It 100% is a bad thing, it’s called shitting where you eat. You have to be extremely careful about doing it personally, and as an organization you don’t want to encourage people to blindly do it. Sure it’s nice to play match maker and it’s nice to have a partner ideologically committed and working with you in the same way, but many orgs socialist and not have experienced turbulence in the execution of their mission simply from relationship drama from their own members.
If you have a partner who is not in full agreement with you politically, it is going to limit your potential. If they are in full agreement but don’t join the party, they are wasting their potential. If they do join the party, then there is functionally the same situation if you’d gotten together through the party: the organization ends up dealing with any fallout from relational failure.
There’s no way around this. Relationship drama exists everywhere and defaulting to the atomized individual approach to dating is not going to solve this.
For most of human existence, people have done lots of mingling within small pools, whether by locality of residence, occupation, religion, or special interest. The model of “meet someone at a bar or on a dating site/app” is not qualitatively better than the traditional ways.
I’m not saying don’t date comrades in orgs when it organically happens, it’s life, it happens. I’m saying the org shouldn’t promote fraternization for its own health, and members shouldn’t treat the org as their dating pool.
Having the function of people pairing up in an org or movement is not a bad thing, and it’s certainly better to recognize it than to deny it.
It 100% is a bad thing, it’s called shitting where you eat. You have to be extremely careful about doing it personally, and as an organization you don’t want to encourage people to blindly do it. Sure it’s nice to play match maker and it’s nice to have a partner ideologically committed and working with you in the same way, but many orgs socialist and not have experienced turbulence in the execution of their mission simply from relationship drama from their own members.
If you have a partner who is not in full agreement with you politically, it is going to limit your potential. If they are in full agreement but don’t join the party, they are wasting their potential. If they do join the party, then there is functionally the same situation if you’d gotten together through the party: the organization ends up dealing with any fallout from relational failure.
There’s no way around this. Relationship drama exists everywhere and defaulting to the atomized individual approach to dating is not going to solve this.
For most of human existence, people have done lots of mingling within small pools, whether by locality of residence, occupation, religion, or special interest. The model of “meet someone at a bar or on a dating site/app” is not qualitatively better than the traditional ways.
I’m not saying don’t date comrades in orgs when it organically happens, it’s life, it happens. I’m saying the org shouldn’t promote fraternization for its own health, and members shouldn’t treat the org as their dating pool.