On 3/27/2007 10:51 AM, Christian Seberino wrote:
On Mon, March 26, 2007 11:55 pm, Karl Cunningham wrote:
For most of us, our
first significant relationship is not with the person we end up with
late in life. Those earlier relationships can, IMO, successfully be
sexual as well as emotional. And they may be entered into with long-time
goals in mind, or not.
If very young people are not ready to get married for the reasons you said
then isn't that a good argument that it might be better for them to delay
sex until they *are* ready to get married and avoid lots of problems?
This isn't a religious question just a practical question. Let me put it
another way, if you weren't an expert in the stock market would it make
sense for you to invest all your life savings in your stock picks before
you learned a few things first? Does that really sound that crazy and old
fashioned?
I think choosing a good partner is more about experience and maturity
than age, and is mostly about experience. I think it's good for people
who think they want to be together do what they feel like. Have a
relationship including sex, move in together, and see how well it works.
To me there is no milestone after which they are bound to stay together.
So long as it works for both, keep doing it. When it stops working, call
it quits.
I also think that each person owes it to them self to work at the
relationship according to how much of an emotional investment they have
in it. If neither has much invested and one day they decide it's not
working, split the sheets and move on. If they both have a lot invested
they should exhaust a multitude of avenues before calling it quits.
Also, if one person has a lot more emotional investment than the other,
that in itself is a problem. This all assumes the absence of children,
which to me changes a lot of this considerably.
For many people, myself included, spending one's entire life with one
partner is not a very probable outcome. Shit happens, as they say.
What do you mean? Please elaborate. What could happen that a marriage
couldn't work through?
People change, sometimes in incompatible ways. I think a lot of this,
though, is a matter of priorities. If you value the relationship above
who you are yourself, then you're certainly welcome to change to be more
compatible with your partner, or some compromise. But if you and your
partner have changed in incompatible ways, and both want to be true to
themselves, then their option is to split up.
Here's an example: one partner ceasing to love the other and refusing to
even discuss it, let alone try to improve things. That happened to me in
a relationship that lasted 14 years, 12 of them legally married. It
ended up that I was little more than someone to bring in a paycheck and
fix things when they broke. I spent several years working very hard to
find a solution, and failed.
I learned from that mistake and subsequently chose to be with someone
for whom communication and a loving relationship is a high priority.
Karl
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
