Uncategorized February 13, 2017
Being in the dating scene nowadays has its perks and it’s well, downsides.
You’ve probably all heard the romantic stories of how your grandparents or parents got together. Reminiscing about the good old days when guys were still gentlemen and women still wore cute dresses is something that the older generation talks about with a deep sigh of regret. After that, you start wondering why that guy you’ve had that awkward make out sesh with still hasn’t texted back.
But were the older days really all that better? Let’s see what has changed throughout the years.
Instead of looking up the number on the contact list you got from school and calling the guy’s home phone (hoping his parents won’t pick up), you just add him on Facebook. Even easier, you swipe right. Online dating is definitely something that has changed the dating scene drastically over the last 10 years. Before, it was something you only found your recently divorced aunt on, but statistics show 20 percent of the relationship that begin nowadays start online.
Online dating has also increased chances of finding a date. A lot more dates. As Stephen Merchant says on Conan, “I would have been happier in medieval times … you just lived in a small village, you didn’t know there was another village, and just married somebody of a similar age who wasn’t dead yet.”
The Internet brings you to the attention of not only your cute neighbor, but also to the cute not-so-neighbor 500 miles away (the maximum radius you can set on Tinder). Meeting people from all over the world has suddenly become an option in the age of online chatting (without the cost of international calls and mail), which means dating people from all over the world as well.
According to a 2014 study, the average woman kissed 15 men and had two serious relationships (and heartbreaks) before settling down. Yeah, that number might have gone up in the last two years, but it’s still pretty recent.
Gender equality! Yes, a big thing that’s changed on dates is that the guy understands that you make your own money and therefore there is no need for him to pay for your drink. However, it is still frowned upon – if a guy doesn’t pay, it does give a bitter aftertaste to the date. Sometimes it even makes you question whether it was a date at all or just two people hanging out. Even though it’s a questionable case, it’s good to know guys realize you have your own money.
The age the average woman was married used to be between 20-23. Back in the ’40s, after men came back from WWII, the average age women married was only 20! Nowadays that age has gone up to 27 years old, which would make us old spinsters at just 25, according to our grandparents.
Besides, the average length of courtship before marriage is 42 months (that’s about three and a half years). So even if you combine everything, we’re still single (or at least ‘un-married’) a lot longer than our grandparents were. Dating therefore has become an almost normal part of our younger lives, where we all go through a couple of really bad eggs and (hopefully) a few good ones.
It’s hard to say whether it’s a myth or not we have more sex or if it happens sooner. Especially since before the 1940s dating was a very regular thing. According to Burzumato, dating was even used to become more desirable for other men – “She must be attractive if she can rate all that attention.”
Since there was a big taboo on having sex (even though there is definitely a correlation between marriages and the time children are born) historians aren’t very clear about how much people did it back in the day. Speaking up about it though has definitely changed. As soon as Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda showed the world how excessive girls exchange their intimate stories, people realized it was okay to have sex and talk about it.
The location of the date has only slightly changed. Where drive-in movies were a popular first date for your grandparents, just going out for a drink is more common nowadays. The movies have become something more common for a second date, where you can discuss the movie afterwards (since you’ve done all the ‘where did you grew up’-questions on the first date).
But hey, nostalgic for the days when you would get a milkshake with a boy back in the day? Well guess what, milkshakes still exist and you can still do that, but now we have smartphones that can find the city’s best milkshake.
Do you think dating is better nowadays? Or would you rather go back in time? Tweet us at @entity_mag
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