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"Demoting" a Relationship

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I infer that your standard for The One is your personal standard for whether a person is acceptable for a romantic relationship. (Otherwise she wouldn't be getting something she didn't deserve.) A bit stoic for my taste, but I don't see anything wrong with that. However there's no reason why others ought to have the same (romance only with The One) standard.

The appeal of my standard is because it is the path to the best things in life. As I said, sure, you can choose the lesser paths and that's up to you. You'll get out what you put in. I just think it's a shame that so many people give up their standards so easily, especially young people.

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It may not take a great deal of effort to determine whether someone is worthy, but you may discover after a significant length of time that they aren't as interesting as you thought.

Okay, I think I get your worthy/interesting distinction now. Sort of. I mean, you seem to be lumping a lot of things under "interesting." From what I've seen, attraction has a lot more to do with what you think of someone as a person (morally as well as sense of life), and as a male/female than what they do for a living or for their hobbies. That, and having comparable intelligence. So perhaps you meant something else?

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What about the majority of break-up cases, where you know she's not The One, but she is of high enough quality that you want to (having not yet met and until you meet The One) want to have a romantic relationship with her? (This is not "settling" or "giving up".)

See, I would imagine that, even if you are a "settler," you still wouldn't generally break up with someone unless you stopped liking them. Which would mean that they weren't worthy of your standard, whatever it was.

I just think it's a shame that so many people give up their standards so easily, especially young people.

Hell, that may be way too generous. Most young people don't even have standards or any concept at all of the kind of romance I'm talking about (i.e. ideal romance). They don't just give it up; most don't have any concept of it at all.

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So perhaps you meant something else?

No. In my experience you can be as attracted as you like to someone but if the interest isn't there you will never develop a relationship with them, not even friendship. I encounter a great many attractive men all the time and I rarely have even a conversation with them.

Let me give you a concrete example here: I was at the Atlas Shrugged 50-year celebration held by the NYU Objectivist Club about 2 months ago. There were a lot of people there and I had actual conversations with two of them, and one only because he was stuck sitting next to me at lunch and I forcefully butted into the conversation. (The other person I was sitting next to put his back to me and ignored me for the entire meal.)

Heck, I talk to the people that live in the house with me even less than that.

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Heck, I talk to the people that live in the house with me even less than that.

But is that a lack-of-interest thing or a not-a-gregarious-conversationalist thing? I dunno; seems like there could be a lot of reasons for a thing like that, not all of them having to do with shared interests. I mean, those are great conversation starters, but by no means the only way it can be done.

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Heh, I don't like people that aren't gregarious conversationalists; ability to start a conversation is one of my "interest-points". I know a few people that like other people that don't like conversation: I am not one of them. There's a difference between being talkative and liking conversation, too . . . I like to talk a lot so I tend to like people that prefer to listen, but people that like to listen still like conversation.

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Yeah, I'm not sure that my descriptive skills are up to the task of taking this conversation further, at least at this point. Hey, at least we actually got something out of the discussion this time, considering that we've been intermittantly arguing this same issue for, what, 2 years now?

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