Couplethink Rant (WAS: Shipping the Trio and the Twins)

[Haggridd <jkusalavagemd@yahoo.com>]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "ssk7882 <skelkins at a...>" 
<skelkins at a...> wrote:


> Oh, I don't like that romantic paradigm.  No, sir.  I don't
> like it at all.
> 
> It enforces what has always struck me as a very bizarre and 
> artificial notion: namely, that the closest relationship in 
> ones life "ought" to have a sexual element.  If it does not, 
> then it is dismissed as "just" friendship.  
> 
> It also enforces the equally (to my mind) bizarre and artificial 
> notion that a sexual relationship "ought" to be deeply emotionally 
> and intellectually fulfilling.  If it is not, then it is dismissed 
> as "cheap" sex.


> 
> 
> So.  Aren't you glad you asked?  ;-)
> 
> 
> Elkins 
> 
Allow me to make an observation that might help explain that bizarre 
and artificial notion.

This issue is-- or was-- viewed differently by males and females.  I 
no longer hold the following opinion (two score years since have 
taught me its artificiality) but at the time I believed it as Gospel, 
and I was not alone among my (male) peers.  It is that the 
relationship, or the love, isn't real unless there is sex.  The sex 
somehow ratifies the validity of the relationship.  The (very 
bizarre) reasoning went as follows:  any guy could be nice to a girl 
and be have her be nice in return.  the friendship thus was simple 
courtesy, and nothing special.  It was the sexual act that lifted the 
relationship from the mundane and made it "real" somehow.  This 
attitude was all tied up with the "double standard", with the notion 
that the girl was "giving up" something, and with other obsolete ways 
of thinking about the opposite gender, but when I read this post, it 
made me wonder just how obsolete this attitude was.

Haggridd