Let’s all wring our hands over what text-messaging, online dating, and kids today are doing to the supposed 1950s ideal of dating, says this weekend’s New York Times. Sorry, but we’re not buying it.
The article, titled “The End of Courtship,” posits that women are getting the short end of the stick, dating-wise, because guys aren’t taking them out to dinner on date one. Instead, gals are left with last-minute texts for group hangs “or whatever.”
Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.
“The new date is ‘hanging out,’ ” said Denise Hewett, 24, an associate television producer in Manhattan, who is currently developing a show about this frustrating new romantic landscape. As one male friend recently told her: “I don’t like to take girls out. I like to have them join in on what I’m doing — going to an event, a concert.”
And so the article goes, with eligible young woman after eligible young woman being not-so-subtly dissed by a “dark-eyed musician with artfully disheveled hair,” a “bouncer at a Williamsburg nightclub,” and a “branding coordinator.”
Though there might be more to this laissez-faire attitude than meets the eye. The economy plays a major role, offers one expert:
Income equality, or superiority, for women muddles the old, male-dominated dating structure.
“Maybe there’s still a sense of a man taking care of a woman, but our ideology is aligning with the reality of our finances,” [author Hannah] Rosin said. As a man, you might “convince yourself that dating is passé, a relic of a paternalistic era, because you can’t afford to take a woman to a restaurant.”
Overall, we don’t doubt that online dating, the near-extinction of the phone call, and instantaneous communication has changed the dating landscape, but we must say: Not all guys behave like this. There are still plenty of men who take women on so-called proper (and not necessarily expensive) first dates. If — and this is a big if — that is the kind of guy you, as a woman, want to date.
If you, as a woman, are more interested in dating someone sexy, not practical; someone exciting, not stable… If you are more keen on shaking things up rather than settling down, definitely keep going out with flaky bouncers, musicians, and media types who’d rather text than talk. They’ll give you something to write about, not so much something to have and to hold.
If you, as a woman, want someone who will pull out your chair, give you a corsage…whatever you personally refuse to settle on, then demand better treatment. Don’t go on a second date with a man if he gravely disappoints you on the first.
Keep on keepin’ on, good guys. We know you’re out there.
[NY Times]
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