Wow, this quickly blew up into a different discussion, which IMO is fine, because the faux Seuss wasn’t very good.
I am critical of “dating” also. People both for and against make it sound as if there was some real social protocol at work in this, but if there is any, it seems elusive. Sure, it would be great for people to know if they were interested in each other, and how interested, and what kind of interested. But the reality of it seems fairly random to me. Even “asking a person out” does not necessarily clarify to them (or even one’s self) how one feels about them.
Dismissing romantic love as being a sketchy ideal only brings other problems to the foreground. If all sexual relationships are ultimately just between friends, then does one, and how does one, determine which friendships have sexual components and which do not? People seem to be deliberately obscure about this sort of thing, systematically avoiding being either completely open or closed, and instead required some weird internested social rituals with varying degrees of ambiguity. So it’s hardly any wonder that many find such issues “difficult” or “confusing”.
