@plainoldme,
plainoldme wrote:
OK, so a formal, old-fashioned date was not always fun. A man who insisted on ordering my dinner for me always ended up on the outside track. And seeing a movie or a play with someone whose reaction to the entertainment was 180 degrees from mine often made both parties thoroughly miserable.
But . . .
there seems to be something lost in today's just hanging out. Kids today meet and mate without any ritual. There's no slow growth of a relationship, no baby steps to take.
How do you feel?
Well, there was no "dating ritual" when I was a young, or at least certainly not in my group.
We hung out a lot as groups, with everyone's friends being introduced all the time, so there was always lots of "new blood", got interested in each other, got to know each other and relationships developed naturally out of that.
I loved that.
NOW I date, because everyone's too busy to mix and mingle all the time. I hate it. I much preferred the hanging out and getting to know each other that way. Sometimes I meet a fella that way now (like a few weeks ago, but it didn't take off).
I don't think Australia ever had the dating ritual the same way as you USians did, anyway. It was always a lot more casual, and I don't recall the word "date" being used here before very recently. We asked people out.
