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The Modern Dating Scene
Welcome To The Jungle
"The sexual revolution
has hit the Western world like a storm
and yet people are more unhappy
in sexual relationships
than ever before."
- Lee Lozowick
Article assembled by LiveReal
Agents Courtney
, Ethan,
Jen, and
Ben
Talk about it
info@livereal.com
Dating nowadays can
be pretty tough.- not just tough, but confusing. Confusing
in ways that older generations probably don't understand.
And not just confusing, but hard to navigate, because
it's really pretty hard to find good maps to steer around in the
dating minefield.
So, having made more than a few mistakes, having learned
some lessons the hard way, and hoping that we can possibly help
some folks navigate the scene with a little less suffering than
we did . . .
A handful of LiveReal
Agents have decided to embark on a quest for truth, freedom,
justice, caffeine, and those rare moments when you actually seem
to be on the same page with another person . . .
- and have emerged with a rough map of the modern
dating scene . . .
". . . Finding our way
through the complexities of intimacy today
is like being lost
in the wilderness
without a map or compass . . ."
"Dating":
Boy meets girl, girl meets boy.
Boy and girl get to know each other.
Boy and girl fall in love.
Boy and girl get married.
Boy and girl live happily ever after.
It's as simple as that . . . right?
Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahahahaahahaaaa . . .
"Two people seeking to fashion
a life together today
face a unique set of challenges and difficulties.
Never before have couples had so little help or guidance
from elders, society, or religion.
Most of the old social and economic rationales for marriage
as a life-long relationship have broken down.
Even the old incentives for having children -
to carry on the family name or trade,
or to contribute to family work, providing an economic asset -
are mostly gone.
For the first time in history,
the relations between men and women
lack clear guidelines, supportive family networks,
a religious context, and a compelling social meaning."
- John Welwood
Your trusty LiveReal
Agents, in our quest for truth, meaning, virtue . . . umm,
and other stuff like that - in the modern world . . . are no strangers
to the modern dating scene.
Like we all probably know, searching for that
right guy or girl in the real world is often, at times, both blissful
and brutal.
Especially when we're going on these things
called "dates" - which are often basically job interviews
about your personal life.
So why do we put ourselves through this?
It's obvious, really - sex
and love . . . and "sex,"
and "love".
When we really
dig into it, we know that we're not really searching for
just any ordinary guy or girl, or even just for marriage.
Really, deep down . . . we're searching for "IT"
- call it "love," "intimacy,"
a little sane companionship, or just that hottie with the buns that
caught our eye for the moment.
But then, all too often, you're searching for
love . . .
and you just get sex . . .
or you're searching for sex
. . .
and you just get screwed . . .
So what's going on?
Your brave and cuddly LiveReal Agents,
working to figure it out,,
are on the case . . .
"For singles today, the spectrum of experience
is broad,
but confusion and despair
about finding lasting love
run deep."
- Harville Hendrix
The Tale
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago in
a land far, far away, there lived a beautiful princess, the most
beautiful princess in all the land.
But, she was lonely. And she longed, deep
in her heart, for that . . . someone . . .
Meanwhile, a young prince came to the land
from far away. He saw the princess and instantly fell in love. He
proved himself worthy, and she fell in love with him too.
They married and lived happily ever after.
The End.
The Tale, Year 2006
Once upon a time, a long, long . . . well,
actually, year 2002 . . . there lived a beautiful princess, the
most beautiful princess in the whole metropolitan area.
She was alone and longed for someone . .
. but well, she was pretty busy with her job most of the time anyway,
because she had her career to focus on and all.
A Noble Prince came into the land from far
away, saw the beautiful Princess, and asked her out for coffee.
She refused, because she had read somewhere in a book that she wasn't
supposed to seem too available. So, the Prince got drunk and hit
on some of the other fair maidens in the land. The Princess found
out about it and became very angry. She then asked the Prince out,
and he happily agreed. They went out for coffee and slept together.
As months and years went by, they drank much
more coffee and slept together many more times. The Princess grew
to think she loved him . . . although
she wasn't sure she was in love with him (she had heard that line
in a movie or somewhere). She sometimes secretly thought him a little
boring and unromantic, and wondered if he was maybe holding her
back from actualizing her potential or something like that . . .
or wondered if maybe he wasn't as good in bed as many of the other
Princes she had been with or who kept hitting on her. At any rate,
she continually asked herself if this was really the One Prince
she was truly supposed to spend her life with. And he thought all
the same things about her.
So they moved in together, but eventually
felt they had somehow lost the flame of passion or something. They
went to many weekend seminars, read some bad self-help books, saw
many therapists, and tried many different things to make their relationship
more exciting, intimate, spicy, fulfilling and so on. They broke
up several times and eventually decided to get married. They got
divorced soon after, twice, spent most of their money on lawyers,
and in time, grew old and bitter.
The End.
". . . the most interpersonally
alienation generation in history . . ."
- Shelby Steele, The Hoover Institution
Cut the Bull: What is "Dating"?
OK, here it is,
as plain as we know how to say it.
The best way we know of getting this idea
across is to talk about an old experiment from sociobiology. Here
is how the exercise runs:
Take twenty men and twenty women.
Put them all in a room.
Assign each person a number from 1 to 20 . . . BUT . . .
no person knows what number they themselves get.
(Like the game "Indian poker" where everyone raises a
card at once and puts it on their forehead without looking at it
. . . each person can see everyone else's number, but has no idea
about their own (hmmm . . . perhaps a strangely accurate metaphor
for the human condition? Something about a splinter and a beam?
- but we digress.))
Each participant is given a simple instruction:
Pair up with the best number you can find.
"1" is the most desirable, "2" was excellent
. . . and "20", well, is at the bottom of the barrel.
And you are given only five minutes to do it.
The way this "experiment" inevitably,
predictably, heart-breakingly plays out . . . is a pattern essentially
similar to what happens at every high school, college, and meat-market
dance club all across the country . . . only much faster, a little
more honestly, a little more ruthlessly, and without all the drunkenness
and blaring loud music:
The folks with the highest ranking numbers
(the ones, twos, three) immediately start getting offers - lots
of offers. As they become centers of attention, they quickly become
choosy, realizing that they must possess a valuable number . . .
and understand that they should hold out for similar value. The
folks with the low-ranking numbers are left alone - even actively
avoided - and after running from person to person with no success,
quickly get the point. After being shunned by the fives and sixes
of the world, they learn to give up on the glamour crowd, lower
their expectations, and go for double-digits.
And as time runs down, the pairing-off transpires
in earnest. No one wants to get caught alone, and better to take
even a lowly 18 or 19 than end up with nothing.
(although - for precisely these reasons -
more and more folks nowadays seem to be saying "screw it. I'm
not playing," and decide they'd rather end up with nothing
than with a 19. Or a 12. Or even a 6 . . . )
At the final bell . . . somehow, people always
manage to connect with remarkable success, landing within one or
two positions of their own rank.
The point being, of course, that humans .
. . even while asserting poetic profundities about "love"
and "God's will"
and "what's meant to be" and other such lofty matters
. . . matchmake and mate in a similar manner. We judge each other,
coldly and with precise calculation to a very exacting degree, imbue
others with status through our behavior toward them, and define
ourselves and our value according to feedback we're given.
This, in essence, seems to be the project
that many of us spend the
first quarter of our lives in.
- much gratitute to Terry
Rossio for bringing this experiment to our attention
- and for another breakdown along these same
lines,
visit "The Modern Dating Game"
- complete with the rules - here.
So, now that we have the foundation established,
why don't we take a look at some of the "experts" . .
.
Modern Thinkers on Modern Relationships
- "'We are really seeing a change in the way
people are viewing relationships,' says Linda Waite, a University
of Chicago sociologist and researcher." (USA Today, May 5th, 2001).
I'm just looking for . . . a real man
. . . hmmmm . . .
- ". . . we know more about the courtship and
mating rituals of virtually every form of wildlife other than
young men and women . . ." (Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook,
"Girl Meets Boy", August 3rd, 2001)
- "Inherited cultural forms are under siege - not only marriage
but also the rituals of courtship that once led to it. A
certain taken-for-grantedness has disappeared . . . In
the modern age, when ties of God, clan, nation or family have
weakened, how much more difficult is marriage?" (Wall Street Journal
Book Review, July, 2001)
- "The wreckage of relationships that these patients
strew around my office has led me to wonder whether as a society
we might be witnessing a general deterioration
of erotic life in America . . . The couples I see are mostly successful,
educated, middle-class people, accomplished in their professional
lives, surrounded by nourishing friendships, absorbed in enjoyable
recreational activities. In their marriages and other couplings,
however, they are among the casualties of a widening cultural
crisis. . . . The phenomenon that I describe as 'intimate
terrorism' is the frequent outcome when two adults try
to make a life together equipped with little more than a vision
of intimacy
suitable for adolescent first love. Romantic love is under siege,
both from within marriage and from outside it, but neither have
we yet come up with a new ideal to replace it." (Michael Vincent
Miller, Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love In An Age of Disillusion,
1995)
- ". . . A quarter of adults under the age of forty-four are children
of divorce . . . Forty percent of the men and women in this divorce
study have never married." Like all massive social change,
what's happening is affecting us in ways that we have yet to understand."
- "Having spent the last thirty years of my life traveling here
and abroad talking to professional, legal, and mental health groups
plus working with thousands of parents and children in divorced
families, it's clear that we've created a new kind of
society never before seen in human culture." (Judith
Wallerstein, The Unexpected Legacy Of Divorce, 2000)
- " . . . the injury to family life in America over the past 30
years (from high divorce and illegitimacy rates, a sweeping sexual
revolution, dual-career households, etc) may have given us the
most interpersonally alienated generation in our history."
(Shelby Steele, research fellow, The Hoover Institution, 2001)
- "Children in postdivorce families do not, on
the whole, look happier, healthier, or more well adjusted even
if one or both parents are happier. National studies show that
children from divorced and remarried families are more aggressive
toward their parents and teachers. They experience more depression,
have more learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems
with peers than children from intact families. Children from divorced
and remarried families are two to three times more likely to be
referred for psychological help at school than their peers from
intact families. More of them end up in mental health clinics
and hospital settings. There is earlier sexual activity, more
children born out of wedlock, less marriage, and more divorce.
Numerous studies show that adult children of divorce have more
psychological problems than those raised in intact marriages.
. . We embarked on a gigantic social experiment without any idea
about how the next generation would be affected." (Judith Wallerstein,
Lewis, Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy Of Divorce, 2000).
- "The seemingly antiquated concept of courtship, the
wooing and winning of a partner according to an accepted set of
rules that lead to marriage, is being poked, prodded and dusted
off. Researchers want to know if there is any mileage left in
the notion . . . and others in the dating trenches are longing
for help. There are no rules to follow anymore about just 'dating,'
much less some type of formal courtship, and many are confused."
("Courtship Flirts With a Comeback," USA
Today, Sept 26th, 2000)
- "Pornography is a $13 billion dollar a
year industry" (Laurie Hall, 1996)
- "For possibly the first time in history, young women
are left to make up the rules for themselves without
older adult guidance. Parents, college administrators and health
professionals have withdrawn from this role . . . While older
adults are 'willing to pass on information in the interest of
protecting young people's physical health, [they] are largely
and curiously silent when in comes to the deeper questions of
love, commitment, and marriage.'" (Wall Street Journal Review
& Outlook, "Girl Meets Boy", August 3rd, 2001)
- "The social fabric of our country is unraveling before our very
eyes, and the disintegration is directly traceable to the crisis
in the family, specifically to the quality of marriages - the
nest from which children come. Underlying the crisis is a critical
overlooked fact: the long-stagnant institution of marriage
has undergone a revolution in the last century. But our minds
and hearts have not kept up with this change. Because
we have not reoriented ourselves to the revised agenda of marriage,
we're making a mess of it." (Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. Keeping the
Love You Find, 1992)
". . . the result is
a gender confusion never experienced at such a wide level
in the history of the world."
- John Eldredge
Adults are Clueless
Many adults, typically immersed in their own
problems, often haven't the foggiest notion of what it is actually
like to be a young person out in the jungle today. (Note: this also
includes marital
therapists, psychologists, and various authors of self-help
books)
They might possibly get at least a little more
clued in if they check out certain . . .
Movies, TV, and Radio
Because so many folks don't seem to have the
slightest idea of how bad it is nowadays . . . we decided to go
searching for movies, television, and radio shows that really get
the message across fairly well
While these might not necessarily always be
the most lighthearted-enjoyable-and-knee-slapping entertainment
on the planet, they can give us a pretty realistic glimpse into
the gritty reality that actually underlies the modern dating scene
and how bad it can sometimes be.
Why are things the way they are now?
"You know . . . what I've concluded
is that many singles just aren't mature -
they're not connected to reality,
they don't know themselves,
they haven't the capacity to take on responsibilities,
and they have fantasy-world ideas about love.
They're either running to or running from marriage,
but they are in the dark as to what
it's really about.
They have adult privileges and adult possessions,
but they haven't reached adulthood . . ."
- Harville Hendrix
Many events that took place before many of
us were even old enough to walk have shaped the way we date now.
Maybe understanding a few of them might give us a little perspective
on the matter, and so, help us out.
Unfortunately for us, a great deal of our lives,
culture, and general mindset today have been influenced haveily
by various political idealists from a generation or two before.
While political idealists might sometimes be a positive force in
politics, their spillover effects in the dating scene and/or bedroom
and our personal lives can often have some unpleasant consequences.
Some of these major influencing factors
just from the past few decades:
- The Generation of Divorce
- Post-sexual revolution
- Recent Technology of Birth Control
- Sex as sport
- Living together as a "trial
marriage"
- Entering relationships with "baggage"
- The rise of science-on-relationships (a.k.a. "love"
as a by-product of pheromones)
- The Psychologization of Relationships (a.k.a. it's not about
"love," it's about
"meeting needs")
- Post-feminism and the tension between the sexes
- The
erosion of religious authority
-
The decline of tradition
- Nonexistence of "courtship" (a.k.a. "no
rules")
- "Let's just live together" (living together increased
72% in the last decade (does it
"work"?))
- Marriage - redefined to
be "a burden and limit of freedom"
- Kids - defined as "things that interfere with my career"
- Relationships - redefined as "something that interferes
with my career"
- "So then, why
should I get married, anyway?"
"When my parents divorced
in the late '70s,
we children went along with it like troopers.
When they started bringing home boyfriends and girlfriends in the
'80s,
we ultimately accepted these new people into our family.
Sometimes, the new people went away.
And we dealt with the divorces and separations all over again.
And accepted the new people all over again.
Fine. Exhausting, but fine.
It's a wonder we 18- to 35-year-olds
even have the energy to date. (And maybe some of us don't.)"
- Larissa Phillips
The Results
"ASIDE from a 29-inch waist and a full
head of hair, there isn't much to recommend the 20-something
male.
He is footloose and fancy-free - except for
the fact that is likely to be living with his parents. It takes
him longer to leave home than his women friends, and he is more
likely to return.
He is, of course, sexually active and therefore
at increased risk of unmarried fatherhood, but he doesn't especially
like kids. He considers them a financial burden and an irritant
in any relationship with the mother.
He is openly suspicious that a woman would
try to trap him with a pregnancy or that a one-night stand would
result in a pregnancy and a long-term parenting relationship with
a woman he doesn't care about and doesn't want to marry. This fear,
however, doesn't keep him from regularly waking up with a stranger.
He has no biological clock since he can father
children well past middle age, so he is in no hurry to marry.
He is looking for a "soul-mate,"
and he believes there is someone out there whom he is destined to
love.
If he finds her, he is also likely to find
that the relationship does not live up to this romantic ideal, but
it will be easy enough to divorce these days.
In the meantime, he is taking his time looking
for her because he can, so his current lifestyle is likely to extend
into his 30s.
He is living an extended adolescence - an adult-olescence
- and every immature, irresponsible, self-absorbed thing he does
is re-enforced by the latest issue of his favorite men's magazine.
If one of his sexual liaisons does result in
a child, there are no longer any social pressures for him to commit
to family life.
He is likely to live with the mother for a
while or enter a loose child-rearing contract that does not include
any commitment between the parents.
Women, for their part, are losing patience
with this guy . . ."
- excerpt from the Baltimore Sun, June 29th, 2003
"A double revolution is at work in modern American
love:
A revolution in higher education has created
the most professionally accomplished and independent generation
of young women in history,
and a revolution in mating has created a prolonged and perplexing
search for Mr. Right . . . .
Cultural historian, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead documents
the new social climate
in which the demands of work, the epidemic of cohabitation,
the disappearance of courtship, and the exacting standards of educated
women
are leading them to stay single longer –
and to find the search for a mate even harder when the time is right.
From the frontlines of college, where dating is dead, to the trenches
of corporate solitude,
Whitehead reports on a wholesale shift
that has stacked the marriage deck against the best and brightest
women.
The thirty-something, perplexed single woman is today’s
new cultural icon.
Why There Are No Good Men Left is the first book
to take a serious approach to analyzing where she came from
and to ask how she can realize her dreams of lasting love.
There are plenty of good men left, of course, but
Whitehead deftly illustrates
why women in my generation often believe otherwise . . ."
- excerpt from Why
There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single
Woman
by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
What to do?
Sometimes you've got to wonder - with dating,
divorce, sexual harassment, Viagra . . .
Is "love"
just futile?
Maybe.
- but then again,
your trusty LiveReal Agents
are on the case.
"So much of the heartbreak of
love
could be avoided if we would postpone marriage until we learn
what relationships are really about,
and until we uncover the hidden land mines
we bring to our partnerships . . ."
- Harville Hendrix
The causes of all this madness and chaos are
manyfold and complex, so we just will not (unlike most self-help
authors or relationship experts out there), pretend to have
any easy, cure-all solution.
But that definitely doesn't mean that there
is nothing to do. In fact, there are plenty of things that are well
in your control that can definitely help improve the odds in your
favor.
What are they?
Here goes.
First and foremost:
Get smarter.
The best place to do this,
in our own humble and totally unbiased estimation
is right here.
So many singles
concentrate all their efforts on perfecting the image, outside
trappings, and gamelike strategies of singleness (the hair, the
makeup, the weight-lifting, the snazzy clothes, the sparkling teeth,
the aeronautic boobs, etc etc etc) - in order to stand up to the
scrutiny of the mating game, while their "inner games"
- for lack of better words - goes unexamined, ignored, and neglected.
For example,
learn about The Typical Cycle
of Relationships . . . so you can maybe avoid it.
"Love"
and the built-in struggles
Many of the problems and troubles in relationships come built-in
to the game. There are many, many pitfalls and land mines, and the
more you know about them, the more likely you will be able to avoid
them.
Figure out what sex
really is.
If you understand it thoroughly - how it effects you, how it effects
the person you're with, how it effects relationship, how it effects
your confidence and emotional makeup - if you understand these things,
you are in a much better position. (- and no, we mean . . . well,
you know what we mean.)
Understand what real "intimacy"
is.
And we recommend an incredibly stellar place to do it right here.
What is the real cause of problems
in many relationships?
"Fifteen or twenty years ago, I suddenly recognized something that
had eluded me during the early years of my psychology practice.
In my frantic efforts to help people keep their marriages together,
I had overlooked the most salient truth of all: Most of these people
didn't have a 'marriage' problem. That is, one or both partners
had emotional difficulties, and when those individuals brought their
personal problems into the relationship, the marriage went sour.
In 75 to 80 percent of all marriages that eventually end in divorce
or separation, at least one of the partners suffers from an emotional
health deficiency." (Dr. Neil Warren, founder of eharmony.com).
There does seem to be a strange cycle people can fall into: relationships
give a person "baggage"; the more "baggage"
a person brings into a relationship, the more likely it is that
the relationship might go wrong . . . which then creates more baggage
. . . and on and on . . .
So, then, how does a person take care of this? And what can you
do about it? Go here.
Dating . . . and relationships . .
. are really pretty stressful.
So learn how to deal
with stress.
How can you prevent a lot of problems
from coming up to start with?
It seems to us that a great deal of the suffering that comes up
in life doesn't have a direct and immediate solution . . . but very
often could have been very easily prevented from happening in the
first place. This is what we think of when it comes to wising up
about "morality."
What happens when you find out that
the person you're with is a jerk?
In other words, many times in our relationships, we find out that
the people we've chosen to be with are people who, in certain ways,
lack "character."
And they often find out the same thing about us.
Why do you want a relationship, anyway?
For many people, the
reason they are here on the planet definitely has something
to do with looking for "IT"
through love (not just sex
or marriage) within a relationship
with another person.
In other words, relationships take place within a certain context,
of fundamental, core assumptions about yourself and the universe
and your place in it - in other words, "reality."
- and most importantly, join
up
and check out the awesome LiveReal
Relationship Arena Products
"I forgot
how difficult it was
to be a human being.
Nobody looks at each other any more."
- Thornton Wilder
stay tuned . . .
Talk about it:
info@livereal.com
Related Articles
What
is "Love"?
Relationships:
The Typical Cycle
What
is "Sex"?
Stress:
LiveReal's Guide to Dealing
What
is "Intimacy"?
The
LiveReal Guide to Relationship Literature
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