Over power sushi, my girlfriends and I were discussing our recent jabs at dating. My best friend described being introduced to a particular guy who asked her out. They met at a bar, and things were going well until it came time to order.
"He ordered cheese sticks! This may seem shallow, but that totally ended it for me right there."
In addition, before I could reach to dip my unfashionable tortilla chip in the vat of salsa before me, the table was alive with conversation.
"For me it's decent shoes," chimed in my other female partner in crime.
"Facial hair," chirped yet another, to which everyone heaved a collective sigh of agreement. "Yeaaahhhh." Goatee’d men are out. Add to that boat shoes, e-mailing too frequently/not frequently enough, Ikea furniture, muscle cars— and all bets were off.
Yes, we were pretty shallow. Nevertheless, we had all, at one time or another set our intentions on some super hero character from our never-ending proverbial black books. After all, who could possibly fathom spending one more moment than we had to with a man that ordered cheese sticks, when nature’s Viagra of oysters on the half shell were six lines down on the menu? Welcome to courtship, where the quest for the ideal mate can be more brutal than tryouts for a major league baseball team.
Not that we truly have bad intentions. We choose the path of least resistance or make bad choices in men just so we have someone to bash about among our girlfriends. I know my parents probably married thinking it was forever and wound up paying a slew of high-powered divorce lawyers. Like any good generation, we are hoping to pursue the blatantly opposite course. I do not know a single person my age who is not seeking to meet "The One" — with, of course, the postneoteric awareness that "The One" is just as relative a proposition as finding the right car, or the bathing suit. In the meantime, we fill our calendars with meaningless flings and failed attempts at true love with the wrong person. On the other hand, is it just the wrong time?
I am an abnormality in my generation. I tied the knot at 18 with a post high school sweetheart in foolhardy pursuit of the nuclear family I had never known. It did not last long. Within a year, I got a strong whiff of the world of possibility from friends returning from their first year of college. Realizing these numerous options were available to me as well, I was gone faster than you could say "adios." Thus began my life as a single white female in search of herself, instead of that special someone.
And what a world it was! I attended a university, traveled and jetted-setted with the grace of a woman twice my age. Life was teeming with possibility and I relished that I unknowingly had no fear. I was young, intellectual, spiritual and flat-out bizarre. Not only was there no pressure to get married, start a family and buy a house but, thanks to our parents' experiments of two decades before, sexual mores were loosened. We were taught how to use condoms in high school, after all.
My generation has been portrayed as driveless and meandering. This is not an altogether fair characterization. We simply have more time to figure out what we want — whether it is a career in sales or a family. In love, we experiment, try on relationships and until the more adult notion strikes that perhaps we should seek something deeper, more serious. With that begins a whole new phase: the quest for true love — and the cheese stick filtering system. It is also where things get really ugly.
Ask any single person under 35. It's so ferocious out there. Work hours are long, leaving little precious time for social activities, save the high-risk office romance, which takes the concept of bringing your work home with you just a little too literally for my taste. Then again, I do work at home. It is no longer socially acceptable to simply admit you are single and looking to meet people for romance and whatnot. Though the personal ad industry is booming, finding anyone to cop to such methods is highly unlikely.
E-mail, pagers, cell phones and caller ID systems create all sorts of newfangled hazards to traditional romantic angst. Try calling the object of your affection repeatedly, but hanging up before leaving a message, only to find out his caller ID shows that you phoned him 13 times in 2 hours. Stalk much? And do not get me started on checking your e-mail every 60 seconds to see if Mr. Crush will respond wittily to your last e-mail inviting him to see a show. Nothing's changed, fundamentally; there are just a hundred new ways to wait all day by the phone.
More importantly, after playing the field for years with no specific goal in mind, you develop a pretty good idea of what you don't want in a future partner. So good an idea, in fact, that you've already written off 98 percent of the population based on such questionable litmus tests as shoes, facial hair and cheese sticks which, by the way, spark some long-lost memory of that loser drummer you spent a high school summer dodging when you were more naive than you care to ever think about.
Gender roles are in transition, which can throw some for a loop. Instead of "going Dutch," men tend to pick up the tab on the first date, only to find themselves being treated to dinner a week later. Fellows are expected to cook and women to have career goals. I am blown away at the thought of the dating crises Gay and Lesbian couples must have to deal with.
One day I may flip over someone after floundering from hot to cold. One of my couplings lasted almost a year, but the rest were brief-lived affairs from which I always learned something. And having floundered about for so long, trying every strange custom that caught my fancy along the way, I was ready to settle down a bit, invest in creating a home and a life together, "Ozzie and Harriet" style.
Although it's probably too soon to tell, I believe that when my generation comes to be evaluated and reflected on in history— instead of the current commercial stereotyping we get now — we'll be accurately pegged as a traditional lot, self-aware but inclined to embrace the romantic ideals of our grandparents generation.