Roamin' with Romagni

Happy Almost Friday!

The other day, my mother and I were having what my mother likes to call a nice “chat” (to me it felt mostly like a slew of questions aimed at my personal life) and the topic of dating came up. Usually I try to avoid this topic with my mother, as most of the time I have nothing new to talk about in that department (only because I’m so busy bringing you stories like this). However, after spending a bit of time actually answering my mother’s list of questions, I realized how different dating was “back in the day” versus today.

Now, most of the time I am extremely grateful for the amount of technology I have the privilege to use, but after listening to my mother explain her dating experiences, I started looking at things a bit differently. People in my age group (21 give or take a few years) hit the teenage years when the cell phone became an affordable piece of technology. I know it may be hard, but try and remember what things were like without the use of your precious Blackberry.

Since I was young enough to receive a cell phone by the time I was able to drive, I had to rely on what my mother told me was the social norm in the dating world. Scary I know, but this is what I got out of the conversation:

When a guy or girl would be out with his or her friends and see a person whom they were attracted to, they would actually approach that person and start up a conversation. If it worked, most of the time the guy would ask if he could call that girl, then proceed to write down her number. During the week, the girl would receive a phone call asking for a date – not the day before, the day of, but multiple days in advance. The two people would go out and things would either continue or stop from there.

I realize that that was not the exact situation for every person in my mother’s generation, but compared to the way things work now, in my opinion, it sounds a lot less complicated.

Here is a college dating scenario from the present day:

A single guy or girl will go out with their friends to some place like a house party or bar and spend most of the night TALKING about the people that catch their eye. In most cases, the fear of failure keeps a person from pursuing a conversation. Here is where the problem with technology comes in. If a guy (for the sake of situational familiarity) somehow gets the girl’s contact information, what does he do? Call to talk and get to know her? Call to ask her out on a date? No, the word “date” has almost completely been retired from the vocabulary of young people. Replaced with “hang out,” a guy would most likely find this girl on some sort of social media outlet like Facebook or Twitter to make his presence known. At the most, he will find an excuse to text message this girl about things that really tell him nothing about what she is like, besides maybe the fact that she “likes to party” or is “hanging out by the pool.” By the time these two get to “hang out,” they realize that they have nothing to talk about that exceeds 160 characters in a text or wasn’t found in their Facebook information. The problems just get worse from there.

What ever happened to reservations at a nice restaurant or a long walk on a beach? Call me square, but I think we could all take a lesson from our parents on dating.

After all, how do you think you got here?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 11:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
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