Monday, October 30, 2006

Dating before friendship or dating after friendship

Some people are more comfortable to establish a friend relationship before dating someone. Usually they want to know the partner more before starting to invest big amount of time and heart. Other reason is to identify possible freaks and perverts before their life become interlinked. Yet another reason is that they consider dating as a privilege that must be earned by someone who is worthy.

On the other side, some people are comfortable to date a complete stranger, ..well not a complete stranger, but you got the idea. If it works out, then they can start working to progress into a more intimate relationship. It if doesn't work that well, they can just be friends. If it really doesn't work out, you ignore him/her or even avoid him/her if necessary. Slap in a court order if it's really necessary :-)

If you want to approach someone, it is important to know in what category does your interest believe in, ie: dating before friendship or friendship before dating. Failure to know that will fail the relationship.

If someone believe in dating after friendship, and you declare an interest on him/her and persuade him/her to date while you're not in a friendly term with him/her, you will be rejected without any more chance of future date.

If someone believe in dating before friendship, and you develop a friendly relationship too slowly hoping that you will eventually date him/her, (s)he might decided too early that you're not worth the trouble to know because of the steps must be taken to. This is especially true for people whose life are too hectics to waste on people like you.

Summary-ing the above and adding some of my own experience, indicators of what a person believe in are:
1. Age and time constraint. Older people tend to believe in dating before friendship since they appreciate their life time more than younger ones, and they might want to get married as soon as possible.
2. Busy-ness and free time. Busy people tend to believe in dating before friendship due to reason in point 1 above.
3. Number of friends. More friends means more choice of possible intimate relationship thus less likely to take risk of "heavy commiting" too fast. Since "heavy commiting" too fast is a characteristic of dating before friendship, people with more friends tend to believe in dating after friendship.

Anyway, please correct me if I'm wrong, or tell me some more indicators I missed.

Yeah, it's so complicated. Life sucks.

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