I ran into a truly wild cultural misunderstanding with my father some years ago, when I had to explain to him what âhookup cultureâ actually was, and that the thing he assumed it was was actually what we call âcruising cultureâ. His response was âhow is that different from dating?â and when I explained how it was different, he said, and please note that this a direct quote: âThatâs ridiculous! You canât expect a woman to stop fooling around with other guys for anything less than a marriage proposal. I mean, sheâs not a prostitute, you canât buy her.â Now obviously thereâs like⌠a lot to unpack there, but I think itâs pretty darn illustrative of a substantive cultural shift around the assumption of monogamy!
Also, following this, I asked my mom what her thoughts were on the matter, and she said that while she âwouldnât put it in those termsâ she broadly agreed, and thought that anyone expecting any sort of exclusivity when a marriage proposal wasnât at least on the very immanent horizon was ânuts, honestly.â I hesitantly asked if she was including relationships with premarital sexual activity in that, and her response was âOf course. I mean, gosh, you know your Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week before she finally settled down.â
And this was when I learned, to my shock, that the oft-repeated story of how âAunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the weekâ didnât just mean âAunt Terri had a full dance cardâ but rather meant that Aunt Terri had a period of her life where she literally dated exactly seven guys at once, all of whom she was sleeping with (or, my mom was quick to disclaim, âwell, fooling around with, I donât know how far she actually went with any of them, but they were definitely all fooling around behind closed doorsâ), on a literal weekly rotation. Like, they had a schedule. A schedule that all seven of the guys knew.
America has gotten a lot more conservative about dating, actually.
