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Thread: Do you feel comfortable dating someone who is seperated

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 191 (view)

Do you feel comfortable dating someone who is seperated Posted: 4/13/2009 7:51:00 PM
No, I wouldn't date someone who's separated. What they need is time alone -- Not someone to pass time with.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 3 (view)

Set in your ways due to living alone Posted: 6/16/2008 8:16:03 AM
No, not at all. If anything, long periods of being alone and single over the course of my 28 years of living have only taught me what I want out of life: Happiness, success, stress-free living, etc.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 193 (view)

Do you wish the worst for your ex? Posted: 6/16/2008 2:13:06 AM
I used to wish for Karma, but these days, I simply wish for her to leave me alone.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 14 (view)

A-Z: Enlightenment On Dating and Today's Culture Posted: 2/12/2007 6:50:50 AM
Folks, FYI: As noted, I am not the author of the message. Just passing along the word.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 1 (view)

A-Z: Enlightenment On Dating and Today's Culture Posted: 2/11/2007 10:58:21 PM
I stumbled upon this information tonight, and decided I would share it with others. Some will take offense to it, but it nails the coffin shut on naysayers about today's reality in dating. Be enlightened. Be informed. ---- > The Pill and the Decline of Dating and Marriage The invention of birth control made possible a series of unprecedented changes in the relations between men and women. Few people realize that the chain of incentives that provided the foundation for monogamous marriage no longer exists. Prior to birth control, men and women were motivated by biological and economic forces to get married and begin families by their early 20s. Today's singles lack those incentives and thus inhabit a relationship world that is completely unfamiliar to their parents and grandparents. > Why Marry At All? Throughout civilized history, men and women have entered into monogamous relationships at an early age and begun raising families. This happens much less frequently today. Marriage is becoming more rare and singles who do get married, marry later. Families are also becoming smaller and less common as men and women now have fewer children later in life. The age of marriage has risen by about five years since 1950, the marriage rate has dropped about forty percent, and the fertility rate has also dropped about forty percent according to the National Marriage Project. In order to understand the root causes of these changes, one must understand what the dating environment was like prior to the widespread use of birth control in the 1960's. Before the pill, marriage was necessary for practical reasons. Men and women were much more dependent on each other and there was a defined division of labor. This division of labor was necessary because of a basic biological difference between the sexes. Women can bear children, men cannot. Before contraception, a woman could not readily control when pregnancy might take her out of the workforce. Women unable to control reproduction also had more children and spent more of their lives pregnant or with young children. These factors made it difficult for women pursue careers in the long-term. The difficulty in pursuing work made it necessary for women to find a husband who would provide financial resources for her and her children. Restrictions on premarital sex also encouraged marriage. Before the advent of birth control, premarital sex was risky and had potentially drastic consequences. A woman who had premarital sex could become pregnant with an illegitimate child, which would severely restrict her marriage options. This was a serious handicap in a system where marriage was essential in society. A woman who had an unintended pregnancy might also be forced into an inescapable shotgun marriage with a man she didn't really want, and who was a poor choice as a lifelong partner and provider. In either case, premarital sex could doom a woman to a lifetime of difficulty, and women had to exercise restraint. Before the invention of the pill, the sexual behavior of men was also necessarily less promiscuous. Under the monogamous system, sex without commitment was rarely available, so a man had to court a woman for an extended time and then get married before a woman would consent to sex. Because women were not economically independent, society strongly sanctioned men who impregnated women and then left them without the means to support themselves. When an unmarried woman did become pregnant, marriage was often forced upon the man. Premarital sex could result in a lifetime commitment for men as well, so men too had to be more discerning in their choice of sex partners. > Why Marry Young? For the reasons listed above, women in the pre-pill era did not generally pursue careers. In order to take the burden of support from their parents, women needed to attract a husband while young, and were also incented by the need to attract a mate while at the peak of their fertility and physical attractiveness. (A woman's fertile lifetime is shorter than a man's because of differences in their reproductive systems. A woman's reproductive system must support a developing baby for nine months. This requires a vastly more complex system that is more biologically difficult to maintain and more susceptible to aging. The male reproductive system produces only sperm, which is much simpler.) The biological and social pressures that encouraged early marriage were reinforced by social customs and pressures that promoted marriage, such as older sisters having to marry before younger sisters were allowed to. Men were incented to get married early by a combination of sexual desire and the fact that single women became scarcer with age. Because most women were married and raising children by their early 20s, a man who remained unmarried much past that age faced a dramatically shrinking number of eligible women within his social group. This resulted in the vast majority of men seeking marriage in their youth as well. In today's society, many singles postpone marriage to pursue careers or delay in the hope of finding more attractive mates. In the past, the lack of premarital sex and eligible partners made it much more difficult to wait. > Why Stay Together? While the features of the pre-pill dating environment encouraged marriage at a young age, it also provided incentives for couples to stay together once married. When physical attraction inevitably waned, there were many practical reasons to stay married. The fact that there were relatively few singles available in the dating market discouraged infidelity and divorce. Men and women married early and spent their 20's raising children. The social scene for singles was much smaller than it is today. Women's time was filled with child-rearing duties in the home and they had few interactions with single men. With few single women in their social circles, married men also had fewer temptations for infidelity and fewer options for remarriage if they were to get divorced. Larger families were another reason couples stayed together. Women could not easily avoid pregnancy and had more children. Managing a large family required a great deal of time and effort, particularly without modern conveniences. A single parent would be unable to both manage a family and earn a living. Thus, women without a means to support themselves couldn't leave their husbands. Husbands who left would be abandoning their children to lives of poverty. Harsh community sanction from one's friends and social group resulted in either case. Religious rules and social norms further enforced the practical reasons to avoid adultery, avoid divorce and stay married. In the past, the social practices defining dating and marriage were based on underlying biological and economic rules. Those rules made marriage a practical necessity. The advent of birth control decoupled sex from reproduction and the changes have rippled through the system. Premarital sex no longer carries the threat of pregnancy. Families have gotten smaller and more manageable. Women can work and are capable of supporting themselves and their children. Instead of being practical necessities, today's singles often believe that the point of marriage and sex are to provide emotional and romantic bliss for the individuals involved. While birth control's conquest over biology may seem to have provided many benefits, it has also had many unintended consequences. There are fewer reasons to get married, so men and women are staying single longer. Now that premarital sex is possible, dating has transformed from a search for marriage into a pursuit of sex. Sex is now prerequisite for beginning a relationship. Rather than being forced to marry early, singles find it increasingly difficult to find partners willing to marry at all. Men and women seeking sexual relationships value members of the opposite sex based on instinctual emotion and physical attraction rather than valuing the virtues and personality traits that make a good long-term partner. The interdependence between men and women has been severely weakened, resulting in rising illegitimacy, single parenthood and divorce. Birth control was the catalyst that swung the pendulum from monogamy to pervasive promiscuity. The consequences for singles and for society have been considerable and widespread. > The Rise of Players and the Decline of Providers Why is it that "bad boys" are generally much more sexually successful than "nice guys" are? Intelligent, hard-working men who contribute to society in formerly respectable careers like engineering, accounting or science are now looked down upon by women. Athletes, rockers, rappers and actors don't work to improve society, yet many women desire sex with them. There is no longer a connection between a man's contribution to society, his options with women and his social status. Further, a man's ability and willingness to provide for a wife and children has little impact on his ability to attract women. This was not always the case. > How Women Choose Men Women's attraction has shifted from dependable, nice provider men to exciting, unpredictable "bad boys." In order to understand this phenonmenon, one must understand how women choose men and how the process of mate selection evolved. Millions of years ago, when our primate ancestors lived in small bands, the males who were the strongest, most aggressive fighters dominated the group. Because of the differential in male and female parental investment (Discussed in There is No Longer Someone for Everyone), competition among males was a winner-take-all affair. The winners, the alpha males, were able to monopolize sexual access to the females and have many offspring. The beta males were rarely able to have sex and rarely able to pass on their genes. Females thus developed an instinctual attraction to the physically strong "alpha" males because alpha male offspring were consistently more successful in the reproductive game. These instincts evolved over millions of years and still exist in today's women even though the attributes that made a winning fighter in primitive Africa are counterproductive to success in modern society. (For more information on sex and evolutionary psychology, see Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, Jared Diamond's Why is Sex Fun? and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.) Fighting is no longer a part of daily life, yet today's women still have an instinctual attraction to strong, muscular men. Aggressive, unpredictable men are exciting and attractive to today's women, even though in the information age, the ability to cooperate and work with others in an quiet office environment is more useful to one's career success. Women are also attracted to indicators of high testosterone, like square jaws and broad shoulders. Evolution instilled these instinctual desires over millions of years, while civilization has existed for only a tiny fraction of evolutionary time. At an unconscious level, today's women are still deeply attracted to alpha male characteristics. For men, sexual attraction has also been irrationally shaped by evolution. In primitive times, one of the most common threats to a man's offspring was infant mortality during childbirth. Because of this, men developed an instinctual attraction to women with wide, child-bearing hips. In modern society, infant mortality is rare, but men still have a vestigial attraction to women with the ideal waist-hip ratio. Men also have an attraction to women with large breasts since infant malnourishment was a problem in distant evolutionary times. In the developed countries of today, few infants starve, and many women don't breastfeed at all. The male obession with physical attributes is an evolutionary relic. However, because attractive prehistoric females did not have the same destructive behavior as our male ancestors, men do not have the same irrational attraction to physicality and aggression that women do. > The Development of the Provider So, if women are attracted to physically dominant alpha male types, then how could geeky-looking, physically weak men ever evolve? The development of the "provider" type came about because of the development of intelligence within our human ancestry. As the predecessors of homo sapiens evolved greater intelligence, human babies were born less mature, and the time required to raise a human child required increasingly more time and resources. In most animal species, babies are born nearly self-sufficient. Within a few months, most other animal species can live independently of their parents. In contrast, a human baby is completely dependent for food and defense for at least five years after birth, and requires education and resources for many years after that. As human babies took longer to raise, females found that they alone could not provide the resources necessary to support their children into adulthood. They needed help, and they found ways to get help. Beta males who were not physically strong enough to dominate the other males found that by providing food and other resources to females in the group, they could bargain for sex from those females. Interestingly, the same high testosterone that provided alpha males with greater physical strength and natural aggressiveness worked against them as providers. Studies have shown that men with high testosterone have lower intelligence and less ability to concentrate on mental tasks. High-testosterone men are less likely to hold white-collar jobs, more likely to hold jobs that require manual labor, and are more likely to commit crime. (See Heroes, Rogues and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior.) Thus a spectrum of men emerged. Strong, aggressive, dominating men existed on one side of the spectrum and intelligent, nice, cooperative men existed on the other. Eventually as civilization developed and intelligence and financial success became more important than physical strength, females who chose males with "provider" characteristics produced more successful offspring than those who chose alpha males. Over time, there was a reduction in the proportion of high-testosterone males. Social and religious customs like the monogamous marriage system further increased the proportion of providers. Women looking for lifelong commitment and wanting to avoid a lifetime of unhappy marriage put a higher priority on companions with agreeable personalities and financial resources and a lower priority on looks and alpha maleness. In the last forty years, however, that trend has been reversed. (Note: Men making a lifelong commitment under the monogamous system were also more likely to value a woman's companionship and personality than men who are pursuing short-term sex, where physical appearance is of primary importance.) > The Pill, the Provider and the Alpha Male In recent years, the nice provider personality has become decidedly unpopular, while the aggressive alpha male personality types are celebrated and envied. Professional athletes, rock bands, and hip hop musicians have eclipsed doctors, lawyers and engineers in social status. "Players" who take advantage of the weaknesses in women's sexual instincts are celebrated while faithful providers are not. Over the last forty years, birth control has removed the practical reasons for a woman to choose a provider male (See The Pill and the Decline of Dating and Marriage). Women unafraid of pregnancy can have sex with the sexiest men and fulfill their instinctual desires without apparent consequence. They can "follow their hearts," even when the emotions they perceive as love or passion are irrational vestiges from the evolutionary past. Providers are also devalued because financially self-sufficient women no longer need a man to provide resources for them. Because women no longer put a high value on providers, the social position of those men has fallen while the player/alpha male personality type has begun to dominate society and culture. As women encourage more "bad boy" behavior by their sexual choices, men and society are becoming less considerate, less cooperative and less civilized.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 8 (view)

Not in college, but dating someone who is, good idea? Posted: 2/11/2007 10:52:51 PM
Horrible idea. Young women + college = disaster. Save yourself the hassle. Get a dog, or find someone in your own area.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 13 (view)

Stay & suffer or leave & lose? Posted: 2/10/2007 7:59:39 PM
Your situation sounds sticky, and because men rarely fare well in divorce,you have a lot to think about. One thing I can say is this: You will not solve this by seeking comfort in another woman. It's not worth it and will bring more trouble than it's worth. Hopefully you can come out of this in a good position. I did a topic search but didn't really find what I was looking for,so here goes. for every guy that has gone through a divorce after a long marriage {20 yrs or more} How do you decide the time is now, regardless of what you stand to loose? When you have no feelings for each other & there haven't been any for a long time, if you feel like you're sharing a house with someone you don't really know. This is very hard to explain without going into great detail but all I want is to be on my own so that the only one I have to clean up after or whatever is me.It was several yrs ago that I came to the obvious conclusion that neither one of us could care less if the other is around.In fact I'm at the point that I feel tense just being in the same house and hearing her voice.Problem is she has never been on her own,I was her first and as many times as I have said I want a divorce,she just brushes it off like oh he won't do it.I've spoken to our lawyer and he advised me that due to special circumstances,I would the courts would force me to maintain her standard of living and I would be very lucky if I came away with a cardboard box to live in.I don't remember the early years,it's like my mind is drawing a blank.All I have gotten out of 26 yrs is my 18 yr old daughter who is all I live for right now, and she can't wait to finish her grd.12 and move in with her boyfriend to get away from not me , but her mother.I read the responces to the topic of what do you miss most in a relationship and thought to myself what have I missed out on all these yrs. This isn't self pity although it may seem like it ,there is a question if you read between the lines.Just wanted to explain the details involved.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 4 (view)

Lurking fish Posted: 2/10/2007 10:28:03 AM
Thanks for the warm welcome, ladies.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 669 (view)

Why are older women not into younger guys??? Posted: 2/10/2007 10:00:07 AM
There are many reasons, but here are a few: 1. They are insecure about younger women and their mate's attraction to them 2. Some believe younger men aren't attracted to them (and this is far from true -- I've met some wonderful older women that put younger ones to shame -- they make great friends, too!) 3. They do not find younger men appealing 4. They are self-conscious about the age difference

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 2 (view)

do you feel like you're disposible? Posted: 2/10/2007 9:54:12 AM
J, If you believe you are unworthy and disposable, then you are. Personally, I wouldn't worry about most people on dating sites. You're not missing anything, just as you wouldn't offline. Enjoy life. Find inner peace and happiness. I've been on the site for about 4 months and I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm "disposible". I'm the type of gal that is cautious when it comes to meeting someone in person. I guess I've watched too many movies, but I want to make sure that I've gotten to know someone the best you can over email before actually meeting them. I feel like there are a lot of people on the site that "just move on" because there are so many other people on the site. This has led to a lot of frustration for me. Does anyone else feel like this?

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 33 (view)

Can you die of a broken heart? Posted: 2/10/2007 7:36:07 AM
This woman's message is the perfect example that men and women can rarely be friends. Someone will likely have an attachment to the other, etc. Anyway, don't sit around hoping this guy will leave his woman. And if you truly care about this male friend, you'll keep your distance from him, because it's not healthy to be hanging around a guy in a committed relationship and you have feelings for him.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 41 (view)

The I'll call you Posted: 2/10/2007 6:58:08 AM
Why wait for a guy to call, when you can call him?

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 32 (view)

Goin To a movie with a friend... he freaks... Posted: 2/9/2007 12:48:07 PM
Pooh, It seems to me you enjoy the attention from other men. A 40+ year old man isn't going to hang around a 20 year old girl for fun. He wants to **** you. Plain and simple. And you already know this. The best you can do for your boyfriend is leave him alone. You are not prepared for a healthy relationship, as you are too concerned with making new "male" friends. This situation will not improve, because you're not helping it. If you're truly naive about these men, then it's time to wake up -- you're young, and most men don't hang around to be your friend.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 139 (view)

Is being alone hard for you? Posted: 2/9/2007 8:05:33 AM
It's very easy. I'm happy, too. You have to break the mold of desire, and learn to exist on your own.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 1019 (view)

Introduce Yourself Here. Posted: 2/9/2007 7:39:37 AM
Greetings! I am not currently a resident in Calgary, but it's certainly a place I've been quite fond of for the past few years. I've visited a lot and have lived there for a few months at a time as well. Anyway, just wanted to introduce myself, and maybe I'll make some friends that I can visit on future trips to the city. Cheers!

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 1 (view)

Lurking fish Posted: 2/9/2007 7:35:17 AM
I've been around for a few months, and I observe on occasion. Just taking this opportunity to show my face and say hello. While some people are here looking for love, I'm just here to network and be among people. Feel free to drop me a line. Hope all is well with everyone.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 114 (view)

Male logic versus Female emotions.. Posted: 2/9/2007 7:15:34 AM
It's as simple as this: Men think logically, and women, emotionally. I recently read that Jessica Simpson was inspired by a movie to divorce her husband. Go figure.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 49 (view)

Common law vs. Married Posted: 2/9/2007 7:07:52 AM
"Commitment" is psychological -- no legal status or label will make it firm or better.

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 17 (view)

Widowed and crushed again! Posted: 1/15/2007 12:28:23 AM
After 27 years of marriage, you're already trying to meet men?

Joined: 10/13/2006

Msg: 1 (view)

Are you able to be honest with yourself? Posted: 10/20/2006 9:30:25 PM
There seems to be a constant theme on all of these forums, regardless of the web site: There's always a problem in dating or relationships. There aren't any concrete answers as to why, but I have one simple question: Who can honestly say that they're able to be honest with themselves in a situation? I can honestly say that I have the "art of self-reflection" down to a science, because I'm just that way. Unfortunately, I don't see this in many people, because if they were able, I'd think that people would be happier and more trusting of their mate. What are your thoughts?

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