Different ways of pursuing relationships

I've been thinking and talking to some people, including Dancing Physicist and the ex-info desk guy (he quit), about romantic relationships. (Actually, that's silly to specify. Those are the only two local people I talk to about anything that isn't academic.) I've noticed there are two fundamentally divergent ways people think about them. Some people go "relationship first." They think about having a relationship, and if they decide they want one, then they think about what kind of person they want to be with - what kind of person fits into the relationship they want. Others, like me, go "person first." I meet people and get to know them, and if I have an attraction/connection to someone that makes me want to be with them, then I think about what a relationship with that person might be like and if I want that.

I said these are fundamentally divergent views, but I acknowledge that I haven't always behaved this way. I dated people in 7th, 8th, even 9th grade that I wasn't especially interested in, but I wanted to be dating people (well, "dating" for whatever it's worth in middle school). I attribute this to just the impatience of that age. At that point in life, it was an experience I needed to get under my belt. Now, it's something I can engage or not at my leisure, for whatever reasons I choose. So, I think that my attitude now is who I really am. Relationships (of whatever variety) arise out of the interactions between people, so it doesn't make sense for me think about a relationship as if it were an object that can be considered separately from a specific person. To use a nerdy chemistry metaphor, it's like talking about p orbitals in a hydrogen atom - you can do it theoretically, but the orbital doesn't actually exist until it has an electron to define it.