i hate hookup culture

[@chideraomeh]

you don't know how much I needed this rn 😭

[@MyCandidWorld]

i've been hearing a lot of the same thing😭

[@stephyedo3481]

I agree with you 💯 👍 I hate the hook up culture too

[@billwalton4571]

So accurate and eloquently put

[@MyCandidWorld]

thank you kindly!

[@darkengine5931]

I'm from Japan and I really dislike hookup culture but also what I want to call, "modern, Westerized dating" for lack of a better term. The way I distinguish this concept is "dating to get to know each other." This is skipping a vital step to my Japanese sensibilities which is friendship. Most Japanese, even today, don't date in this modern/Westernized way to get to know each other (implying they didn't know much about each other before). Instead they form friendships first, and if the friendship works out after a good period of time (say months to years), then they might go on a date. Friendship is the process of getting to know each other to us, not dating. Dating is what we do after we already know each other very well as the next step after a close friendship to elevate it to something romantic. For example, I'm married but when I was single and met a lovely woman at a bar, I did not ask her on a date. That is too forward and moving too fast from my perspective. Instead I invited her to spend time together with my friends (both men and women) and me, like invite her to a barbecue together with my friends. I'd also encourage her to bring any friends of hers along (both men and women). Then we get to know each other over the passing time not dating but hanging out together with our mutual friends, and if we continue to click and are attracted to each other, I ask her out on a date. I think that's the best way and also the most natural way closest to how we formed romantic relationships for the bulk of our human evolution living in small, cooperative communities of familiar faces. The courtship process involved people we already knew in advance, not people we barely knew, and I think that natural way is often the way most conducive to our social and mental well-being. On top of that, our mutual friends can vouch for each other's character. They can say, "That man/woman is a good and decent man/woman". We can gather a lot of not only first-hand information about them but also second-hand information about them before we go on a date where things have a tendency to get romantic and sexual quite quickly.

[@MyCandidWorld]

I definitely agree. People skip right past the getting to know one another faze and go straight into being a romantic relationship. If you couldn't be friends with your partner maybe you can't be partners either.

[@darkengine5931]

​@@MyCandidWorld I'm thinking it also helps keep men and women honorable on dates, or at least helps honorable men and women find each other more easily. For example, say a man is an unethical player type whose goal is to just have his sexual fun with a woman and then ghost her. Such men also tend to be among the most charming since they're not playing a long-term game where honesty and integrity are rewarded, and can instead deceive women about who they are in order to present themselves as more charming and committed than they actually are. They also tend to be the most socially well-rehearsed at forming the best short-term impressions through the sheer volume of women they try to charm, since they don't need to form anything more than a relatively short-term impression: just long enough to have their sexual fun and move on. When I was growing up before online dating was a thing (I'm in my 40s and we didn't even have smartphones back then), such player types seemed relatively rare even in the West and could usually only operate in big cities filled with endless bars and nightclubs (in settings that offered an endless sea of unfamiliar faces). It's the only way they could avoid being discovered as they exploited random women they picked up as they hopped from bar to bar. Otherwise word would spread of their misdeeds and they would become known among the people there. Meanwhile, online dating seems to establish the perfect setting for the most unscrupulous men (as well as possibly women) to exploit without ever seriously risking a reputation that will come back to them among the next person on whom they swipe right. I suspect the growing popularity of online dating is at least a large part why hook-up culture has become so prevalent among newer generations than mine. So I think the ultimate defense against not only hook-up culture but general exploitation of decent people who only want to find a committed romantic partner is to form social circles of both sexes: a community of like-minded people if you will. Then spend a lot of time together and have a lot of fun going out together in groups, throwing parties, going on picnics, barbecues, watching movies together, playing sports, hiking, camping, attending each other's Birthday's, weddings, and so forth. Then you get to see each other in both the best and worst lights, through highs and lows, and the deepest aspects of each other's character will be known not just among potential love interests within that group but the entire group of lifelong friends. That's the way I met my wife. She was originally a friend of a mutual friend invited to a picnic together (Hanami), and over the course of hanging out together with our mutual friends, we had a strong gravitation towards each other. We kept finding ourselves at the edge of our friends' parties, often talking to each other for hours on end at the balcony of a friend's house, e.g. (somewhat ditching our mutual friends in the process and almost forgetting they were around us as we got lost in our conversations). Then after a year or so of hanging out this way with our mutual friends, one day they left us alone in a bar since everyone had to leave early. So we danced and kissed and I asked her out on a date and she agreed. The rest is history; it seemed like we were already destined to marry by the time we went on our first date. And when we married, all of those mutual lifelong friends we had established attended our wedding, as we did theirs, and that always struck me as the most harmonious way to not only find love but find a sense of community outside of our families. Funnily enough, two of our mutual friends also formed their love interest during our wedding and went on their first date soon after, only to get married 4 years later with my wife and I attending their wedding (they also copied us and had their wedding in exactly the same location since they loved our wedding so much and developed their love interest through the time they spent together at ours).

[@infinityb33]

Needed the call out HA

[@MyCandidWorld]

LMAOO glad to help