There Is A Difference Between "Afraid" and "Anxious" -- And It Applies To Everyone Dating

[osewalrus]

It is a peculiar world in which folks older than 50 spend their time debating whether young men spend their lives in terror of dating women because they are afraid of false accusations of sexual assault. But that appears to be the world we live in.

I would normally not opine much, being over 50 myself. But I'm father of a fine young man and so have perforce taken something of an interest in how the dating world appears to work these days. 

From what I can gather (and admittedly this is rather episodic in terms of reading and talking to people in their 20s who are dating), men are not trembling with fear so much as experiencing an enormous amount of angst that they can't safely talk about. As are women. In fact, no one seems to have any clue how to actually date and establish relationships. While this may prompt nostalgia among us oldsters, no -- it's not the same as when we were young. It's a lot more tense.

First, start with the knowledge that dating is intrinsically anxiety provoking. Now layer on lots of entirely new means of communicating that straddle a peculiar world of not-quite-public but not-really-private.  Even texts may be subject to sharing and widespread distribution at some future point -- or you could just mess up and spam your contact list.

So many things can go wrong. So many can go wrong *publicly*. So many messages people are trying to send to each other. All without the benefit of any clear guidelines. There used to be conventions of various sorts. Not all of them were good, many were were in fact bad. But it's not like we've replaced bad conventions (i.e., it is the role of the guy to initiate contact and the role of the girl to wait by the phone) with good conventions. We replaced them with no conventions. Leaving folks in free fall for one of the most anxiety provoking social functions we have as human beings.

Comments

[luscious_purple]

I agree that dating sucks. A few years ago I read a brilliant essay on that theme -- I think it was in Slate.

I used to have a fantasy that I would wake up some morning -- as if arising from a very long sleep, or even a coma -- and a good-looking, smiling man about my age would be sitting in a chair next to my bed. He would shake my hand and say, "Hi, I'm [Name], we've been matched to each other." And we would get to talking and he would have very compatible interests with me, and great relationship skills, and a great sense of humor, and.... (You get the point.)

Perhaps the best thing parents of young men can do is to show their sons what a healthy relationship looks like, and encourage their sons to treat women as equals and not possessions that they "deserve" to have in their lives.

(I would probably think of more things to write if I wasn't on a short break from thinking about CubeSat-based quantum key distribution.)

[vettecat]

I also wonder whether the situation is being exacerbated by the tendency of young people to communicate via text, so when they're sitting at a table with someone of the opposite sex they literally don't know how to have a conversation.