Pro: Never alone
Con: Never aloneAccurate.
Advantage:
- You have someone to talk to
- You have someone to eat with
- You have someone to have sex with
- You have someone to pool resources with
- You have someone whose family is now your extended family
Disadvantage:
- You have to talk to someone
- You have to eat with someone
- You have to have sex with someone
- You have to pool resources with someone
- You have more fucking family you have to do things with
In a good relationsship, you don’t have to do anything like this, you do it because you want to.
- Talk - A good partner will recognize when you need space and leave you alone.
- Eat - You can eat at different times depending on your schedule, just remember to consider the other person when cooking and do the washing up after yourself.
- Sex - no, you don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to, or when you don’t want to.
- Resources - no you can have separate finances, but it is usually beneficial to pool your resources.
- Family - not everyone has a happy family, or a family at all, this is not a given.
Sex - no, you don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to, or when you don’t want to.
Of course, as with most things, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t feel pressured to do something because you want your partner to be happy, and they want to do it. You always have the right to refuse, but “I don’t want to do X, but I know my partner does, so I do want to do X because I want to make them happy” is an intrinsic downside of a relationship. In turn, you should always be able to say no, and your partner should respect that because they know it wouldn’t make you happy, and that’s more important than getting what they want. “You can just say no” is true, but it also bypasses the entire point of the conversation around what makes being in a relationship difficult.
If you are in a (romantic, personal) relationship, then it is not transactional. Cost/benefit analysis is not really applicable.
Nice to have a fulltime friend
It tends to change what you’re free to do every day
Assuming a healthy, loving relationship:
Advantages
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You always have someone in your corner. Someone who will stand next to you and face whatever comes. Someone who will listen to your fears and anxieties, and reassure you. Someone who can take one look at your face and know that you need a hug, or a tickle monster attack, or a cup of tea.
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You have someone who considers you vital to their happiness. You’re the person in their corner. You get to love, support, and nurture them just as they do for you.
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You have a built-in partner for things like camping, traveling, going to trivia night at the local bar. Someone who will bring you a beer when you’re too lazy to get up from the couch. Someone who you can make smile just by bringing them coffee in bed.
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You can be yourself! They love you just the way you are, you lil weirdo.
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The stability that comes from a relationship with mutual respect, cooperation, and negotiation is really comforting.
Disadvantages
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You lose some spontaneity for doing things solo, because you need to check with your partner to make sure you don’t already have plans.
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Sometimes you have to hide snack foods if you hope to get your fair share. We have a drawer in our fridge that didn’t get much use. I started squirreling away cans of sparkling water in there because if I didn’t hide them, they’d all be gone by the time I decided I wanted one.
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You can get into a rut, but neither one tries to change it on the assumption that the other one is happy that way.
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Sometimes they toot in bed 😡
You lose some spontaneity for doing things solo, because you need to check with your partner to make sure you don’t already have plans.
This isn’t really inherent to relationships unless you count “friendships”, too.
Not all relationships are deeply entangled. I have a partner that makes their own plans without checking with me. We use a calendar to keep track of like “we’re doing such and such Friday” so we don’t double book or forget, but that kind of “loss of spontaneity” would happen if it was “trivia night with the guys” or “dinner with friend”
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That’s a working model, but I think there are different types of relationships. A type of relationship would be an element of the power set of {
friendship,romance,sex}.One person might only like relationships without
sex, another might dislike the wholeromancepart,…Each of these aspects of a relaionship has their advantages and disadvantages. The relationship as a whole is just the sum of them.
Using coding markdown to explain types of relationships? Yyyyup we’re on Lemmy, baby. And I wouldn’t have it any other way ❤️
You’re the first person I’ve ever seen use the concept of a power set to describe what kinds of relationships there can be and I wish more people knew what that was so I could preach this like gospel.
That said, our relationship is
Øbut it could quickly become {friendship} if we ever met
This is not a problem for the vast majority of people but I was always told that women don’t want to have sex but turns out that they do and this is bit of an issue as I don’t particularly enjoy that myself.
Another issue is that I like being alone but not all day every day but being in a relationship means I have to leave the house to be alone.
It’s interesting because one of the reasons I’ve never dated is because 99% of people on the planet want and need sex in a relationship. I don’t want sex so I figured why bother attempting to date. Well I found out about asexual dating sites and have been casually on them for a while now, but it’s tricky because no one has been close enough to meet. And I don’t know what the hell people do in LDRs if it doesn’t revolve around sex. Wishing you the best.
Thanks! I actually am in a relationship right now and it’s an open one so she doesn’t need to completely live without sex but I still can’t help but to feel like I’m not doing my part. It’s just one of those things that don’t really have a perfect solution to it. Not having sex doesn’t feel right but forcing myself into it to please her isn’t right either especially knowing that it’s what I’ve done in my previous relationships which only has made me resent sex even more.
Main advantage: You feel whole
Main disadvantage: You always have your plate full because you got a little more than wholeness
You are never alone…
This counts as both.
Good things: you get someone to spend time with. Frequent sex. Someone to share your world with.b you tell your secrets, you trust them
Bad things: they have their own needs, even when it isn’t convenient for you. You have to accept that you’re a partnership, and their judgement is important. You trust them, whether or not they deserve it. You are open and vulnerable, which means you’re vulnerable. Sex can be mechanical and unfulfilling. Your growth needs to include them
There are many different kinds of relationships, and they have their own advantages and disadvantages.
For example, someone might say that being in a relationship means you can only have sex with that one person. That’s only true if you’re doing a conventional monogamous relationship. Many people happily and successfully do some form of ethical non monogamy.
ENM in turn has its own advantages and disadvantages. One of them is a high frequency of people going “I knew a non monogamous couple and they broke up” despite the fact that most monogamous couples break up, too. Just to get ahead of that.
Anyway. One of the common advantages I value is that people you have a relationship with are less likely to blow you off. A casual friend might bail on your invite, but it’s less likely a good friend or partner will.
The most common disadvantage is you’ll probably have to do some emotional work at some point. They’ll be having a problem and you’ll have to be there for them. That can be tough.
You trade off freedom for companionship basically, but in a good relationship you can still have a good amount of freedom still (you just need to consider the needs of your partner too).
Relationships take effort and compromise; communicating can be hard (but it’s probably the most important thing in a relationship).
Not being in a committed relationship, it’s a lot easier to live without as many obligations.
Also, if you live together you can pool your resources both financially and effort-wise which can help a lot.
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Pro: sex.
Con: you live longerThey might want you to shower and clean your flat - clear advantage. Disadvantage: you may be expected to tell other interested parties that you can only engage in casual sex, since your heart is already taken. Also: fucking without a heart-on is not as satisfactory as making love.
I would not consider cheating to be an upside or downside of a healthy relationship, because it shouldn’t be a part of one at all.
i didn’t talk about cheating
Engaging in casual sex with other people is, in most relationships, cheating. Wishing it could be more is cheating in the rest.
