2026-07-06
Do not take seriously the dating advice of religious people
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
Meta note
- I might be vaguely reacting to a mind sim of a specific person when writing this post. But I think the core point generalises.
- I am violating the X Y rule to write this post, hope it is important enough to be worth violating the rule.
Main
- Your periodic reminder to not take seriously the dating advice of religious people. Assume all of it is coming from someone who is poisoned in a way they themselves don't understand.
- Insights about relationships that more religious people than atheists would agree with, that I think are true and important:
- Having children gives a lot of happiness and meaning to many people. Most people (not all) who have kids don't regret having kids.
- Long-term relationships have value that a series of short-term won't provide. This also straightforwardly applies to friendships.
- A lot of interpersonal and communal conflict is fundamental over people's access to sex and relationships.
- A lot of casual sex can end up a coping mechanism and/or an instant gratification loop, just like over-eating or drug abuse or porn addiction or basically any other such thing.
- Inspite of this, I want to basically throw all advice by religious people on this topic into the trash can. Why?
- There is a very subtle vibe of "sex is bad" that I seem to get, atleast when I talk to some religious people. This singlehandedly negates basically all the positive value I would otherwise get from taking these people seriously.
- Median casual sex experience is not as amazing as I might sometimes imagine, but is also not as bad as I might sometimes image. Reality is more weird and also lowkey boring than projections.
- A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts. I am very confident that atleast some experiences of sex are amazing, even if nothing fruitful comes out of them long-term. This alone negates everything religious people say on this topic.
- Being genuinely curious and genuinely willing to show emotion (including yes, feelings of attraction) in early stages of knowing someone is hot. It is useful. Neurotically analysing these things doesn't help much. All that can be done later, once you're more serious with a person. (You = Samuel. This is not a post for everyone.) You should be willing to casually show interest to people without neurotically analysing five steps ahead. If you wanna have sex with someone, just go have sex with them, and don't think too much about it. Your expectations of how things will go affect how they will actually go. (This might be the single most important point in this post for me, given that I otherwise seem to often lack curiosity about people.)
- You can find "wise" atheist people who have maintained LTRs that have survived value transitions, and who basically agree with the insights listed at the top. Given that you can find such people, you have no reason to rely on the opinions of religious people instead.
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