Welcome to Dating and Mating

How long does it take to get over an ex? What’s the real edict for the post date phone call? When is it appropriate to say ‘I Love you’? Does size matter? Can you date your friend’s ex? What is Love? And most of all why do we find these things so important?

As a kid I was always the one with a million questions, I wanted to understand a situation before I got too involved in it. It’s this little personality quirk of mine that has caused me to create ‘Dating and mating’ a weekly look into life, love and sex. It’s my way of trying to understand why people do the things they do, say the things they say and act like complete fools half the time all in the name of love and relationships.

Lets face it at the college level there are only a few things people can agree on, there aren’t enough classes, books cost too much and sex and love are constantly topics of discussion.

We talk about it with our friends, we think about it all the time and let’s be honest, if given the choice between studying Shakespeare or going out with this weeks token celebrity hottie we’d all be saying good bye to the bard and hello to Orlando.

Which brings me to this weeks topic, what is date in 2005?

From the outside it would seem like a simply question but after hours, well an hour of discussion with a handful of CSUF students I have discovered that the simple dinner-movie, movie-dinner, and light make out session in front seat of car, form of date doesn’t work for the Y generation as it did for the generations before us.

Today’s dating process no longer falls into one simple category. There are several kinds of dates and several ways to partake in these activities here are just a handful.

The sneak attack date, this takes place when only one member of the dating party is aware that you are on a date. This usually consists of a ‘friend’ asking to ‘hang out’ and suddenly the person who asked to hang out is attempting to move in for the kill.

The intentional date, while rare these such dates still do occur every now and then, where one person asks another person out on a date, picks that person up takes them out engages in conversation, food, and entertainment and if the mating ritual goes over well the date leads to some form of affection and the promise of additional dates in the future.

The baggage date as a male friend of mine explained it “this happens when three people go somewhere together and you really want to get to know just one of them but there is this other person there getting in the way.”

The brake up date, for some reason people feel that the best way to end a bad relationship is to go out on a date as you did when you first got together, thus taking part in an acquired meal and then just before desert announce that you want to break up needless to say no one ever gets desert in these cases.

The pity date is well known form of date, they happen when one person feels obligated to go out with another even though they know that they are not interested in the other person. These dates usually consist of a lot of acquired conversation, small talk and a mental mantra of “I’m being nice, I can’t just run out the door screaming because I’m being nice.”

The “I had nothing better to do” date, these are the worst version of the pity date, a date where you have tried everything to get out of it but you simply can’t, as a friend of mine explained “the ‘I have to wash my hair’ excuse doesn’t work in our generation so sometimes you have to go out on the date.”

So lets recap, dating for our technology savvy generation is a bit of a challenge because most times both people don’t know why there on a date or if they every even are so in the pursuit of keeping the stream of conservation flowing smoothly I say give each other a heads up on what type of date your on and make sure that both parties know your actually on one.