Diane Mapes - How to Date in a Post-Dating World

Table of Contents

Dating, according to Dr. Evelyn Millis Duvall, author of the 1958 advice book The Art of Dating, is one of the most exciting periods of your life. Suddenly, there are new horizons before you. Friendships flower, your personality looms... This is a time of great exhilaration, splendor, and discovery. To live it fully is to enjoy one of lifes most delightful experiences.

All of which raises a burning question: if dating is one of lifes most delightful experiences, why is it most people these days would rather eat glass?

Whats happened to the exhilaration? The splendor? The discovery? Hard to say exactly, but my guess is they were completely obliterated by the looming personality of your last Internet date. Or perhaps what you thought was a flowering friendship turned out to be chlamydia.

Lets face it, folks. Dating is no picnic these days. The bars are filled with misanthropes, the online sites with mullets, and your coupled-up friends dont help matters by setting you up with people simply because theyre breathing and bipedal (But youve got so much in common! Youre both single and youre both Homo sapiens!). Manners are MIA, expectations are DOA, and your love life, as a result, is totally SOL. Even if youre happy with your single status (and the popular media will be the first to tell you youre not), its tough going out there. Flirting has become a foreign language, affection a damaging weakness. Instead of slowly getting to know people over drinks and dinner, we conduct brutal husband and wife interviews, impatient to hear the right answers, dismissive of all the wrong. How do you feel about children? What kind of car do you drive? Would you ever consider breast augmentations? Are those hair plugs or what? Weve become shallow, weve become cranky, and weve systematically Elimidated true love from our lives before it can even raise its sheepish head.

Half of us are on some kind of crazed quest for the perfect soul mate, a phantom figure complete with 1,001 useful qualities (He slices, he dices, he puts up shelves and rubs your shoulders! Hes the Soul Mate 2006, now with improved communication skills!). Others seek respite in a handful of lovers, perpetually juggling three or four at a time like colorful beanbags named Sue or Steve or Sweetie Pie. And as luck would have it, were all swimming around in the exact same dating pool togetherwith no damn lifeguards to make sure we all play nice, which I suppose is where this book comes in.

Am I a dating expert? Not by a long shot (I could wax poetic on all the horrific dating mistakes Ive made over the years, but Ill spare you the gory details and just ask you to trust me on this). What I am instead is incredibly curious and about as nosy as they come. So when I was asked to do this book, I went looking to the experts for answers to that age-old question: How do we date, particularly in this post-dating world?

I turned to the people out there in the trenches, gleaning stories and advice from nearly two hundred singles, men and women, gay and straight, young and old, heartbroken and hopeful. Then I sought out the pros, picking the brains of two dozen specialists, from social historians to sexologists, dating coaches to fashion consultants, psychologists to speed-dating entrepreneurs, experts on everything from social etiquette to serial killers to style. And finally, just for good measure, I scoured the Internet dating sites, pored over scientific research, poked around singles events, read the most recent news reports, and hit the bookshelves in order to examine a hundred years worth of good, bad, and ugly dating advice, from The Spinster Book (1901) to The Hookup Handbook (2005).

I listened to the horror stories (really, your date threw up on you?), I asked the tough questions (why exactly is it again that men are supposed to pay for everything?), and I lugged home enough singles self-help to convince every bookstore clerk in Seattle that Im pathologically obsessed with finding a man.

The end result, you hold in your hands a grab bag of observations, advice, and historical tidbits on everything from good grooming to bungled breakups, social networks to naked speed dating.

How do we date in a world where a hundred years of conflicting customs, shifting social mores, and a consumer-crazed society have made it easier to get our own reality TV show than find someone we actually like? The same way we learn to swimby taking a deep breath and diving in.

Dating means different things to different people.

To Darryl, a 28-year-old project manager from Seattle, its a way to find the right person with whom Im completely compatible and willing to commit my life. For Kate, a 26-year-old single from San Francisco, its when two people go out and the man pays.

Its a little more complicated for Eric, a 27-year-old teacher from Iowa City. A date is a nebulous thing, he says. A date could be defined by the willingness of both members of the date to label the date a date. It could be a reconnaissance date, which is simply a matter of checking out whether this person is actually going to be a date, in which case the date is merely a preemptory event toward an actual date: Its a neo-date. Theres also the school of thought that says any scheduled appointment in which the situation is casual and not business-related is a date. I tend to go with the more direct belief that a date is a date if and only if it is labeled a date by one or both members of the date. Otherwise, its simply dinner or drinks with a friend.

No wonder were all having problemswe cant even come up with a simple definition without tying ourselves into some kind of Gordian word knot.

It gets even crazier when you consider the number of people who refuse to label dates as dates. They dont date, they hang out or hook up. To these people, dating seems to imply the presence of corsages, convertibles, and possibly even the scariest C-word of all, commitment, even if youre simply committing to the fact that youre on a date. I do my best to avoid dating, writes Greg, a fortysomething bookseller from Seattle. I prefer hanging out and getting to know women that way. Im probably just engaging in semantics or deluding myself.

Could be, Greg, but youre certainly not alone.

Like a career criminal, dating has gone by a number of different aliases over the yearsspooning, sparking, courting, calling, bundling, fussing, stepping out, pitching woo, getting it on, kicking it. And the code of conduct governing this odd and lovely ritual has been equally malleable. But no matter what you call it and no matter how you define it, most people would probably agree that dating is the process we all have to go through in order to get intimate with someonein either a romantic or a sexual sense.