I didn't mean all that much about the comment re: auditioning life partners. It's just that when you talk about women here, there tend to be a lot of capital letters and discussions of how you want to settle down and have children. So the impression (perhaps mistaken) I'd gotten was that there wasn't a lot of room for causal dating in your worldview. Now, granted, what counts as 'casual dating' is a somewhat fluid category. I wouldn't call going out to dinner with a woman a 'date' if I had *no* romantic or sexual interest in her - so if you restrict romantic and/or sexual activity to marriage, then probably a lot of the role that 'dates' (in my sense) play/ed for me would be played for you by activities that I wouldn't be inclined to call dates.
Now, I wouldn't at all want to defend Meghan's position here - but. The one thing that does seem notable is that if going out with a woman for dinner and a walk on the beach a) counts as a date for you and b) isn't much different from what you'd do with Meghan before your wedding night, then I can see how some confusions might set in. In particular, it might not be immediately obvious when some woman with whom you were hanging out as a friend crossed over into date territory, which would make problematic a rule that friends are OK, but dates aren't (seems to be part of what was going on maybe with her saying it was cool for you to have female friends, and then basically defining "female friend" in such a way that most of your friends aren't covered).
Not that that means you should change your views. Courtship is pretty much gone, so we've now got these ambient social categories of friend-date-marriage, where dates are distinguished from friendships (speaking loosely) by the smooching and from marriages by the level of exclusivity. Go away from that either way - whether it's by expanding marriage or constricting dating, and you're going to have to do more explaining about where you draw the line.
no subject
Now, I wouldn't at all want to defend Meghan's position here - but. The one thing that does seem notable is that if going out with a woman for dinner and a walk on the beach a) counts as a date for you and b) isn't much different from what you'd do with Meghan before your wedding night, then I can see how some confusions might set in. In particular, it might not be immediately obvious when some woman with whom you were hanging out as a friend crossed over into date territory, which would make problematic a rule that friends are OK, but dates aren't (seems to be part of what was going on maybe with her saying it was cool for you to have female friends, and then basically defining "female friend" in such a way that most of your friends aren't covered).
Not that that means you should change your views. Courtship is pretty much gone, so we've now got these ambient social categories of friend-date-marriage, where dates are distinguished from friendships (speaking loosely) by the smooching and from marriages by the level of exclusivity. Go away from that either way - whether it's by expanding marriage or constricting dating, and you're going to have to do more explaining about where you draw the line.
Hmm.