Here’s another addition to the “Glad to Be Married” file. On X, which I often scroll through with the same kind of morbid fascination an auto-racing aficionado feels waiting for a crash, there arose a controversy involving a young woman in New York who was texting back and forth with a potential first date and asked him to send a car to pick her up. I assume she meant an Uber. In any case, he declined but offered to come to a restaurant near where she lived. And thus began the debate. Was she right to demand the stranger provide transportation for her, or was he somehow a jerk for unequivocally refusing to do so? The only conclusion one could draw from this vigorous debate was that being single right now must super suck.
No, this is about more than just shaking my boomer-adjacent head at those crazy kids and their kooky customs. What it implicates is something going on all over the world that might mean the end of civilization as we know it. The birth rate is dropping lower than Graham Platner’s approval rating at an AIPAC convention. People just aren’t having babies. Now, conservatives are having more babies than liberals, which is good and predictable since we like normal sex and a lot of leftists are weirdos, but we’re not exactly being fruitful and multiplying either. Dating and mating is a young people’s issue, and their dating habits are bizarre, and the mating part is suffering.
Of course, back in my day, I would’ve just taken my car to her house and picked her up. Most people in New York City don’t have a car, so it’s understandable that he didn’t do that. But is there some sort of obligation on his part to fund her transportation? The dinner he was going to take her to was one of those top-shelf Michelin restaurants. Homeboy was already planning on shelling out some serious ducats. Was he required to fund her trip as well? He did say he would consider getting her a car to take her home. I found the whole thing kind of odd.
First, what the heck? She’s making demands of her date before they even met? I thought all young women are self-sustaining girl bosses with exciting careers who need a man like a fish needs a bicycle. But apparently, she needed a man to provide her a Prius driven by some immigrant from Papua New Guinea named Mugattu.
Look, I default to the guy acting like a guy. You pick up the girl for the date. You pay for her dinner. You see her home. If she doesn’t invite you in, you say goodbye, and that’s that. But I’m informed by the playas on X that I am hopelessly old-fashioned. You don’t pick chicks up at their house because she doesn’t want to tell heR date where she lives. That’s because they usually found each other online. And I get that. If I were a lady, I wouldn’t want to give my address to some weirdo whose entire connection with me was because I swiped right or left or whichever direction on my romance app.
I’m also told that you don’t take women to dinner for a first date anymore. Apparently, some young gold diggers make it a thing to go out several nights a week to nice dinners with guys they are not otherwise interested in. I don’t have any idea how young men can afford to do that. I could do a good dinner date for under 50 bucks back in my day. You’re talking close to $200 now if you want to have a couple drinks, and you definitely want to have a couple drinks if you’re on a date. Apparently, there’s no problem with you taking her home if she wants you to see her home, but before you go inside, you better get a videotaped and notarized statement of consent.
So the guys have several problems, and there’s some tension that I can’t blame young men for being confused about. Guys who were just starting out probably don’t have $200 to drop on dates on a regular basis. This is why there are arguments that the first date should be for coffee or maybe a drink; taking a woman to dinner on her first date is a sign of weakness to these studs, none of whom seem to have a girlfriend. I bet that’s just a coincidence.
Now, many of society’s problems are a direct result of feminism, and a lot of this dating disaster is, too. You have some women who want to exploit men, and you have some women who want all the benefits of chivalry with none of the obligations. If a guy is taking you out and paying for everything, fine, she has to be cool to him. She can’t be a jerk. And there seem to be a lot of stories of women who get taken out on dates and spend the entire time on their phone texting their friends. I don’t know if they were raised by wolves or what, but for every hapless dude out there, there’s some conniving chick.
Oh, and you’re supposed to be over 6 feet tall and make $100K a year, according to the people on social media, before you are considered a man of potential value. But you’re definitely not supposed to consider a girl’s weight or appearance. Again, feminism or something.
So, I’m not sure about the answer to the great car-service question. And I’m glad I don’t have to face it. I’ve been out of the game for a quarter century, and I couldn’t be happier.
But we do have to start figuring out how to help young people connect. It’s not just a matter of their happiness, though it is. If you look at the statistics, half of young women are insane, and half of young men are miserable. That’s not good for society. That’s not good for the future. We should want the best for the next generations, but we also have a practical consideration — somebody’s going to have to change our bedpans in the not-too-distant future.
Young people have challenges we don’t understand, although we had challenges that our parents didn’t understand. Yeah, every generation has obstacles, but that doesn’t mean they’re not obstacles. That doesn’t mean there’s not a practical result of those obstacles; right now, the practical result is a dearth of births. We’ve got to figure out how to make life affordable for young people. We’ve got to figure out how we can change society so that people can connect. We’ve got to get rid of the militant feminism that makes women unattractive and revive the masculine energy that makes men want to find a mate. We’re going to have to do that as a society. We need to reject popular culture that depicts men as losers just as we need to reject popular culture that depicts women as pains in the rear. And we need policies that promote family formation and growth. We don’t need people to wait until they’re 40 to get hitched. They should be doing it in their 20s, and yes, I know I’m a hypocrite.
The past wasn’t perfect. We certainly weren’t perfect, but don’t tell the present generation. Instead, try to help them with a little good advice. After all, despite everything, including terrible clothes, bad hair, and grunge music, we did okay.
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