Could there please be more articles on the end of dating/traditional courtship? (That was sarcasm.) So far as I can tell, this ended before I was in university, and I didn’t graduate yesterday. Also, no blaming men, please. Why on earth would a man proffer dinner and roses when we appear to be satisfied with Kraft Dinner?
That may explain why “dates” among 20-somethings resemble college hookups, only without the dorms. Lindsay, a 25-year-old online marketing manager in Manhattan, recalled a recent non-date that had all the elegance of a keg stand (her last name is not used here to avoid professional embarrassment).
After an evening when she exchanged flirtatious glances with a bouncer at a Williamsburg nightclub, the bouncer invited her and her friends back to his apartment for whiskey and boxed macaroni and cheese. When she agreed, he gamely hoisted her over his shoulders, and, she recalled, “carried me home, my girlfriends and his bros in tow, where we danced around a tiny apartment to some MGMT and Ratatat remixes.”
She spent the night at the apartment, which kicked off a cycle of weekly hookups, invariably preceded by a Thursday night text message from him saying, ‘hey babe, what are you up to this weekend?” (It petered out after four months.)
“She spent the night at his apartment…” And did so for another four months. Et voila. The demise of the courtship, explained.
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Seraphic says
Well, indeed. He didn’t have to court her. He could literally pick her up and take her home to his cave where presumably they eventually had sexual intercourse.
At least he fed her first. And her friends and his friends were there for dinner, so it was like a little caveman wedding! Awwww….
Melissa says
So, from the article, I am to gather, this is the status quo trajectory of many-a-relationship: a series of more or less casual hookups followed by a slow, grinding death of the relationship. And yet Lindsay, who is apparently a professional woman, is so red-faced by the fact that she took part in such a relationship that she is unwilling to let her name stand in print.
Something doesn’t compute here. If this is what it means to be an emancipated 21st century woman, then should she not throw back her shoulders, hold her head high, and tell the rest of the world that she is living the life she chooses? And if she is NOT living the life she chooses, then maybe, just maybe, shouldn’t she be holding out for more?
And I just heard my grandmother talking.