Dating Article

The New Rules are: There are NO Rules

Ask most of your friends and they will tell you they can’t remember the last time they went on a date. What is a date anyway? It would take a presidential committee hearing for this generation to answer that question.

In more genteel days, a boy asked a girl out on a date to the movies, or dinner, maybe bowling or to a concert. He would ask her several days in advance in person or over the phone. The night of the date, the lucky young man rang the girl’s doorbell, met her father, and took her out on their date on the condition that he would bring her back at an agreed upon time. While alone on the date, the boy was presumably nice to the girl and paid for their expenses hoping to get a kiss at the end of the night.

Where did that concept come from, and where has it gone? We would need another committee hearing to figure these two out. Slowly but ever so surely, male-female relationships have plummeted from proper courtship to the convenient satisfaction of loneliness and desire.

The well known dating book, The Rules, stresses that you must not have sex before the fourth date, and that for every four times a man contacts you, he should only get one response. The woman should be chased and the man should not expect instant gratification. What have we gotten ourselves into here? Admit it. Most women have gone after more than a couple guys, maybe even at the same time. Maybe even this week? This is 2006, women do these things. They ask men out, pay, and get down and dirty. But how do you go from dating around to being a couple?

Modern relationships before during and after the college years generally consist of hooking up with the hottest person you are able to attract and hold conversation with. The shortest relationships are mere hours long. You go to a party with some friends, spend the whole time chatting with some stud, and end up quite tipsy and very topless in the back of a cab headed for his place.

Want to try a longer relationship, good luck. During young adult-hood, we are constantly dealt a new hand of potential mates. Usually, they come along through mutual friends and in the cliques we carve out for ourselves. People pair off eventually, but only when it’s time for last call.

The group date has all but replaced the real thing. Here, you are surrounded by friends, somewhat focused on the one you want to get to know more, but also engaged with everyone else. There is no pressure to impress that one special guy with funny stories or successful undertakings, and he isn’t worried about getting you home to daddy with a report of respectful and charming behavior. All you have to do now is throw back a few drinks, smile until your face hurts and make plenty of intense eye contact. Voila, Boy and Girl will leave together and spend the next four weeks playing obligatory games while deciding if they like each other enough to do something without the gang.

It’s hard to say when or how this happened, but take a look at your daily habits and you may see some indicators of this new dating age. Email, text-messaging and instant-messaging have changed the way we communicate. Drastically. This casual form of correspondence has turned formal dating into spur of the moment rendez-vous.