Never date in your scene
That’s right. If you’re in a band, don’t date someone in another band. Or a bartender at a music venue. Or a local music reviewer. If you’re a competitive M:TG player, don’t date another competitive M:TG player. Here’s why:
1. It’s easy to misinterpret common interests with interest in you. This goes double for people who aren’t experienced daters. When some cutie from math class is always looking for an opportunity to run into you outside of class, said cutie may like you. When some cutie from your game night wants a ride to a convention, they probably just want to go to a con.
2. “Common interests” don’t count as much as you think they do. Folks sometimes melt like butter when they discover a potential romantic interest loves the same obscure piece of media as they do. Loving the same Commodore 64 emulator game is a great sign that you should be playing games together. It’s not a sign that you have similar housekeeping styles or that you have the same opinion on if and when to have kids. This isn’t to say that you can’t have overlapping interests, just that sharing some pop-culture totems is widely over-interpreted.
3. The narcissism of small differences. Tumblr is full of otherwise similar people waging pitched battles over the 0.5% of stuff they disagree about. Sharing a scene doesn’t reduce disagreement, it just creates opportunities to be petty.
4. The best (and worst) scenes are hives of gossip. Wouldn’t it be nice to break up with someone without having to worry about your name getting dragged through the mud in the one place you go to blow off steam?
5. You might want a position of authority. Even if you don’t aspire for leadership now, consider that your mind may change. It’s far easier to win the respect and trust required to reach a position of responsibility if people aren’t gossiping about who you asked out last weekend. The best leaders are focused on the mission and don’t get swamped by personal BS. In addition, you probably don’t want people assuming your leadership decisions are done on behalf of a SO.
6. People will respect you more. If you don’t date in the scene, you can’t reek of desperation in the scene. If you don’t ask anyone out in the scene, you’ll never get shot down in front of the scene.
7. No jealousy. Scenes are often collaborative efforts in which people volunteer time, money and effort to create a shared experience. Jealousy can stress or even destroy those voluntary bonds. If you don’t date in the scene, you can’t get the date someone else in the scene wanted.
8. It’s not healthy to live your life in one scene anyway. I usually enjoy meeting my SO’s friends and dipping my toes into their world. If I don’t, that tells me something I need to know.
9. Good practice. It’s probably at least a little but healthy to find a way to deal with your crushes that doesn’t involve hiding from them.
10. One of these days, someone will break your heart. You might want to spend time doing something you like without worrying about avoiding that someone.
Ah geez.
What I want to say here is something like: This is not only bad advice in the general case, it is staggeringly bad advice for your audience in particular. You are pushing people straight towards almost-certain failure modes – and away from the likeliest sources of fulfillment – through an argument whose justification amounts to “something might theoretically go very wrong someday and better safe than sorry.”
But in fact, deep breath, that’s unfair. Most of these listed bullet points are, in the direct sense, true. Some of them are even importantly true. (#2 in particular; even if you’re a true Neon Genesis Evangelion fanatic, “we both love NGE” does not a soul-bond make.) If the advice here is interpreted wisely – and the terms, especially “scene,” are correctly defined – there is value to be gained from it.
…of course, anyone who needs this advice is unlikely to be in a position to interpret it wisely.
There’s a long, sloggy argument to be had here about exactly how much each of these ideas applies and in what circumstances, about how big the risks are, about the nature of the flipside factors that aren’t being discussed. Right now I confess that I don’t wanna. So, instead, I’ll just say the big thing at the middle of it all:
People are not fungible. If you want to be in a happy relationship for the long haul, It is important to find a partner who is genuinely compatible with you. If you are weird, most potential partners are not compatible with you, and you need to go seek out the dwelling-places of the ones who are. This is more important than pretty much anything else.
Circumstances matter, sometimes a lot, but trying to make things work with a good person under bad circumstances is infinitely better than trying to make things work with a bad person under good circumstances.
I can say: I have been part of the same reasonably-tight-knit, weird-interest-laden social group for my entire adult life. I have, in fact, seen that group dealt grievous and hideous wounds by people’s stupid romantic drama; it’s not as though we’ve just been charmed and lucky. Nonetheless I have no hesitation asserting that the relationships that form between group members have been overall really very excellent for everyone involved, often they’ve turned into long-lasting marriages etc., and within-group partnerships have generally worked out much better (even when they dissolve) than have people’s attempts to find partners elsewhere. For all the obvious reasons that you’d expect.
I can also say: school and online dating are terrible plans, so much worse than anything under discussion in the OP. People really really really are not fungible.