Speaking out of turn

Once more in response to Dan in response to myself and Mikey, who was inspired by Dan in the first place. Still following?

So it is like an audition for a relationship? ... the idea that one can immediately recognise who they find attractive in the medium to long term is patently false anyways...

Yes, it's like an audition for a relationship. But you do not immediately need to recognize anything long-term: it's an audition for the *sexual* part of the relationship, which you seem to be placing no importance on at all. Some of the longest-running relationships *I* know of started with sex and then turned into something else later. As I said before, I'm sure the mix is roughly proportional to the general sexual habits of the single populace, and we are just picking out the examples we like.

How is a night spent getting to know someone new "wasted"? Getting to know someone, even if they turn out not to be the kind of person you want a relationship with, is a worthwhile experience -- you might learn something new, get a new perspective on an old situation, or simply recognize that their personality is less compatible with yours and more compatible with that of one of your friends; then you could introduce the two. Again, examples of friends ending up in relationships with people their friends pulled just once abound. And how is a night spent not interacting with your friends "wasted"? Sometimes I spend the night not interacting with my friends just because I *don't feel like it*, and I don't consider that wasted time. Running jokes and anecdotes are a dime a dozen, generated every time a group of friends gets together. They're nice, but they're not exactly rare and valuable, while good men remain proverbially hard to find.

I see my friends all the time; I find a guy I seriously want to go after much less often. Of course I'll go for the guy. But if I'm not hoping to get a second date out of it, then as Mikey said, it's just remote control masturbation. Sleeping with someone who seems nice, only to discover they're a psycho is just as pointless as spending a week going out "for coffee" with someone only to discover they are intellectually bankrupt. That's essentially my developing thesis here -- it's pointless, yes, but no more or less pointless than the other approach.