If your gut reaction is that romantic relationships aren’t for you, being aromantic is a thing. It’s uncommon, but it seemed worth saying.
Finally, there’s the issue of permanence. Not all love is intended to be permanent, but a lot of the time it is. How can you commit to something so permanently?
The impression I get from seeing friends’ and acquaintances’ relationships is that the average length of time they last is comparable to how long a person stays at a job (but with a greater standard deviation). Even when you’re trying to build a relationship that would be permanent, you haven’t committed to making it permanent just by attempting it, and people consider it acceptable to break it off if it’s not working well for you. Ending a relationship can still be very unpleasant, of course, but I don’t think a broken commitment is the reason for that. The breakup is just a cost you have to expect when you decide to start a romance.
Based on conversations I’ve had with non-rationalists about their romances, some of them make poorer decisions when romance is involved, and others don’t. From what I’ve seen, it looks like the people who are usually the sanest under other circumstances are also the least prone to making poor decisions about romance and regretting it later. It really, really depends on the person.
So my take is that there is probably a form of love that is rational to take. Something along the lines of enjoying each others company, and caring for one another and stuff, but not being blindly committed to one another, and being honest about the fact that you wouldn’t do anything for one another, and will in fact probably grow apart at some point.
This sounds sort of like what I’m in right now (we’re both rationalists). It also doesn’t sound too different from my sister’s relationships, and she doesn’t pay any particular attention to rationality—it’s just that she’s in college and everyone in her social circle knows that people may go their separate ways because of personality clashes or the demands of starting a career. If you’d be looking for a relationship with someone who shared your values anyway, then making it a sane one wouldn’t add many additional constraints.
In my experience, during the addiction-like phase, you get some pretty intense emotions, but you don’t loose control of yourself or stop caring about other things. I get really happy about things that ordinarily wouldn’t be a big deal (ex: person started a conversation with me in chat, which means they were thinking about me), and get tempted to invest more than I should, but that’s about it. Given that most people in romantic relationships don’t strain their other friendships or have difficulty at work because of it, I suspect my experience was similar to most peoples’.
I think the core issue here is that the stories we like to tell about how love and romances work are different from the reality. When you analyze the story closely, you realize it wouldn’t actually be a good story to live. But the way romances actually go is different from the way humans like to say they go in most of the aspects you didn’t like.
If your gut reaction is that romantic relationships aren’t for you, being aromantic is a thing. It’s uncommon, but it seemed worth saying.
Based on conversations I’ve had with non-rationalists about their romances, some of them make poorer decisions when romance is involved, and others don’t. From what I’ve seen, it looks like the people who are usually the sanest under other circumstances are also the least prone to making poor decisions about romance and regretting it later. It really, really depends on the person.
In my experience, during the addiction-like phase, you get some pretty intense emotions, but you don’t loose control of yourself or stop caring about other things. I get really happy about things that ordinarily wouldn’t be a big deal (ex: person started a conversation with me in chat, which means they were thinking about me), and get tempted to invest more than I should, but that’s about it. Given that most people in romantic relationships don’t strain their other friendships or have difficulty at work because of it, I suspect my experience was similar to most peoples’.
I think the core issue here is that the stories we like to tell about how love and romances work are different from the reality. When you analyze the story closely, you realize it wouldn’t actually be a good story to live. But the way romances actually go is different from the way humans like to say they go in most of the aspects you didn’t like.