Weekend Plans Post: Catching Up With Old Friends and Discussing Dating
There’s a friend I have who used to come out to Colorado for work quite regularly prior to the pandemic. I hadn’t seen him since 2019. Well, he came back today.
We sat on the porch and discussed cars and pizza and work and how he was going through a divorce 3 years ago and what’s been happening since.
He’s doing great. He’s got a new job, he’s got a new girlfriend, and he’s started purchasing old junky cars for cheap and turning them into old pretty good cars and selling them for… well, I didn’t get into that. I assume that it’s more or less “parts plus labor” where “labor” means “not a whole lot”. (Hey, do what you love on nights and weekends and that makes it easy to go to work on Monday morning.)
One of the questions I asked was in regards to his new girlfriend… specifically “Oh jeez… what is dating like in the current year?”
Oh my gosh. It was like a horror movie.
He told me about Tinder. He told me about Facebook dating. He told me about various first dates. Then he told me something that made my eyes widen.
“Some of the advice I got was to do every first date at the same place. That way you’ll know whether the vibe is working or not and not be distracted by the novelty of the first date.”
He made a comparison to going out and playing putt-putt. If you do the exact same thing each time, you’ll hit the ball into the exact same place each time. The only thing that changes are the environmental conditions like wind or humidity changes on the carpet.
I was reminded of this banger of a tweet:
do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam
— Amy (@lolennui) January 21, 2022
And, yes, also this essay from more than a decade ago.
Additionally, Maribou is on the road again visiting a friend who is going through a rough time and, well, I’m batching it and thinking “as bad as batching it can be, it still sounds less bad than *THAT*.”
As such, this weekend will be spent counting blessings and recuperating from the first week back.
What’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Dodging Bullets” by Carine06, used under a Creative Commons License.)
Dating has always been a minefield surrounded by a moat full of crocodiles and the whole thing suspended by fraying ropes over a pit full of spikes that justs manifests differently for every generation.
Glad he’s doing well.Report
Been married for 27 years this year, The horror of dating is one thing that encourages me to keep my marriage healthy.Report
42 years for us later this year. We met because Bell Labs had hired almost 1,000 technical staff aged 23-26 over a two year period and dropped them all into one giant building in what was basically the middle of nowhere in New Jersey. Fortunately, the Labs only had rules about direct reports not dating each other.Report
We were high school friends, started dating after I joined the Navy.Report
That tweet had me nodding my head vigorously until I remembered how crappy dating was in the 80s and 90s for an introvert like me. It was overall pretty bad until I happened to randomly meet a woman on a work trip. We’ve been married now for 22 years.
I’m with Oscar that avoiding the dating scene is definitely an incentive to keep my marriage healthy. But as much as dating generally sucks, using apps and online tools does not seem any worse than what I had to do, which is going to bars or hoping for serendipity.Report
I always think I’ll be fine when my wife is somewhere else (or I’m somewhere that she isn’t) and then about halfway through I realize that I’m really Not Fine and I’m actively but unconsciously avoiding having feelings about it.Report
I met my wife doing online dating but before it had been Tinder-ized. It felt awkward at first but after being in a relationship that didn’t work out from just out of college through end of law school I found I just didn’t meet people like I used to. The bar scene also changed in ways not conducive to finding what I was looking for.
I never went to quite the lengths as your friend but I did eventually have a rule that first dates were drinks only at a casual place, at the bar not a table. From my experience it was obvious if there was any potential pretty quickly. Nothing was worse than going through the motions of a full evening knowing you weren’t ever going to talk again. On the other hand it was easy (for me anyway) to have a drink or two with anyone then go separate ways. Needless to say my wife and I met at like 5 in the evening and ended up closing the place down.Report
At least with “Online dating” you are less likely to get a concussion for dumping someone.
Never dump someone in a construction zone.Report
I had a couple of post-divorce girlfriends (not at the same time). Getting to them was not fun. A new factor in later life is the question of re-marriage. When I was younger it felt like something that didn’t need to be said while dating — if this works out well enough for long enough, we will get married. Not necessarily the case when you’re dating in your 40’s and 50’s! So that provides another point that needs to be talked about and therefore which creates a potential for friction. Also, she probably has kids. Maybe they’re adults by this age, but more likely not. Another minefield, another arena for potential frustration.Report
Also, I moved from a conservative part of California to Portland after my divorce and there are some cultural differences. A lot more people here are poly, and that is something to consider (maybe there were a lot of poly people back in the desert, but I didn’t really know about it?) because poly people tend to want specific kinds of relationships that maybe don’t have certain components (emotional commitment, potential for marriage) and that becomes, at best, another potential friction point. And if you’re a serial monogamist instead of a polyamorist, you need to figure out if you’re okay dating a polyamorist. Not everyone subscribes to a uniform code of what it means to be ethically non-monogamous, either. So THAT’S a dating hazard I’d not really anticipated but have hit a few times also.Report
Notes to self:
1. Get married ASAP.
2. Don’t move to Portland.Report
Online dating is basically meeting people at a bar but without the help of inhibition lowering substances. Actually, it’s more like a combination of bar and awkward middle school dance. I met two of my three exes online, so that is how things are done these days. Still better than video dating in the 1980s I guess.Report
Damn, reading the comments here has given this recent widower the sads.
The docket is doing some house stuff and maybe a little garden cleanup.Report
I’m in a weird situation dating wise because all my ex-girlfriends decided to get back in touch with me in the same week. One I didn’t have contact with in over a year and the other recently broke up very angrily for no reason but got back in touch about a month after that. It is both vindicating and a Pyrrhic victory at the same time. I really wish both would be more clear in their intentions but I guess it doesn’t work that way.Report