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This kind of reads like a troll post from a new account, but I guess I'll bite.
If this is all true you're clearly on the very right end of the bell-curve in terms of sexual success and social milieu, it's like a multi-millionaire heir asking why people complain about housing affordability when they were gifted three on their birthday.
I suppose I can't really relate personally, in the sense that my libido is quite low and I don't have a lot of interest in casual dating or sex.
The median man probably does, in the sense they would mostly like to be Chad and Casanova who can fuck a lot of hot women, but obviously this is out of reach for the vast majority of men even if they work as hard as possible.
Yes. Very few people can be professional ballet dancers, either - and "Chad" is every bit as determined as any world-class athlete. His social gracefulness probably cannot be described in English, at least not the dialects any of us speak. It would take Paul Ekman and his team a hundred years to articulate what Chad can do - a microexpression held for a tenth of a second too long can communicate an entire sentence.
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Do you have a strong romantic drive, or is the concept of marriage for you mostly a material alliance for childrearing? If you lean mostly towards the latter, I think that would absolutely contribute to your feeling that marriage in the modern concept has little to offer.
Also not a fan of casual sex, but my libido is moderate to high. I just enjoy sex with an intimate partner in a romantic context a lot more than casual trysts. I can’t have a tryst without catching feelings — not overwhelming passion or anything, I’m not insane, but I end up wanting to make a connection. I’m probably in the top 10% of men in terms of… romance orientation? Physical affection? Romanticalness? So the incentive for me to date is strong, even if I never wanted to marry, even if I never wanted kids. So long as there’s a woman out there with sweet eyes and a warm smile, I’m going to want to look deeply into them and smile back.
Yeah, if put in those terms I definitely consider marriage primarily as an material alliance for childrearing purposes.
I enjoy fiction about romance occasionally, but I suppose I'm blackpilled/realistic/cynical enough to think about romance (in the eros sense) in Roman terms, as a force that wounds men and drives them crazy; that the initial burst of limerance for someone that doesn't exist will always fade with time, and that it has very significant risks to my health and happiness.
At the end of the day, romantic drive (in the storge sense) is definitely more something that would hypothetically be nice, not something that substantially motivates me day to day.
I don't know that storge really describes what I'm getting at when I talk about romantic drive, but that word has been used in all sorts of contexts to mean so many different things, so I don't know.
I find it hard to meaningfully distinguish "companionate love" from "passionate love." I can understand the difference between infatuation (which often involves an impossible idealization) and a deeper intimacy based on truth, but I see a great overlap between the concept of eros and the more companionate romantic love you're describing as storge. In particular, I've been in relationships where the passion increases over time, rather than decreases -- and also where lots of things that are described as characteristic of infatuation (like "'Desire for "complete union,' permanency") also grow over time.
But infatuation is also fun! Yes, it's dangerous. Yes, it has led men and women off cliffs into the great dark beyond. But many great and valuable things begin with a little risk. When I fell in love with a woman for the first time, it was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and I've only ever been able to describe it in spiritual terms, both then and now.
Would you say that you've felt limerance before and believed on that basis that it's dangerous, or is your cynicism about eros based mostly on observing others who've experienced it?
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