I am married, never dated in the normal sense. Met a girl, spent time doing normal things with her, we decided we got along well enough to get married. Coming up on three years, seems to work pretty well.
Doing normal things together is dating. Maybe I am missing your point. But if you ever went out to dinner together, or lunch, or walked in the park, those are dates.
I mean extremely normal things, like grocery shopping, getting coffee in the morning before work, things that would be considered at best poor date ideas by most of the women I know. Sure, it fits the definition of dating, technically.
Happily married man here. I go to dinner one on one with my guy friends. That doesn't mean taking my wife out to dinner is not a date? Doing 'dating' things with friends is totally normal. It's a 'date' when you're doing it with someone you might marry.
I don't take my platonic friends to the nice French steakhouse downtown, though. Is going to Waffle House because you're hungry a date, or is it going to Waffle House because you're hungry?
Because it sends the wrong message. You take a significant other there for special occasions, or you take a date there if you're really interested/really want to get laid.
Apparently, you can only eat steak with someone else if you want to get laid. Who knew? I've been propositioned so many times and didn't even know what was happening. Hope I didn't leave all my buddies hanging.
What message does that send? I don't see where anyone is propositioning anyone else.
> special occassions
You don't celebrate special occassions with friends? Why not? Honestly, this is the saddest thing about the US. Other than romantic things, no one cares to celebrate friendship.
In the US - this is not dating. Dates are considered something you do with someone you're not in a committed relationship with. What we define as dates are usually when two "single" people go out somewhere together with the explicit intention of romantic/sexual progression and those people call it a date. If you didn't call it a date - it's probably not a date. A date has pressure and naming. There's also an aspect of a date being something where it's like an experiment - if it goes well then you keep going. If it doesn't go well then you leave.
Once you're in a committed relationship with someone - going out with intention of romantic/sexual progression is not a date anymore. It's just "going out for the night", etc. People will have "date night" and what not to fake dates because one of the partners want to feel hot and single again but there's nothing real about them because there's no chance that they'll be like, "Yeah, it's not me - it's actually you. Ghosting now." Whereas that's a real possibility on a real date.
Well framed. My point is simply that we never dated in any way that normal people would call dating. We treated it like a platonic friendship with the intent of life partnership.
It's a cultural thing. Extremely broadly speaking, the West treats love as something you fall into while Asia + some other places treat it as something you build.
American culture lacks words to describe love because we don't understand it, and have rejected the western patrimony.
America is obsessed with eros and increasingly disinterested in filial love and utterly uninterested in agape love. It leads to an incredibly unbalanced society. Healthy societies ignore erotic love as a fleeting feeling and instead focus on filial love, which is buildable and intentional.
A lot (or at least a number) of arranged marriages have dates, though, and honestly that might count as more of a date than I've been on. I have a friend that was turned down (He was fully on-board with the marriage being arranged).
