Posted on 11/10/2004 3:52:01 PM PST by iheartusa
I'm the guy means well, but it sounds, well, hokey. Nothing short of hokey. For some reason, the whole thing makes me picture the author in pajamas, a covering bathrobe, slippers and a pipe. Something straight out of 50's sitcom.
No, but they don't go out to dinner any less. That is to say I want to know when this golden era of dating supposedly existed. As I've said in another thread, todays generation couldn't be any more promiscuous than mine, and I have it on good authority that the woodstock generation prior to mine wasn't exactly chaste. Then if we go back and read about the life and times of people like say Henry Miller, we have wonder if it was ever really any different.
I didn't realize it until you mentioned it, but I know a cannon engineer married to a domestic lawyer.
I just printed the article for our 16-1/2 yr. old daughter!
Hey, back when I was a teenage boy, I would do just about anything to get into a girl's panties, even, gasp!, talk to them.
Ping
Bump!
They don't change with age, from my experience.
You are exactly right in that today's youth does not date. In fact, that term has practically fallen out of the lexicon. The positive side of this is that in a way it fits very well with the first piece of advice from this article, to develop friendships first. Casual sex has always been a reality for some teenagers, but at least now there is a much stronger focus on friendship and developing a larger social circle. It seems to me that girls (or guys) who want to remain chaste actually have it easier now, in a way.
I was 16 when woodstock was held. I was also the product of 12 years of Catholic school and was subject to a bit more parental control than some, though many girls in my school had the same parental demands, so I didn't consider myself unusual.
There may not have been a golden age of dating, but I think that, up until recently, there was a golden age of being a teenager. For many years you could just hang out w/your friends, be involved in scouts and school activities and not be thought of as a nerd. You were just a teen having fun. Now you've got young kids worried about STDs and pregnancies, things that weren't even on my radar because my lifestyle didn't include the sexually active dating that is commonplace among high schoolers today.
I have a 27 yr old son. I think I gave him a lot of freedom, but I tried to emphasize that the sex stuff was secondary to his development as a human being and his selection of decent people (male and female) to be his friends.
But I coupled that with not being stupid - he didn't have a lot of unsupervised time as a teen; what the Church used to call 'near occaissions of sin.' I think that's an error that parents make - they assume kids have more maturity than they do and then they leave them alone where they're almost sure to get into trouble.
Dating advice *ping*
I think on the East and Left Coasts it probably went out of fashion in the middle to late 1960s. It hung on a bit longer in cultural backwaters like the Midwest. I actually went out on "dates" like that in high school (LONG ago; I was graduated in 1971) but it was definitely considered an "uncool" thing to do by the time I was out of high school.
People have always fooled around. General Pershing tried to keep his WW I troops out of the brothels of Paris (with varying success), and the song was born, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm / After they've seen Paree?"
Men in WW II had affairs with Italian and French women, but that didn't stop them from returning to the US postwar and building families in the suburbs.
The "beatniks" (1950s precursors to the hippies) had a similar emphasis on 'free love.'
The major difference until the late 1960s is that all these deviations from the ideal were kept "under the sheets," so to speak, and weren't bragged about in mixed or polite company. Birth control before the pill was not so convenient and required forethought. Abortion was largely unobtainable. That kept a bit of a damper on things.
But in short, "dating" among teenagers is very last-century, and exists only in the minds of conservative "courtship" advocates.
One Additional: Realize that when dating as a teenager you are probably NOT in a relationship with your future spouse.
Thanks for the Ping, I can use it. LOL
Bumping back up for Anoreth ...
But I have to say, this guy's not conservative enough for ME! (And yes, I expect to be whomped upside the head by reality eventually ...)
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