Singles and Dating

[pbrower2a]

(08-24-2018, 09:33 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(07-24-2018, 10:32 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-24-2018, 03:45 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: I had a thread on this topic over on the old forum. I couldn't figure out how to retrieve it so I decided to start anew here. Do you all feel as if so many in the dating realm expect idealism and perfection in their relationships? Are both genders equally guilty of this? Are they more reluctant to accept things and people as they are? (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, etc. notwithstanding). Do we all want to be loved  unconditionally?

Obviously I am speaking from a male perspective.

There are people without ideals. Lowered expectations can get people something -- someone broke, unattractive, unhealthy, witless, abusive, mentally unstable, or with a criminal record. Or, for that matter, people who have nothing in common. Anyone can dip low enough and find something. That's not that I suggest such. What people accept as tawdry substitutes for their dreams quickly show themselves as mistakes. Do you remember the awful car that you bought because it was $200 cheaper? You had plenty of time in which to kick yourself. Remember the dead-end job that you took just to pay off some bills? Did you keep that job when you had a chance to do something else?

Some compromises are realism. Some are self-destructive.

Quote:I have my own thoughts on this issue, and I often feel that we may have come in the wrong direction since the days when dating had a more genteel approach to it. When I started in the 1970s there was still a certain amount of old-fashionedness left, as it was still customary for the man to make the date, picked the lady up wherever she lived, go out for dinner, movies, dancing, etc., and bring her back at the end of the evening. Contrary to popular belief, sex was seldom on the menu for dessert. That all began to change in the late 1970s when it became much more commonplace for the couples to meet in a public place such as restaurant or park. By the mid-1980s the AIDS scare cut the heart out of the sexual revolution and made dating more complex. But an even bigger factor was the advent of the professional yuppie class and the whole "I don't have time" syndrome which hasn't really led up much to this day. To me the only real "pro" from this trend was that dating services gained respectability and will no longer considered the last resort for losers as had been the case before. They also, however, became ridiculously expensive, sometimes costing a grand or more.

The cycle suggests that practices lost in the past may return in somewhat different forms. People don't have time for dating? When they get lonely, they just might. People will get into accidental situations in which they might start talking about going out for dates that begin with dinner at some mass-market restaurant and then go further. Then there are mutual friends who try to set people up. If one is foolish there might be semi-pornographic sites that offer sex and nothing else. I do not suggest them.

There are dating sites. Put in your demographics, and meet someone. Some even have such fantasies as interracial liaisons (as in "such-and-such ethnicity" want to meet you). OK, so maybe her English is at best rudimentary, you will tire of her favorite cuisine, she can't get accustomed to your country music or to American sports, or she will hate a cold climate. Minneapolis isn't Manila even if it is better by practically any objective measure.   If you think that foreign women will show more tolerance for your drinking, drug use, gambling, or use of pornography, then think again. In such a case it is you who has a problem to deal with. Deal with your vices before you seek female companionship.

My suggestion is to get involved in activities that have nothing to do with romance -- religious activities, civic and fraternal organizations, hobby clubs, ethnic associations (like attracts like, as a general rule)... and you might show yourself interesting, available, and desirable. If you like bowling -- bowling alleys have people of both genders. Or sign up for a course at a community college... food dating is roundabout.  

Quote:Singles dances may still be around but they are much less numerous today. What do you see ahead to be the dating customs of the future, and might we someday see a return to more genteel approaches?

Technologies and available venues will change, but core human nature doesn't. The rating-and-dating system works. It is surprising how some primitive traits in human nature operate. Dancing is a show of health. Flowers excite a sense that rarely gets excited. Financial circumstances matter greatly.

But yet the heyday of the big dance bands and ballrooms was right in the midst of the Great Depression. But this 4T you are not seeing anything even remotely similar. Could the reduction in dating and sex life tie in with the fact that most of us are not happy with the current state of the country and how we're seen around the world?

It could be. But we are also more demanding of economic circumstances than we once were. Many things that we used to think of as luxuries (like inside toilets, radios, telephones, and recorded music) are now necessities. 

The economic ruling elite is nasty. It seems to be full of people who care only about their gain, indulgence, and power and to that end they impose insecurity and poverty upon as many people as possible even despite high levels of material productivity. I keep saying that we are out of the era in which people can find happiness just by buying more stuff. It is far safer to have modest expectations in life. On the other hand -- our economic elites seem to be the swine before whom the rest of us are obliged to cast pearls. 

Consider the background of someone who got an MBA in the early 1980's, got latched onto capitalism at its most privileged rather early, and has since become part of the Master Class as an executive. He may have been the low-life who was interested only in "sex and drugs and rock-and-roll" and found out at some stage that he could get those more reliably if he had a degree in marketing or finance. He was never interested in the liberal arts, so he took snap courses in such areas as languages and literature while putting his focus on accounting and economics. He studied psychology not so much to get deeper insights on human nature as to discover the dark science of manipulation and exploitation. By ignoring the complexity of human nature he could easily reduce people to their economic roles as customers, workers, or suppliers.  So what does he do as an executive? He reduces people to objects to exploit and discard as necessary.

Hollow people ordinarily gravitate to the basest drives in nature even if they have the means to do better. The costliest whiskey replaces marijuana; he never learns to appreciate art or classical music. He falls for the siren sound of the fraudulent word luxury, and he aligns with the reactionary politics of others in his milieu. He does insist on the finest car and a wife who looks like a Playmate of the Month ™... and when she no longer looks like an object of envy, he divorces her and leaves her with a ten-year-old Mercedes-Benz and children with a divorce settlement that sticks her with a house with payments she can never meet and an empty pantry. He gets a new luxury vehicle, a new house, and above all a wife perhaps twenty years younger than the last one, trading her in as if he were trading in an automobile. (Is the inspiration for that from Harold Bloom or Christopher Lasch?)  Considering his crass treatment of subordinates and clients it is no wonder that he ends up treating his aging wife and his children who have become spoiled brats who will be chips off the old narcissistic block because they know nothing else and could never adapt to living as a small-town minister or a farmer's wife, let alone a blue-collar worker of any kind.  

Let's look at the difference in the economic character of America in the Great Depression and the last decade or so. The Great Depression practically destroyed the power of the economic elites whose profits plummeted and stayed low. Those elites wanted to get "That Man" out of office and return to the norms of the Gilded Age, but lacked the means. Those elites learned a hard lesson about the dangers of economic speculation without genuine improvements in the lives of most people. Obama may have wanted to be the next FDR and had most of the personal tools... but Obama chose to get as swift a recovery from what started as an economic meltdown as dangerous that starting in the 1929 Market Crash. So the elites got to recover first... well, if that is the only way in which to prevent the misery that was the early 1930's that would seem reasonable. The elites would then have the means of investing in the recovery through profits. Those elites would also have the means with which to buy the political process by supporting the campaigns of politicians who believe as those elites do -- that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it enriches, indulges, and empowers the elites. That is indeed a primitive way of looking at economic relations, one well befitting feudal landlords, ante-bellum planters, mobsters, and the sorts of tycoons who supported fascism in countries that became fascist monstrosities inimical to democracy and freedom. These are the sorts of people Karl Marx warned us all about -- people who endorse the very conditions that Marx deplored, and the sorts of people who put their countries at the risk of proletarian revolutions.