rowyn

Some of it depends on how you define "spending time". I know couples who've been pretty happy going out to dinner and watching a movie a few times a week, and do their own thing the rest of the time. And this works for them. Even though Lut and I are both gamers, we often don't play the same games so we spend a lot of time focused on different activities. I play stuff like PBEMs and Puzzle Pirates, and he plays FPS and RTS games. It works fine as long as both parties have that expectation. But it's nightmarish if they don't.

Though I think it does help that we're both gamers, because even when we're playing different games we have an appreciation for what the other person's spending all their time on. It doesn't get into a "I don't see what you see in those games" situation that I've seen with gamer/non-gamer couples, which always looks pretty uncomfortable to me.

Also, what's with this 'deciding to love' bit?

I don't get that either. The whole dating thing, I don't get. Pretty much all my relationships have been either "I am friends with this person and we're not romantically involved" or "I am in love with this person and I want a romantic relationship with him". I've never done the "I'm dating him to figure out if I like him enough to have a relationship" thing. I don't understand how that works. I've heard SO MUCH about it, I know countless media based on the assumption that dating is how relationships begin, but I don't grok it at all. I grok the difference between "loving" and "being in love". But not "dating". I don't get how some women can make lists of "what I want in a man" and then decide to dump a man because he only meets 5 out of 8 criteria. It's just ... alien.

I think it may be that I skip the "getting to know you by dating" stage and do a "getting to know you by being friends" stage instead. Which seems a whole lot less awkward to me than dating.