Living together

I remember my son (who had had girlfriends from about age 16 already) who was by now 28 but still hadn't lived   more than a week with any girlfriend yet saying to me something like what I would consider to be a "Playboy magazine" view of reality. And I said to him, "Living with a woman ongoing is not like anything you are going to read in Playboy magazine or anything like that. Once it goes beyond living separately to living together everything changes from what it once was to something completely different.

So, until you are burned in the fires of "actually living together" a month or more continuously it can be a very very rude awakening like it was for me. Within a few months of this talk my son and I had he got married for the first time at age 28 and later said to me, "Boy. Was I deluded as to what living with someone actually is like or what?" I just nodded because I first lived with my first wife (his mother) before we got married a year later a while before my son was born when I was only 25 (just turned 25 and got married to his mother for the first time when I was 26.

So, for me, the experience was having one girlfriend at a time for about 1 year or more each from ages 15 to 21. Then being devastated in a relationship that didn't work out and dating a whole bunch of women from ages 21 to 25 ongoing one at a time (25 or more) as a way to stay alive and not just kill myself until my son was born and then I didn't need anyone to tell me to stay alive because I had a reason to live on to raise my son to adulthood.

So, every person's experience is different. Also, it wouldn't be practical likely to date as many women as I did then for most people now. Only because I was dating mostly between 1963 (when I was 15) and 1973 (when I was 25) was it practical to date as many women as I did. The culture of being a California coastal Cosmic was very different than the world is now in the 1960s and early 1970s on all levels.

People now days a very lucky to have dated maybe 5 or 10 people in their whole lives. So, it has become more like it was in the 1940s and early 1950s maybe now since about 1980. I would say the main reasons for this is millions of people around the world dying of AIDS since 1980 and Herpes and other Venereal Diseases worldwide which were not as big a problem at all in the late 1960s and early 1970s yet especially for middle class and above people as they are now.