I'll be honest; I haven't dated since high school. In fact, the last time I was in something I'd consider a relationship, I was 16 and involved with an 18-year-old who was pregnant with the child of a friend of mine. It wasn't the most healthy of situations, I suppose, but it taught me quite a bit about people, pregnancy, the female body, life, and what I wanted from it. I suppose it qualifies as the most shaping event of my youth.
So, for the last 5.5 years, I've been a non-dater. Oh sure, I'd fool around with friends here and there, and I certainly took enough people to quiet dinners that I suppose I went on dates... I just never felt strongly enough about anyone to say, "we're dating." Many people seem surprised when I say this, because they consider the state of "Dating" to be fairly casual, and something everyone just *does.*
Lest you get the wrong idea, it isn't a lack of interest from other people. I mean, I'm not having to beat the women (or the men) off with a stick, and I haven't even had my first internet stalker yet, but there have been people, at a fairly steady rate of one a year or so, who were interested enough in me that had I desired a "real relationship," I probably would have had it. So, what I'm going to address below is why I didn't want one.
First, I think it's important to define what I mean when I say "dating." As I implied above, to me, this isn't the same thing as going on dates for people. I remember being confused by dating as a young(er) boy, because I would see one couple that seemed scared to touch each other in public, but I'd see a people who were "just friends" who'd quite cheerfully shove their tongues down each other's throat anywhere, anytime. This eventually led to my rather useless definition of dating:
dating - v. The state between two or more people wherein each member agrees they are dating every other member.
You may have noticed this is a circular definition; that's because, after years of study, I have concluded that the term dating has *no* universal meaing that I can extract. If you don't believe me, try a little experiment: answer this list of questions about dating, and then ask a few of your friends to do the same. Compare answers, and see if you manage to get more than, say, 50% of you to agree to any particular answer.
The funny thing is, many people will quite cheerfully go into some situation and ask someone else, "so, are we dating now," and neither person will think to ask the other what they mean by the term. Instead, we go merrily along with our own definitions and just assume that everyone shares our ideas on such things. (I think this tendency we have to assume everyone else defines concepts the same as us is a bigger problem that I'll rant on at a later date.) So, the end result is, the only thing I think it's fair to assume when somebody tosses the word dating out is that they and the datee both believe they are dating. If one of the people doesn't want to call it dating, I think it's fairer to agree with them than the one who claims they are.
Now I have a general definition, and it does me absolutely no good. So next I've got to figure out what dating means to me before I can hope to apply it. I approach the problem thusly: what can I say about someone I'm dating that I can't say about someone I'm not dating? In other words, what makes dating unique?