like the idea of making a commitment to anyone unless I am already at the point where I can think of them as family. Once I make a commitment, whether it is to be a girlfriend or a wife, I would want this to be something I see through to the very end. I have no interest in “let’s be together and see how it goes” – I just don’t see the appeal to that. Nor do I like my culture’s way of doing it (“let’s get married and pray to God that it works out”).
I would like to think it is possible for two people to get close without being in a romantic relationship. And then build on that strong connection to decide whether to make a commitment to each other or not. But I don’t think most of the world works this way and all if this model once existed, we are moving away from it. I am not interested in moving along with it. And that’s why I say I am not interested in having a romantic relationship.
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 