The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle Caveat: “dating” in the American sense isn’t really a thing in Finland. But I’m going to assume this means rather just starting to get involved with boys/girls in a romantic sense. Whatever form that may take.
I started at 20, largely due to lack of opportunity before that.
Would’ve liked to start earlier, but it was out of my hands.
GalacticTurtle
The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether Also, have you considered that people might also just not like communal living, rather than specifically living in women’s houses or not wanting to live with friends?
Of my single friends I don’t know anyone who would like to live with other people communally, if they have the option of living alone.
This may of course be a cultural thing, as I’m mainly talking about Finnish people here, and shared housing has been very much on the decline for several decades now in Finland. People just aren’t interested in it if they can avoid it.
GalacticTurtle
The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether Well, see here’s the thing. I don’t like living with people. And I’m not particularly keen on building/sharing a life with people either.
That also applies to homes for multiple people.
There are very few people indeed in this world whom I like enough to actively want to live with them, shared values and expectations or not.* By the time I realised these things I was fully expecting to never live with anyone, it just happened I came across someone whom I tolerate enough that I can live with him, and circumstances were such that it was either living together or parting for good.
As things are, the idea of living in a shared residence with a bunch of other people sounds to me like an absolute nightmare. It would make absolutely no difference if that was a women’s residence.
So basically in order to want to live with someone, that person has to hit all the three factors; friend, lover AND partner. If any of those are missing, I have no interest in living with someone as long as I have a reasonable choice.
*I’ve lived with flatmates in the past, because that made economical sense at the time. But whether I became friends with them or just happened to partially occupy the same flat as they did, depended entirely on the person. It was fine at the time, but I always expected it to be a temporary solution and I would never choose it as a permanent arrangement, as long as I had a choice.
GalacticTurtle
The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether It’s not so much that I prefer solitude, it’s that I don’t like sharing my space with people. I do like having company, but I want to have it on my own terms. I lived in a block of flats for about a decade and I could almost feel the presence of the neighbours, and I didn’t like it. It’s not that I was avoiding relationships either, I just knew that I’m picky and didn’t think it very likely that someone tolerable enough would come along.
My preferred living arrangement would actually be adjacent houses, or a bigger house divided in two with one half for each, but that’s still not exactly feasible. Back then one of us was going to leave the country and so the options were to split up, or live together. The brain chemicals only came to play in the sense that I didn’t want to split up, they had little to do with the living arrangement itself (that was essentially a question of money). I would still like it if we both had our independent spaces, but that’s not realistic. Nor is it feasible to live without any neighbours within about two kilometres, which I would like even better.
I just expect we’ll all abide by the overall rules and expectations set by the house
Well yes, that’s the rub. I don’t want to live by rules set by anyone else in my own home. And I don’t want to have to compromise with others in my own home. Now, I realise that living with one other person does include some compromises, and I’m not exactly a fan of that, but at least with just one person it’s mostly manageable. Plus since that person is a romantic partner, I’m more motivated to manage that, than I would be with flatmates or friends.
Also it’s not a question of expecting to get along with everyone else swimmingly, it’s a question of not wanting them around. As in at all. Like preferring to live without any neighbours even. Again, it’s not that I don’t like company, but I want to have company on my own terms, and that’s not possible in a communal living arrangement.
GalacticTurtle
The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether One of the previous presidents of Finland lived separately “with” her spouse until her term in office. They both owned a flat in the same building, with one flat being above the other. They only moved in together when she moved in the official presidential residence.
You know, even if I didn’t want to bring in men (which I would if I were single) or didn’t drink alcohol at home, the mere fact that someone else had set those rules would still be a problem. If it’s my home, I expect to be able to set the rules, at least to the extent that it’s possible. And the older I get, the more strident I become with that expectation, rather than mellowing out.
I do think a lot of people drift through life decisions, either because they lack a strong internal compass or because they don’t care that much overall and therefore tend to choose the easily available solutions. But with those people who don’t, the results can be quite different.
For example, one of my old childhood friends definitely bucked the trend in some ways, as she and her husband live in an extension built to her childhood home, with her parents just next door. This is a very unusual solution in Finland, but she loves the place and that’s what she wanted. I on the other hand always knew I wanted to see the world, and ended up without a traditional career, with no kids, and having lived in several different countries and having worked lots of different jobs, only to settle down abroad. This also a very unusual life path for people with my background.
And yet another childhood friend ditched her traditional career in a city to go live with a farmer, they have no kids but happily raise dogs. This friend was fully on track to the typical normal life, when life took a turn, and she had enough sense to move on and not look back.
But you can’t really tell which people are just drifting along, and which ones are making conscious decisions, not by just looking at where they happen to be situated. For that you’d have to really get to know someone, and even then you might not know for sure.
GalacticTurtle
EmmyNoether
@GalacticTurtle @Gnomeshatecheese For me, there’s emotional intimacy, which one can have with a friend, and sexual intimacy, which is (again for me) only with a partner, and what distinguishes friendship from romantic partnerships.
I know there’s a whole elaborate taxonomy of shades of “asexuality” (which somewhat counterintuitively, for me at any rate, seems to involve a whole load of “spicy straights” who are having lots of sex, very enthusiastically, but for reasons which somewhat escape me, conceptualising this sex as a form of “asexuality” - oxymoron or what). According to this somewhat baffling world-view there are people who yearn for romantic attachments without sex and sex without romantic attachments (which as far as I am concerned is not asexuality but simply every frat boy ever…)
For me it’s a lot more simple. I fancy some blokes. Generally I don’t want to actually go through with having sex with them unless I am also drawn to them romantically and like them as friends, because long experience has taught me that the endorphin rush of orgasm will result in me becoming emotionally attached regardless of whether they are a complete shit or not, so I tend to be very cautious until I have established that - as far as one ever can tell upfront - they are decent blokes and I will still be able to have reasonable interesting conversations in a few months time.
But beyond that it really is as simple as “I like this person. Do I want to have sex with them? Yes: potential romantic/sexual partner. No: friend.”
The Dread Slender Gnome
@EmmyNoether @GalacticTurtle Ok, so here’s how I would break this down, when it comes to evaluating people I like.
Do I want to share fun things with them? If yes, friend.
Do I want to share sexual things with him? If yes, lover.
Do I want to share my life with him? If yes, partner.
Note that the last point requires both the first ones to be true, but the first two don’t require any other points to be true.
GalacticTurtle
The Dread Slender Gnome
@EmmyNoether @GalacticTurtle Ah yes, you just said the quiet part from my post out loud.
GalacticTurtle
The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether Where I grew up anything between 14 and 17 would’ve been a “normal” age to start getting romantically involved. You wouldn’t have been considered a late start until 20ish or so.
very idea to consider dating someone was more likely due to outside influences (like how people date on TV shows) rather than any genuine desire to pursue a distinctly different relationship type from friendship
I mean… that’s the whole point of “dating” or stepping out or whatever. That it’s something different from a friendship and gives you something friendships don’t. You can have a truckload of friends and it still isn’t the same as an intimate relationship. And the interest for the latter is completely different from the interest for the former, not least because it involves the sheer physical desires as well. And as soon as you start developing that interest for a different kind of relationship, you start thinking about, well, “dating”.
EmmyNoether
@Gnomeshatecheese @GalacticTurtle Echoing Gnome, “dating” wasn’t a thing in the UK either back in the early 80s, but again, assuming you meant “first snog/ trip to the pictures”, about 17, which was not that unusual - many girls would start “going out with” (the UK term of the time) boys at the age of 14 or 15, but many of us were “late developers”.
First proper “boyfriend” aged 19 I guess.
EmmyNoether
@Gnomeshatecheese @GalacticTurtle Forgot to answer your “why” part of the question… because adolescent hormones meant I desperately wanted to get laid, but I was too shy to do anything much about it for ages…
The Dread Slender Gnome
from my pov, living with a romantic partner is a form of communal living.
That’s the thing, I think. I’m pretty confident that most people I know wouldn’t consider living with a romantic partner communal living, or even living with one’s own spouse and children to be that. It comes back to there being a qualitative difference in the relationships between friends, lovers, family members and partners. The relationships with family members and partners would allow for living together much more so than relationships with friends or even lovers. And communal living would very likely be conceptualised as living without those kind of relationships being involved.
I should emphasise that I’m definitely mostly speaking of Finnish people here, because those are the ones I know most about with regard to living choices and relationship outcomes. It is possible that my takes are reflective of how personal space and emotional distance is conceptualised in Finnish culture.
The Dread Slender Gnome
@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether My point was that these are all unusual things for our demographic. It clearly demonstrates that they are capable of making choices as opposed to just drifting in life, so assuming that they’re just drifting in one aspect is questionable. I could’ve also mentioned some newer old friends who are single, but that’s much less rare outcome than any of the ones I mentioned. In fact, it’s common enough to be quite unremarkable in our context.
And frankly, there’s also the possibility of people being overwhelmingly couple-bonding creatures and that being a strong innate drive on average.
The Dread Slender Gnome
I figure that’s where terms like “man cave” and, more recently, the “she shed” came about lol.
Oh and btw, one of my three conditions for moving in with my spouse was that I must have my own room. That was never negotiable. Personally I think every cohabiting couple should have their own spaces, if at all possible. But some people do seem to still be weirded out by that idea.
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