Postmodern Love

A dating guide, from an experienced professional

 
 
 
By Gabe Durán

ext time you’re thinking about buying a girl roses or making her a mix tape-don’t. Send her a neat rock or an e-card. Or, better yet, just don’t do anything. I say this because I was watching The Graduate the other day, and it made me realize how far our notion of romance has shifted. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman takes a girl to a titty bar as a first date, then chases her across the country to tell her he didn’t rape her mother and to ask her to marry him. This movie is rated PG, by the way. Do not take any dating or relationship advice from the film, instead, you’d be much better off reading into articles you can find at https://www.lovedignity.com and other websites across the internet that can provide advice and tips for first dates or couples.

By contrast, all of my marriage proposals have resulted in cease-and-desist orders.

The world just isn’t as idyllic as it used to be, it seems. The reasons for this tragic cultural shift are myriad and complex, and I am in no way qualified to address them, but I can confidently say that they are all the fault of women.

Why isn’t telling a girl you were “thinking about not making out with other girls any more” as romantic as it used to be? Is it because you just met her that night? Because she was only the second person to make out with you ever, because no girls talked to you in high school, because you started a sword-fighting club? My answer to these questions is an unequivocal “no.” It’s because romance is dead. I would also have accepted, “because girls are stupid.” They just don’t appreciate chivalry anymore. Unless, of course, it’s making you pay for dinner, which is somehow still okay.

“Gabe, you seem outlandishly suave and good with women. Maybe you can help me,” you are probably saying right now. “How much affection is too much?”

My response? Any. Any affection is too much. Not only do I not hold the door open for women; I often deliberately pull it closed behind me and lock it. The last time I bought a girl a gift it was a stuffed blue dog that I put in her cubby in fifth grade. I don’t think I even bought it. I think I got it as a consolation prize for being the nerdiest kid alive. Needless to say, she did not appreciate it, which forced me to pick my nose and cry.

Since any outward show of affection has become creepy, the major obstacle in modern dating is how to court someone while showing no interest whatsoever. It becomes a contest to see who can like the other person less, which results in weeks of not dating the person you are attempting to date. Girls have a natural advantage in that they can just stand there and wait for guys to come tell them they like them, at which point they can be needlessly cruel. But guys can even the playing field by having zero emotional needs.

It may just be nostalgia for a time I never actually lived through, but a little part of me feels we have lost something in the transition from love letters to sexting. Instead of long periods of impassioned courtship and correspondence rife with fluid Shakespearean prose we have:

Want to go to a bar or something Friday? I mean I’m going anyway, so …

Yeah, I guess. Let me check to make sure I have nothing better to do.

Is it okay if I stare very obviously at other girls who walk by wearing outfits more revealing than yours?

I probably won’t even notice. I’ll be too busy pretending to receive funny texts from made-up friends.

With creepiness this ubiquitous, what can be done? Luckily, being voted third sketchiest in high school gives me the authority to dole out an unsolicited list of dos and don’ts:

Guys:

Do: Be charming. Charming and creepy are opposites. This seems like an obvious one to me, people.

Don’t: Hit on girls 10 or more years younger than you. College girls don’t care to hear about how you ran out of Ben Gay this morning and were planning on getting more but then you got lost and forgot who you were.

Don’t: Tell a woman how beautiful she looks while she’s sleeping, even if you have been married to her for 20 years.

Do: Tell your roommate how beautiful he looks when he’s sleeping if you want him to sleep somewhere else, because he keeps waking you up so he and his stupid friends can get high and spill hookah coals all over your sheets and tell you someone else did it, even though you know for a fact it was them.

Don’t: Advertise your sense of smell in any capacity ever.

Don’t: Start a sword-fighting club in high school. You will never live it down.

Do: Feign ignorance of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dragon Ball Z, and her favorite bands that you memorized on Facebook last night.

Don’t: Tell a girl how good she looks in a bikini, pause, then raise your eyebrows suggestively.

Don’t: End email or phone conversations with a woman with, “Look behind you!” Especially if you are, in fact, right behind her.

Don’t: as a joke, carry a girl you don’t know very well into a poorly lit alley while she shouts, “No! Stop it! Put me down!” a la my freshman-year roommate.

Don’t: Use a grappling hook to climb onto said girl’s balcony and try to pick her lock with a plastic fork, “just to see if she got home okay,” further a la my freshman-year roommate.

Don’t: Be my freshman-year roommate.

Girls:

Do: Try to be less generally horrible all the time.

Just follow this simple list, plus all that other stuff I said, and you will be ready for modern dating. Of course, I could be way off base here.