"Are you supposed to just promise to stay together even if you meet someone "better"? That's also traditional (and makes sense if you make life decisions based on staying together), but is contradictory to the idea of being with someone you love."
I'm not sure that is contradictory, unless you're also applying here the "you can only love one person at a time" thing (in which case when person 2 shows up you are assumed to automatically stop loving person 1, at which point splitting up and going off with person 2 becomes logical)
I think there's also an extra level of messiness involved. Suppose you are with person A in a fairly serious way, and person B comes along and you think they're a better match for you.
You can't compare like with like, because you know a lot more about person A (as you're seriously dating them / living with them / whatever, and you're presumably not doing this with person B - if you are, you appear to be having them both, so you don't have this dilemma (until one or the other finds out ...)). So - as well as the "there is extra value in my relationship with A because we have put time and effort into it" - how could you really know whether person B would BE better, or would just SEEM better from the outside but be equal/worse once in a relationship?
Surely the logical thing is not to move unless you are pretty sure that a relationship with B would be significantly better. And since you have less information about B than A, that is a very difficult thing to be sure of. (Unless your information is "my relationship with A is really negative and not worth trying to make good, so with B would HAVE to be better, in which case you should be dealing with that anyway irrespective of B)
As a 3rd complication: one also needs to take into account the extent to which you can choose to feel things for people. I guess this depends on your model of falling in love. I think most people would agree that you have some control - you might not be able to stop yourself feeling something, but you don't have to talk to B late at night on MSN about your deepest hopes and fears, or go out to lunch with B and nobody else because you happened to be free, or start learning ballroom dancing with B. Not that any of those things would be objectively definitively wrong, but they might not be the best choices if you might want to stay with A ...
no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 10:27 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that is contradictory, unless you're also applying here the "you can only love one person at a time" thing (in which case when person 2 shows up you are assumed to automatically stop loving person 1, at which point splitting up and going off with person 2 becomes logical)
I think there's also an extra level of messiness involved. Suppose you are with person A in a fairly serious way, and person B comes along and you think they're a better match for you.
You can't compare like with like, because you know a lot more about person A (as you're seriously dating them / living with them / whatever, and you're presumably not doing this with person B - if you are, you appear to be having them both, so you don't have this dilemma (until one or the other finds out ...)). So - as well as the "there is extra value in my relationship with A because we have put time and effort into it" - how could you really know whether person B would BE better, or would just SEEM better from the outside but be equal/worse once in a relationship?
Surely the logical thing is not to move unless you are pretty sure that a relationship with B would be significantly better. And since you have less information about B than A, that is a very difficult thing to be sure of. (Unless your information is "my relationship with A is really negative and not worth trying to make good, so with B would HAVE to be better, in which case you should be dealing with that anyway irrespective of B)
As a 3rd complication: one also needs to take into account the extent to which you can choose to feel things for people. I guess this depends on your model of falling in love. I think most people would agree that you have some control - you might not be able to stop yourself feeling something, but you don't have to talk to B late at night on MSN about your deepest hopes and fears, or go out to lunch with B and nobody else because you happened to be free, or start learning ballroom dancing with B. Not that any of those things would be objectively definitively wrong, but they might not be the best choices if you might want to stay with A ...