I think I get what you mean.

I’m not going to touch on the term “serious relationship” because who and what defines a serious relationship. For life?

Well, here are two life lessons from humble old me who has yet to learn a lot but knows these as facts;

1. There is no ONE relationship for life if you want it, the relationship, and yourself to be healthy. All relationships should be serious for you to some extent coz human mental, emotional and physical communication are no joke. 

2. It’s no study, but spend enough time with older people in unhappy marriages or are divorced, and you’ll find 80% of the time it’s because they have an internal issue they never faced or fixed and used the relationship as a crutch to get by and feel better about themselves for a while, or got married for all the wrong reasons, which simply comes from the same place as having an issue you didn’t fix, only that in that latter case, a person don’t know what they want in life so they just go with all what the culture and tradition around them tell them. 

Both Black and White have to fix things within themselves before pursuing a more “serious” relationship with a significant other “for life”.