People are pretty split on the idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet: some love it, some gag at the thought. But as a general demographic, I think it’s safe to say that most American college males love the concept.
“Pay one low price and get to eat all you want? How on earth could this be considered anything but amazing?” says the dude. However, there are many people in society that would rather eat at a gas station on their birthday than pay good money to eat from what I sometimes call a “trough of poorly prepared, poorly warmed, bland tasting slop for the masses.”
No matter your view on the American buffet, if you choose to eat at one, the ritual is always the same: grab a dish, roam around a room full of food choices, select what you’d like from behind the glass sneeze guard, spoon it onto your plate, sit down at your table, eat as much of it as you want, and then go back and get more. Repeat as many times as your stomach can handle, and finish with a bowl of banana pudding or a chocolate/vanilla twisty cone from the self-serve ice cream machine.
Well, whether you love or hate standing at a public feeding trough, shoveling “nutrition” onto your platter, the idea of a buffet should remain solely in the culinary world, never creeping into the world of dating. And here’s what I mean…
There are people who treat dating as if they were roaming around an environment, selecting someone to go out with, consuming what they want from that person, throwing the relationship away, and quickly moving on to the next person. Or, they take a little bit of something from one person at the same time they are trying out another, without any real sense of maturity, relational health, communication, or commitment. They treat the opposite sex as something they casually select for their own personal satisfaction, and if they don’t like the taste, they quickly discard it in order to move on to someone else. With this kind of carelessness, people can get extremely hurt.
The “buffet approach” is not okay when it comes to dating. Those who characterize dating in a way that treats others like a side dish to be sampled and discarded, are not at all on the same page as me, or what I mean by the term dating. The world may be completely fine with relationship hopping and sampling multiple partners at once. I am not.
The buffet approach is the epitome of self-serving dating, and is therefore not okay when it comes to romantic interaction with the opposite sex.
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