Come on now. Would you buy a car without giving it a test drive?
Ah, (what passes for) a thought on lifelong commitment from one of our libertine libertarians!
A person is not a machine, and test driving a car is a highly overrated diagnostic event.
Actually, I have. But it was a Toyota.:)
Cars are not expected to last a lifetime, in fact they get traded in every few years or so.
A man with a test drive attitude towards women demonstrates his inablility to view them as a person rather than as a utilitarian object to be replaced at whim.
This isn't about a car. It's about a spouse. And it's about committing to a lifetime with that person in marriage.
Half-arsing it by living together first is just dumb. It sets patterns and creates lowered expectations before the marriage. Now flame away, but I'm being judgemental on this one.
I just bought a new car and only drove it for about 5 minutes.
I certainly don't think that living with someone is enough to know what that person would really be like. As the article said, there is no real commitment in that type of relationship and no incentive to try to work through problems.
A car is a car - a marriage is a lifetime commitment.
Get a clue.
"Come on now. Would you buy a car without giving it a test drive?"
Sir, you equate a profoundly intimate personal relationship with driving a vehicle around the block? Sad. You very obviously consider women to be merely sex objects. Selfish attitudes like these are why shotgun weddings had to be invented and an argument for subsidizing welfare moms.
Perhaps that is all you know, maybe from growing up in a tragic situation yourself. Perhaps you'll grow beyond your current perspective. Perhaps you'll grow to realize how treating women with respect is what you were designed to do. And then you will be able to look a girl in the eye--and she will look UP to you as a man, not just a Clinton.
In Wild At Heart (a GREAT book) it refers to the importance of men being aggressive. Yet there is a context for it and it is not the conquest of females. Darwinism and Planned Parenthood might just have you believe it were so.
"I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD,
"plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future."
-- -- -- Jeremiah 29:11
What do two people find out when they shack up? That they are both fornicators. Is it better to marry a chaste person or a fornicator?
Next time go with the shoes analogy...
I have test driven cars, and I went for drives with my fiance. I did not, however, change the lube and oil of either before the relationship was made much more permanent.
People who think sex makes the marriage have no idea what marriage is. You better stick with your hand until you grow up.