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Possibly, to an extent, it illustrates the gap between policy and practice. It may be a European thing, but there's something a bit bobby-sox and Gene Pitney about this "Hal, Chad and Tad all want to go steady with me - but which will give me the relationship closest to what I want?" situation as described. If the swains are equal in absolutely every other way apart from how they would like to construct a relationship, or if the only thing that really matters to you is whether or not you get to kiss other guys, that makes sense. Otherwise, surely "is our idea of the kind of relationship we want compatible?" is one of the questions applied to a potential partner, along with "do I like him?", "is he good dinner-party company?", "are we sexually compatible?", "is he just a little bit too close to his mother?", and so on. Sometimes somebody will like somebody else in lots of ways, and in order to be involved with them will try to work with them on elements of the relationship which may not be natural to them but which are very important to the other part, such as monogamy or for that matter polygamy.
Now, it seems that you have basically already defined what you wanted - a relationship in which you are allowed certain, negotiated forms of physical contact with other people. In your first formulation, this physical contact stoped short of het.pen.sex, and in your second formulation it did not, but it imposed conditions on the het.pen.sex - presumably, that het.pen.sex should occur only with people who are not going to be around in the everyday life of the two people having the relationship. At a guess, I'd presume that emotional closeness and allowable physical closeness are on a sliding scale - sexual intimacy is allowed with people with whom there is no ongoing emotional intimacy, whereas people who were a regular part of one or more of the couple's emotional experience would be suitable for kissing and bed-sharing but not het.pen.sex.
All this being the case - and that's a pretty traditional, white-collar graduate relationship - personally I'd work out who I actually wanted to go out with, explain that this was how I saw an ideal ongoing relationship, and see what they said. If they were not happy with that, I would then balance how much I liked them with how much I liked having the kind of relationship they didn't want to have, and see if a compromise could be reached. |
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