First, for a personally-oriented thread, you've made a refreshingly pleasant one. It's a breath of fresh air in a sea of threads about people who are angry at their friends and want to tell the internet. Well done there.
James Joseph Emerald said:
I think it's kind of pitiable when people need to spend every waking moment with another person because they're too dull or afraid to be alone with themselves.
I would say that this is that rationalisation you were talking about. This is a pretty faulty generalisation and the implied sense of superiority smacks of rationalisation. The overwhelming majority of people are not stupid or pathetic (despite pithy comments suggesting otherwise (a lot of stupid people would be better characterised as misled people)). You should be immediately wary of any line of reasoning that requires the majority of the population to be feeble or unintelligent and places you outside of that majority.
To address this issue more specifically:
First, you mention spending every waking moment with another person. That's simply not how relationships work. A lot of couples don't even see much of one another at all. There is no rule regarding how often you have to see each other as a couple - ideally you find someone who wants to spend as much time together as you do.
Second, regarding why a person might seek out a mate, you seem to be suggesting that the only conceivable reason would be to shore up some innadequacy. As you say later, you think this is all about "needs". But reducing everything to conceptual needs gets silly rather quickly: Do you read books because you have some need that the book fulfills? Do you watch television because you have some need that television fulfills? Do you eat anything beyond tasteless gruel because you have some need that flavourful food fulfills? My point is that you certainly
can characterise all of these things as needs, but the same line of reasoning you're applying makes a lot of other "needs" make a person sound just as ridiculous. Are people who eat anything beyond staple foods pitiable in that they need to have a variety of flavours and interesting, enjoyable food because they lack the ability to just make do with staple foods? And you can virtually always make the opposite argument just as easily: are people who eat only staple foods pitiable because they lack the ability to cope with a varied diet? In short, you can turn almost any desire into a sign of weakness if you apply the same logic you're applying to relationships. All of these statements end up being pretty vacuous.
James Joseph Emerald said:
Anyway, I don't really understand what the point of being in a relationship is, at least at my stage in life (21-year-old college student). I love that feeling, when everything you're supposed to do is done, and you have a whole day to spend on yourself, doing whatever you want.
I want to be perfectly clear here that I'm not suggesting that it's bad not to want a relationship - only trying to answer why a person might want one. Bear in mind that you might understand the reasons why a person might want a relationship, yet still not want one yourself. That doesn't make you or the other people illogical in any substantial way (you are different people with different interests, the fact that a relationship doesn't suit you doesn't mean it doesn't suit them and vice versa).
James Joseph Emerald said:
I tend to begrudge anything or anyone that tries to take it away from me. And I especially resent it when people feel entitled to my free time. Of the few relationships I've started, they inevitably end because the girl wants to waste an entire day "just hanging out", and either I refuse and she gets pissed off, or I relent and end up thinking of her as a chore. Are all relationships like that? Am I just being uncompromising?
One of the primary goals in finding a good relationship is finding someone who won't take your free time away from you, but will simply
join you in it. A lot of people, especially younger people, try to get into a relationship with essentially anyone they can. What you want is either (a) someone who wants to do the same things you do and thus doesn't meaningfully detract from your free time or (b) someone with different interests that actually end up interesting you such that you choose to spend your free time on their interests (or some combination of the two). The notion that you can build a relationship with someone because you like the person themself (whatever that means), even when you're not interested in any of the things they like to do, is, at least in my experience, really a troublesome one.
James Joseph Emerald said:
A lot of my friends are starting to get girlfriends/boyfriends, and when I ask them why, they say things such as "for the sex" or "it's like having a friend you can screw" or "it's so nice to have someone to cuddle and get affection from" or "someone to pick you up when you're feeling down".
To get something out of the way: sex is nice. If you don't think sex is nice, I'm not sure what to tell you. Sex is nice. You are hard-wired to find sex nice (barring asexuality, but that's another reply entirely) and, while this will sound trite, most younger reclusive people who don't think sex is nice really haven't experienced much or it (or at least much good sex). The meat of this however is that sex is rarely enough for a relationship and individual things like cuddling, affection, and consolation are nice perks, but they are not, again in my experience, the things that make a relationship worthwhile. The real kicker is companionship. It's the joy of playing coop with a person instead of a bot. You don't
need to play with a person (again, except in the somewhat vacuous way mentioned above) and there are certainly games that are more fun without other people (again, you're not required to do everything together), but it usually makes it more fun. But you have to find someone who wants to play games that you want to play. Maybe they just happen to already like the same games or maybe they introduce you to some new favourites, but at some point your choice of games has to converge.
James Joseph Emerald said:
But I don't really feel the need for any of that. And I have a suspicion that's the key word: need. I have a theory that all relationships (romantic or otherwise) are formed on the basis of mutual need. And, being content on my own, I don't really feel the need for a girlfriend. But maybe that's just me rationalising my own failure to commit (as a pop psych women's mag dating columnist might say).
As mentioned above, yes, I think that's just rationalisation and I also think that this reasoning based on
need (which is not quite an original idea) is very mistaken in that people fail to realise that you can apply it to make
any behaviour or desire seem to be grounded in weakness.
