something_else

Sorry, but you’re going to get absolutely railroaded if you fall for stuff like this. She was interested in money, not love or depth

It’s not the only thing that matters, but it’s certainly important. Good luck building a long term relationship if you don’t share a sense of humour. The long term stuff comes after a few dates. No point in planning a life together if you don’t even know whether you’d enjoy each other’s company at dinner, a movie, drinks, games, chilling at home etc. I have a strong suspicion that the people who look actively for a ‘life partner’ tend to be the type who jump from relationship to relationship and break up after like 6 months. You try so hard to force everything to be long term even if it isn’t meant to be, and then it blows up.

Ehm, no? Did I say it did I’m honestly not sure what point you’re trying to make here

Because laughter happens when you are relaxed and in the moment. Not when you're thinking about the future and evaluating if this is a person who you want to spend the rest of your life with. That puts you both in a job interview frame of mind, lots of pressure. I'm not saying it can't work to be clear, I just don't think it's optimal.

I think I agree with your points here overall, although going into dating with the approach of "I'm looking for a life partner" is very intense, and often quite off putting. It puts a lot of pressure on the situation and stops you both from being able to relax and have fun. You could argue that's good because you'll filter out incompatible people, but it's also very likely you'll be filtering out people who are a good match but prefer to ease into something.

What a clusterfuck of a thread 😂

Ehm, no, it isn't, at least compared to a human in many tasks it is orders of magnitude faster.

I actually don't think it would be great to have the maturity of a 50 year old while you are young. My evidence for this is that I spent my high school years trying to be as 'mature' as possible. That was actually the exact word I had stuck in my head as a guiding star. It's what I thought was the ideal mindset. "I should be as mature as possible, not like all of those other school kids who party, drink, and take drugs." That mindset through my teenage years is largely why I was so lonely and socially stunted in my early twenties, and I'm only just undoing the harm from that now. Maturity is overrated. Wisdom is a better metric. Life is meant to be fun and a bit chaotic, especially when you are young. And sometimes the wise thing to do is get fucked up and have a good time with friends.

I didn't say it was an exact comparison, just that there are similarities.

Sex is comparable to money. If you don’t have it, you’ll probably be pretty miserable. But it won’t ultimately fulfil you.

Most of the scientific studies on this are very flawed because they don't account for religious beliefs. Divorce rate correlate with higher body count, but causation is not proved. A big factor is that girls with a body count of 1 are much more likely to be religious or conservative and so divorce is basically not an option for them, even if it's the correct choice. When you look at the difference in divorce rate between people with a body count of lets say 3 and 10, where religion is no longer a factor, there is little difference detected scientifically. An increase of <10% if I remember correctly. Perhaps notable, but not really that significant.

Fitbit Air for fitness tracking, and a Boldr Venture Titanium watch on the other wrist.

Same, pretty much. I think this is the only reasonable approach to take as a guy if you've slept around a lot as well. Although I have actually discussed body count with girls before, usually in situations where it's clearly short term. It's surprisingly common for girls to keep a Notes app list of all the guys they've slept with. Highest I've ever heard was 45. Unless you count "I don't know, I lost count" as higher.

The irony is that steroid use at his level is the exact opposite of looking after the body. He's probably cut 15 years off his lifespan, and he openly admits that.

Yea, this applies to me. I have pursued a lot of short term relationships and now I am quite avoidant and afraid to commit. I rationalise this by telling myself I'm just waiting for the perfect relationship, or the right time of my life. But deep down I know that's just an excuse to keep the high of the short term stuff going. It's kind of chicken and egg, do short term relationships make you avoidant, or does being avoidant make you pursue short term relationships?

I never actually opened any of my long term relationships explicitly, but I hooked up with many girls who were in existing open relationships. Some of those girls were into the idea of polyamory obviously. I met most through the dating app Feeld, which is specifically for polyamory. I guess in a sense I’ve had one because in my last relationship (really a situationship at the start) the girl really loved me, but I was in peak sexual exploration stage and I wanted to keep sleeping with other girls. She knew about it and said it was totally fine, which I ultimately knew was a lie. But it was very convenient for me to believe at the time so I didn’t question it. We did end up dating properly on and off for a few years. When I look back on how much I hurt her, it makes me feel awful. Intense is a bad thing for relationships. Intense is good for hookups and the honeymoon phase, but it will ruin a long term relationship, or your life if you’re in too deep. And yes, read my response to @Inliytened1 after you, I describe seeing exactly the dynamic you mentioned here. It’s extremely common in open relationships. One partner is always going to get more attention outside the relationship than the other and that is going to create divides. —— Theoretically, I think, if you found the perfect group of people you could construct a fairly ethical polyamorous setup that might be stable for a few years. Probably hippie-esque people who are very go with the flow and open, not super competitive or jealous. And yes, it’d probably be a lot of fun. But even that in the long run is going to become quite culty and unstable. Too intense. So much drama. So much time and energy managing such a complex situation. Just not sustainable. The ones that seem stable are always going to have some underlying unethical power dynamic keeping everybody together. Like a cult leader, pimp, or a rich dude essentially paying for prostitution with extra steps.

A common trope of women in open relationships is that they’re open because their guy pressured them into it. What usually then happens is the guy finds like zero or maybe a few other partners, while the woman is inundated with offers and quite rightly feels free to explore them. It does not end well. One girl I hooked up with who was in an open relationship was talking about the Netflix shows she was going to go home and watch with her BF after she left my place. She also told me about the 3 other guys she’d slept with that week when I was asking her how the open relationship was going. She said the BF had gotten essentially zero attention despite pressuring her into the open relationship in the first place. It was very clear that opening the relationship up ruined it. He was jealous and she lost a lot of respect for him. Yea, if you want to experience this kind of dynamic the best way is a long term relationship where you both agree to explore group dynamics together. I think that has the potential to be much more stable. The moment you have partners sleeping with lots of other people outside of the relationship it’s going to create a mess eventually.

I’ve been with girls in open relationships, and I’ve played the game where I’m seeing lots of girls at once who vaguely know about each other but claim not to care. In the end, somebody always gets hurt. I’ve had threesomes in that setup too, and almost every time it created divides, even if all of us enjoyed it at the time. Looking back, it caused a lot of suffering and chaos that was convenient for me to ignore because I was getting lots of fun sex. If a woman really likes you, she’ll often tolerate a lot and say she’s fine with things she isn’t actually fine with deep down. So there’s no real blocker to me living that lifestyle. My experience is just that doing it ethically long term is incredibly hard, bordering on impossible. It’s a fundamentally unstable setup. It’s hard enough to maintain one romantic relationship long term without someone getting hurt, let alone a whole web of them. For short-term stuff where everyone knows what it is, it can be great fun. But sooner or later, and with enough short term pursuits, someone catches feelings, gets attached, jealousy builds, and people get hurt.

It’s almost impressive

I find it hard to believe you can achieve this kind of setup ethically, or maintain it with any sort of stability. Somebody is always going to get hurt in the end. Especially with the one-sided monogamy part. It’s convenient for you as a horny dude to believe a setup like this is ethical because it heavily benefits your pleasure and survival, but it is clear from your language that you’re still viewing women as objects which exist solely to cater to you and your pleasure. It’s an inherently unethical mindset that will always result in pain and suffering in the end. To be clear, I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing. Men are always going to see women like this to a degree and people get hurt in all relationship types. It’s part of life. What I don’t like is that you’re claiming this setup is possible to orchestrate and maintain entirely ethically, I think you are believing what is convenient for you to believe. It’s analogous to a billionaire claiming they amassed their wealth entirely ethically. It’s theoretically possible, but there probably isn’t a single case of that happening in the entire world, except lottery winners by sheer dumb luck.

It isn’t fair. That doesn’t change the fact that you are a hypocrite.

The irony is that you want to settle down with a woman and also fuck around, but you don’t want the woman you settle down with to have done the same. That is really not fair. Either you fuck around and don’t care if the woman has too, or you don’t fuck around and find a woman who hasn’t either. This mindset of “I will fuck around and bring my baggage to the relationship, but strictly demand a virgin bride who has no baggage” is, quite honestly, a sign of deep-rooted insecurity. This is also apparent in caring that “other men may be laughing at you.” Like dude, grow up. That’s high school level thinking. You claim you’re this strong willed alpha dude, but it’s really just the most basic stereotype of a hyper-masculine front to compensate for a deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy. It fools nobody.

I've only ever tried it when mixed with alcohol and it just cancels out the alcohol. Useful after a long night out but not anything spectacular. I mean I can imagine meth feels great, I've tried amphetamines in the form of ADHD medication and they feel amazing even in small therapeutic doses the first few times you take them. Meth is that, but x100 so I can imagine it feels insanely good. That's why it's so risky though, plus it works on your dopamine circuits directly which makes it incredibly addictive.

I think you need to take a break from YouTube. You're being very heavily influenced by people who's only goal is to exploit you.

It doesn't intrinsically bother me anymore but when I first read it several years ago it did, and it made me reflect on the language and terminology I used to talk about women. I realised I was often doing the same thing in reverse thinking it was OK and harmless, which it is not. I suspect many men do still get that feeling when reading it, yet still talk about women in an equally objectifying way. This thread is an example of that. There is a degree of value exchange in relationships and there likely always will be, but the mindsets of pickup or FDS are unhealthy because they focus far too much on that value exchange and end up objectifying the other gender to an almost psychopathic degree. If you want to practice pickup and have lots of casual sex as a guy then have at it, or if you want to find a rich husband as a woman then have at it. But there's no need to approach these things in such a rigorously manipulative and degrading way. There are ways to do it more ethically.