I'd rather have no one than hold onto the wrong one. Or make someone I love any less happy than they could possibly be. They need their perfect person to, if I'm not it, so be it. Parly because of this, I do not expect to find someone, but hope springs eternal.
For the curiously insane.
First I do not really believe in morals as such (see my philosophy). What is important in a relationship is not what someone else tells you you "should" do, it's about what makes you happy. The ONLY goal and therefore the entire definition of "right" and "wrong" is between you and your partner. What counts as cheating? Well, what does your partner think? Is an open relationship good or bad? Well how do you and your partner deal with it emotionally? How does it affect your relationship? That's ALL that matters. That being said I think there are some common cause and effect relationships that are important to understand.
There is no one answer, obviously. If there was there wouldn't be thousands of songs written on the topic (okay, maybe there would be, but you get my point). I think it's quite different for every person. Think of it this way, we have no idea if we all see green the same way. Chances are that we don't. What we do know is that there are things that most of us can look at and call green, because someone else told us things that look like that are green. Love is similar, except there's nothing concrete to look at. It's a vague and impossible to describe set of feelings that are probably different for every person. So, the question isn't really what is love, the question is what is love to me.
There are multiple types of love (for me at least), and I feel it's important to differentiate. The basis of what I define as love is the desire to do anything you can towards someone else's happiness. One can love their fellow man in this sense, that is, one can do everything in their power to make everyone around them as happy as possible. As it turns out I don't think this turns out as a very happy life, but that's neither here nor there. This idea of wanting to help someone, being willing to do almost anything for them is what I would call love.
Romantic love for me is this result when begat of a mix of emotional and physical attraction. Basically I've found that if I take a really interesting person who I really like to be around and talk too, and who I also find physically attractive, and stir in a little bit of magic, I get potential for romantic love. At this point it is up to me to open the door and let it out, and let it flourish. As I let it out it grows stronger, if I stifle it, it stays idle. I do not actually know yet whether it goes away, but it stays at, or retreats back to, it's base state of simple potential. To keep myself sane I keep that door shut until there are sufficient clues that it might go somewhere. Otherwise I'd just be an emotional wreck all of the time.
So, for me it's a simple formula, or at least it seems to have been to date.
There is really one important point here to be made. Physical closeness, for myself and I believe the bulk of the population, breeds emotional closeness. Being with someone is about trust and all that mumbo jumbo, but it's also about hormones. We are physical beings. Our hormones drive our emotions, and there are few such extremely hormonal experiences as sex (be it sexual intercourse or otherwise). We are biologically designed to be become emotionally attached to people we have sex with.
A secondary point is that there is only so much emotion a person can stand. Everyone is different of course, but everyone has their limit. I feel that my emotional limit, time, and effort is simply too low to support multiple relationships at maximum capacity. In other words, I feel that my relationship with one or more likely both people would suffer from polyamory. I suspect that this is true of more people than are willing to accept it. There is little doubt in my mind that there are people who can handle open relationships and have as fullfulling (or more even) of relationships as they could in monogamy. I suspect though that these people are far more rare than those who espouse the virtues of open relationships seem to feel, and have noticed a tendency for such relationships to dissolve due to a lack of overall commitment, energy, time, and emotional connection.
Well... sex is awesome, lets be honest. And the better you get at it the more awesome it is (this is true for me so far, and seems to be true for everyone else I've talked too). So yeah, you could "save yourself for your wedding night" so you can explore with your new wife and have it be a fun but overall confusing and possibly quite painful experience (especially for the woman). On the other hand you could go about having reasonably safe sex with people you fall in love with, and learn the ropes (*ahem*, so to speak) before hand.
An issue that I've heard raised before, which I feel is actually quite valid, is what if you marry someone, and then discover that you just don't work together sexually? Well, that kinda sucks doesn't it? I mean, you want to have great sex SOMEtime in your life, and optimally it should be with your wife. It seems like you should figure out if it'll work out beforehand, rather than diving into a supposedly unbreakable bond without ever checking - it's just due diligence.
The limiting factor on running around having sex with everyone, for me at least, is the one mentioned earlier. Basically, I think it has a big affect on your relationship with a given person, and due to a limited amount of attachment to go around, has a pretty big affect on your emotions towards other people to (particularly anyone ELSE you are having sex with).
These points are more specific to my beliefs and less of a general discussion of abstract ideas
I refuse to ever leave myself open to the situation where I'm dating person A seriously, and person B asks me out such that I would want to dump A for B. I refuse to ever be in a situation where it's possible (not necessarily even feasible) for that to occur. By which I mean person B could be anyone, old lovers, movie stars, whatever. The unfortunate disadvantage is that I'm slow to get involved with someone, and have rather high standards. The bonus though is that whoever I'm dating never has to worry whether I like them or will leave them... I won't.
This seems like a functionally impossible constraint, but interestingly enough it doesn't seem to be. Love works in interesting ways. You get to know someone better, you get more attached, and you see them differently. When I was dating my last girlfriend I honestly felt that she was the most beautiful person on earth, and saw no counterexample. And it's truth, to me she was. I believe (or at least sincerely hope) that this can happen again. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say. This is 100% truth. There is no absolute beauty. As my eye changes I hope I can see someone else to be that beautiful. And the eye changing isn't independent of other variables of course, these things grow and change due to specific influences, like a good relationship. The basis has to be there though some physical attraction and such, or it doesn't seem to happen.There is only one metric of beauty. And that is whether you are beautiful to the one you love.
So I look for someone whom I think can do that too me. Someone whom I think I can fall in love with. Someone I will (possibly with time) see as the most beautiful, amazing person ever. I this such people rarely see themselves as such.
If someone is interested in someone else they should say so. I tell someone I like them if I do, and that's it. I don't want to hassle anyone, or "stalk" them or anything like that. I don't really believe in "wooing" someone. It seems silly to pretend your not interested if you are (and vice-versa), and if your not I respect that and don't want to bother you. It seems that being straightforward saves everyone a lot of pain. So if I state or imply interest in you, that's all that's coming. If you don't reciprocate that means "no" and I will probably never repeat the statement, much less turn it into a question. Even if I cry at night wishing I could hold you. Romance is wonderful, and I think it's really cool. To show someone your interest in a neat and original way, but one has to be careful that by doing so they aren't putting too much pressure on the asked. The last thing everyone needs is someone saying yes when they don't mean it. I wouldn't want to put someone in that spot before knowing it would be welcome.
So, if you are interested ask or say so bluntly enough that there can be no confusion (that's probably blunter than you'd expect). I'll try and do the same. But when someone says "no" you leave it be, and by no I mean that no means no, maybe means no, and anything but a claer "I'm interested" means no - please don't be silent. This is what I assume, and the rules I play by.
Same as getting together, I want someone to tell me if they want to leave me, and will do the same myself. There are two critical reasons for this. The first is purely selfish, if I know that someone will only be with me because they want me, then I never have to question. I can put full trust in them. I want to give my partner the same piece of mind, so I always promise to tell them the minute I have second thoughts. The second reason is that bitterness breeds in waiting. I've seen it happen to friends who waited for "a more convenient time", but then you wind up hating each other. If your partner is at all empathic they'll notice something is weird (if not why the heck were you with them?), and all you get is a huge amount of time with everyone stressed and worried and pretending. That just sucks.
I don't understand why anyone would lie, or even lie by omission to an SO. That doesn't mean that you have to share everything, saying "I don't want to tell you that" is not lying. But if one feels that it's important for their partner to know something, not telling them doesn't help. I am generally of the "no lying" camp overall, but even more so in a relationship. If it's just a fling, then there's no stress, and if they flip out over something you just move on. If your hoping this will lead to a life-long relationship, do you really want that with someone you can't talk too about things? Someone you have to lie to? And if you lie, you have to worry that maybe they are lying. The flip side of lying is worry, the flip side of telling the truth is trust. I'd rather have the second relationship.
Well, honestly I've only had one serious relationship, and it was pretty amazing I have to say, but I can't claim to know that much about this topic. I have watched other couples though quite a bit, and I think a few things hold true.
In that relationship I dated a girl who is honestly I feel my equal if not my better. She's probably about as intelligent as I am, though in a fairly different manner, amazingly competent and good at making things, and of significantly better physique and physical ability. In general I feel I was more in love with her, more attached to her than the reverse (I.E. I was totally head over heals). I felt, especially in the beginning, like physical contact and the like were her prerogative, especially given normal male/female gender roles I didn't want to overstep. I believe now that I took this too far actually, but it's hard to know and it so much depends on the person. My big failing in that relationship was being too jumpy about vague statements that seemed to imply she was breaking up with me.
In any case the big difference I noticed between us and many other couples is that we talked. We always talked, about anything and everything. In the end we broke up largely due to communication issues, after 3.5 years. I told her everything, and I believe she did the same. Our problems largely stemmed from things that she was not aware of, primarily that she was falling out of love with me. These things happen, no need for guilt or anything, it was magic while it lasted (there's a great song by James Tayler on the the topic). Some important qualities of this relationship though
All of these I see as good things. I'd rather we hadn't had quite such long spells of not seeing each other at some points, and I think that led to less attachment than I would've liked, but overall I think it's a good sign that you can be away for a while and it's fine. It's important that people be able to stand on their own two feet, and deal with life on their own. To me a relationship is an addition. It may be the single most important part of life, but that doesn't mean you will die, or more importantly that you can't function, without it.
So, if one person just wants the other too be happy, and vice-versa you have an interesting recursive problem, with really no base case. If you are both happy, then you get an upward spiral of happiness, and it's amazing. If you are sad you get a downward spiral of depression. I'm generally a happy person, and I tend to like to hang out with (as well as date) happy people, so I've found this is generally a very positive thing. The trick is, at some point, you do each have to want things besides just things for the other person, otherwise theirs nothing to give your partner, nothing you can do for them. I've gotten lost in this before and missed that point. If it gives your partner pleasure to give you something, you have to want something for them to give, to make them happy. Preferably you are both in this situation and you can both give each other things you want, and in so doing simultaneously be giving the fact that they can give... etc. Wonderfully recursive isn't it? These external desires though supply a base-case in some sense, a grounding, somewhere to start from to build an upwards spiral.