Older people of this sub, has dating always been this way or have you noticed any changes recently?

statusincorporated · 2018-12-19T21:28:40+00:00

I am 50+ so, I grew up in the 70's and:

you went on a date only if you were not dating anyone else
Hooking up was unheard of
NSA/FWB/FB were unheard of

I got married, then I got divorced in the early 90's and:

I remember going on dates and ... discovering that it was normal that the women would go on a different date every day or so
I had my first hookup at age 30-something
I had my first FWB and I actually enjoyed it

I got re-married and then divorced again, but I was also cheating a lot during the last few years of marriage so, in the new millennium:

a blow job is not sex
most everyone over 30 has a FWB/FB while they are looking for a relationship
hooking is normalized
you start dating someone and have sex without being exclusive (it has been like that for a while)
cheating/affairs are very normal

All the items in this list existed before my timeline, it's just that they have become "normalized" in the timeline that I assigned. Everyone will have different views on where to put them in time, but there's no doubt that those items were not normalized 10-20 years prior.

EDIT: until recently it was unheard of someone having a body-count of >100

cxj · 2018-12-20T00:05:30+00:00

Early 30s male here, the critical difference to me can be summed up by a quote from the atlantic article about gen z posted a while back, from a guy who got divorced in like 2012:

"He felt that approaching women in a bar had gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy."

I mentor young band dudes, and have heard convos such as "dude that girl was so hot did you ever talk to her?" "IDK after the party I sent her a DM on insta and she didn't reply." "awwwwwww man thats fucked up, right in the feels bro"

and I'm just like YOU. FUCKING. FAGGOT! Go fucking TALK TO HER IRL and then I realize how much music scenes got polluted by tumblr and how band dudes are being metooed left and right for sexual misconduct and I shake my fists and yell at the clouds.

cxj · 2018-12-19T22:24:25+00:00

There was a thread like this a few weeks ago. The internet is your main answer, imagine dating without that. It was good because you had more of a life and didn't have to check your phone a lot. Just a call mid week to arrange a meeting at the weekend or something.

I remember thinking people being single into their 30s was unusual, you expected to be married by then.

You had to go out and meet people instead of swiping. But hooking up was still easy cos single people all went out .

For me, not much difference in ease of getting laid but you don't need to go out as much.

toronto87 · 2018-12-19T21:28:09+00:00

I doubt I'm as old as you're looking for but dating/casual sex has now become something that you can do completely outside of conventional social circles.

cxj · 2018-12-19T22:27:02+00:00

I am 50. I grew up in the 80s. I was in high school from 1982-86 and college from 86-90.

I don't think dating has changed much for top men. They have always been able to "hookup". Dating for them has been pretty much sex-date-relationship or sex/fuck and chuck.

For most men in the 80s, mostly what u/57M2D2 said. For most men in the 80s, it was meet-date-relationship-sex or if you were lucky, meet - date-sex-relationship. If a girl did get physical with you on the first date it was always just her letting you feel her tits or you might get to pull your dick out and she gives you a tugjob. It was almost NEVER P in V on the first date. If it was P in V on the first date you were dealing with a firstball fastball slut whorebag. Because if she was fucking your lame ass, she was giving it up to half the campus.

If as a man you were dating someone, you were expected to NEVER date anyone else. If you were dating someone and you did try to date someone else and your current "dating" relationship found out, you were done. It was just unspoken -

"if i am agreeing to date you, we are exclusive IMMEDIATELY. Neither of us can date anyone else. And if i get naked with you, we are DEFINITELY exclusive and you are not to even smile at some other girl. If i find out you did, you're GONE."

NSA was unheard of. FWB and fuckbuddies were rare, and reserved only for the 20% or so of men and women who did that. The bottom 80% of men NEVER EVER EVER got FWBs or fuckbuddies. NEVER. For the bottom 80% of men, casual sex was just out of the question. No woman would EVER agree to have casual sex with a bottom 80% man. EVER. Almost all the time, if she's agreeing to any kind of sex with you, she is expecting that she will be the only one you're having sex with, and she is (ostensibly) agreeing to the same thing.

EDIT: Keep in mind this was roughly 1985 to 1990 when i and those in my age cohort were getting sexually active. Everyone was losing their minds about AIDS. We were being told AIDS was going to explode into the heterosexual population. We were being told one in 4 of us would be HIV positive by graduation. At that time HIV was 100% fatal. A hookup could literally KILL YOU, we were being told.

Further edit: Another thing was that back then, women really took responsibility for their own sexuality. They understood that casual sex involved pump and dumps. They understood shit didn't work out most times. They understood they were just as responsible for drunk sex, getting genital warts, and an accidental knockup pregnancy as the man was. And if they fucked up, they usually owned it and didn't go around blaming everyone but themselves for their own fuckups.

Back then, you could usually trust that a woman was being more or less honest and above board with you about whether she was on the pill. These chicks were in college. The last thing they wanted was to get knocked up. They were really realistic about it. They either got on the Pill or they took other measures. They firmly understood that if they got knocked up, it was going to be mostly on them. And we men understood if they got knocked up, we would either support the kid or (preferably) pay for the abortion.

Also, back then, you had to rely on your face to face skills. No such thing as text or email game. You had to actually talk to a girl on the phone. You had to actually see her and she had to see you face to face in person.

You had to rely on your own wits, your own abilities, and your friends. There are no buffers between you and the people you're interested in. If you like that girl you're going to have to sack up and man up and nut up and go over there and talk to her. In person. With your words. And whatever else you've got. You can't send her a text, you can't send her a message through Match.com or OKC or PoF and you can't call her. There were no cell phones, no text messaging, and no online dating services. Shit, there wasn't even such a thing as "online" at all.

You had to make very firm plans. There was none of this last minute plan change thing. Once someone left their home to come to you there was no way to reach them until they got where they were going. (No cell phones.) Same with friends - the plans had to be firm and could not be changed last minute. If you did the only way to do that was to get there and meet up and then decide what more to do.

The dating pool for men and women was much smaller and more circumscribed. Because there was no online dating, women couldn't choose from thousands of attractive men in a 50 mile radius. They could choose from 2 or 3 attractive men, around 15 to 20 middling/mediocre men; and the rest, probably 50 or so, unattractive. They were mostly limited to (1) the men in their social circles and friends of those people; and (2) men brave enough to step to them cold approach style, in a bar or at a party. Online dating exponentially expanded women's options and choices. Blew the doors off choice limits for women.

About blow jobs and anal: Blow jobs were a big deal to women. Women either loved giving them or hated it; either would do it with gusto and skill or would not do it at all. Same with anal. Either into it or absolutely not no way, nuh uh never ever. There were some women who would let you do pretty much what you wanted, but they would NOT suck your dick, at all, ever, and no anal.

petrichordium · 2018-12-19T21:58:35+00:00

Everybody bemoaning online dating, but honestly online dating has been INCREDIBLE for me in helping me find other niche weirdos. I’m just old enough (early 30s) to have experienced the transition, and i think it’s just lovely.

sevenfigsub · 2018-12-19T22:26:14+00:00

I’m 32, and I’d say that online dating has become unbearable when it used to be kind of okay. It was less weird in a time when old people considered dangerous than it is now in a world with tinder.

There are a lot more people interested in hookups and open relationships, but then it turns out to be “jk I’m really an obsessive crazy pants”.

thetotalpackage7 · 2018-12-19T23:01:21+00:00

43/M checking in. Came into college during the "grunge" phase where women wore flannels and huge bulky sweaters. Horrendous. Also, everyone was scared of Aids.

sadomasochrist · 2018-12-19T21:14:24+00:00

No, you dated people you knew socially and that was that. You didn't know anything about them except you were attracted to them and knew of them or about them through circles.

Sad_Virgin_Beta_Male · 2018-12-20T08:12:42+00:00

If you are an ugly male, you litteraly have no chance now. Thats for sure.

Paranoidexboyfriend · 2018-12-19T21:21:56+00:00

I’m not old old, but I am older than the average redditor. If tinder had existed while I was in college I would’ve just been dialing it up like it was takeout. In my day you had to grind on girls at a frat party or bar before you had sex. When I used tinder after college that took so much less game.

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poppy_blu · 2018-12-20T00:48:56+00:00

Need you to specify what “this way” is.

emailpassword12 · 2018-12-19T23:19:12+00:00

In the last five years women have changed. Become angry, demanding, less fun, bitchy,

I am 45.

MGTOWtoday · 2018-12-20T03:14:25+00:00

I graduated from high school in the mid 90’s. It was common place in my experience that almost everyone had an exclusive boyfriend/girlfriend before you graduated. The only ones who didn’t were 2’s-3’s or lower. Having sex was a big deal and a big step in a relationship, typically you waited until a few months into the relationship first before it happened. You never dated more than 1 person at a time. The only people who had a large N count were the slutty girls and there were only about 5-6 of them in the entire school out of a school population of 2,000 students. This was a public high school. Feminism was also unheard of unless you were a weirdo who read radical left wing politics. No one did in my high school except myself and 2 other students. No one cared if you were gay, I knew of 2 students who were out of the closet and a few more that I was pretty sure who weren’t. Nobody talked about social justice, race, rape or “the patriarchy”. The closest thing to social media we had were the few rich kids who had Windows 95 and wasted time trying to get free porn in AOL chat rooms.

[deleted] · 2018-12-23T02:54:07+00:00

Yeah, incels were almost unheard of in the 80s. Now, they make up anywhere between 1% and 20% of the male population, depending on how loose you are with your definition.

TriadFamilyTimes · 2018-12-23T05:43:07+00:00

The internet changed how dating worked. In about every way possible. It changed what people were looking for, it changed how they were looking for them, it gave them access to people outside of their immediate social circles, friend groups, employment environments, etc. Long distance relationships were relatively rare back when everyone was communicating via phone and physical letter only. That was like how the majority of the US was in 1999. You dated people you saw in front of you, if you were single and looking you went to places where single people were or you ran into someone living your life and ran with it.

I mean like, video dating existed. You sent in a VHS tape to be seen by prospective partners and this was in a time when there wasn't really any guidelines for anyone on how to act so the results were fucking hilarious and sometimes insane. Phone dating banks, get connected to a random person also looking for love in another city. People used technology as it was available but like speed dating and all those lovely things that are mostly gone from this world or replaced by much higher tech versions were not very widespread and often were where you went when looking locally didn't pan out for whatever reason.

Now it's completely different. Hookup culture itself is less than 15 years old. I graduated in 2003 and we didn't have smartphones yet when I went to college. Shit facebook was still for .edu email addresses only back then. I forget when Match.com and Eharmony went up and got big, but it wasn't before people found Craigslist personals and turned it into a hellscape of unprotected irresponsible ugly godlessness. My first year at UT finding girls I went to school with online involved getting their AIM handle from them in person or seeing if they'd heard of facebook yet.

Title	Older people of this sub, has dating always been this way or have you noticed any changes recently?
Author	MusicalMarceline
Upvotes	41
Comments	195
Date	December 19, 2018 9:09 PM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/a7qm3f/older_people_of_this_sub_has_dating_always_been/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/older-people-of-this-sub-has-dating-always-been.258463 https://theredarchive.com/post/258463

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