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alot more bushes in the promise-land.... back in the 70's
a different world back in the 70's and 80's - if you wanted to ask a girl out-say in high school,,,you call her house on a rotary phone-and most houses just had one phone-centrally located so everyone else could hear- anyways, you call the girls house, to ask her out-her father answers,,and sternly says "she's not here" or she's doing her homework,,or "she's too young to date- dont bother calling again....even if she's 17
whole different world today.......sooooooooooooooo much easier
Are you talking about Maine? On the West Coast houses had phones on each floor. I'm told that by the 70's some teenagers had phones in their own room, in addition to the phone in the parents' room and the phone in the kitchen on the main floor. Few people were phone-deprived back then. Now back in the 40's, I imagine that was a 1 phone per household time, In the 1st half of the 20th Century, people had "party lines", meaning a phone line shared by neighbors. So you might pick up the phone to call someone, and the neighbor would be on the line. You had to wait until they were done, or if it was an emergency, ask them to free up the line.
Lots of guys were, and still are, too shy to approach women. So women did (and still do, in those cases) the approaching. I don't think much has changed, except that technology has evolved past the land-line phone.
What would be more interesting would be to go WAY back, to when couples who wanted to date had to have chaperones. When did that die out, does anyone know?
I read that in the Victorian era, all a guy had to do was give a woman an intense stare, and if she was up for it, she'd go with him to wherever he'd arranged to have sex. No words exchanged. The only approach was the creepy stare with eye contact. She knew what that meant. If she wasn't interested, she'd ignore it. If she was interested, she'd go with him.
Chaperone concept is cultural to a degree. You may still find certain insular type ethnic or religious (primarily) communities that do so as standard operating procedure.
I think for average Americans it likely dissipated mostly in 50s-60s. I recall talking to parents about their 'dating life' as first generation Americans form eastern Europe in large Midwestern city in pre WW2 and post WW2 years, and that they didn't 'date' per se, they all went out as groups of say 6-8 neighborhood kids in same age range to local events / parties/ dances etc... and eventually they would pair off with most compatible.
One thing I find ironic with technology - that you made me think of - is that land line phones were /are actually better to have an in depth conversation with someone, rather than a cell phone.
Victorian Era sounds fun! I'd like to 'Mesmer-eyes' my way to a young maidens heart with my green eyes down by the old oak in the meadow near the covered bridge...the 'eyes' have it. And of course, unhealthy corsets = built in foreplay!
I think I was in the last era that had land line conversations with girls that I liked. Had facebook and text been around I have no idea how I would've made it.
Where I grew up in the US, we had party lines in the 70s.
In the 80s, one phone per house was the norm. Sometimes a second phone in a teenagers room, but it was on the same line. You could pick up the phone in the kitchen and hear the conversation the teen was having on their bedroom phone. A different line for the teen was something we heard of rich people having, but I never knew anyone who did.
Another thing I had almost forgotten: Calling someone outside of your city was very expensive! It cost about what international calls cost now, just to talk to someone 30 miles away. This was a major factor in LDRs. There was no email or skype, so you communicated with your sweetie by snail mail and by these $$ phone calls.
This was also a big deal for college students who lived in a house with other students. There would be one phone, shared by the 3 or 4 students who lived there. When the phone bill came (on paper!) each month, everyone would mark which calls they had made, and someone would have to add up how much everyone owed and collect the money. For roomies with LDRs, this would be $100-200 a month, which is maybe $500 a month in modern money. Deadbeat housemates would move out owing a thousand dollars in 2013 money, and bankrupt their 'friends'.
It was really nice. People connected with each other. Today people are so disconnected from each other and don't even realize it. Oh well... those times are long gone now.
Lots of great comments, so I won't repeat them. However, one big factor in dating prior to current technology is that you dated from a much smaller pool, you didn't have the whole world at your doorstep. As a youth, you would choose from someone at your school or where you worked part-time, or maybe through a friend. You weren't making connections halfway across the country or world. So in a sense it was easier, because people weren't so ridiculously picky as they seem to be today, thinking that they have hundreds of options or that someone better will always be coming along.
My high school had a French Immersion component so students in that program would come from all over the city to the school, and it was almost odd that they had a different social circle because of where they lived versus where they went to high school.
I found dating to be much more straightforward in the late 80s and 90s. Heck, life in general seems simpler because people communicated and went out, they didn't all sit separately in their homes, communicating by text about the minutiae of everyday life that was never important enough to care about, let alone share with your FB friends and Twitter followers. What you ate for lunch, or were thinking at any given moment wasn't a concern to anyone. No one needed to know those things. I don't know, it just seemed more meaningful and had more depth than today.
Chivalry actualy paid off, imagine that. Women were more feminine, innocent and much less aggressive. Men were more masculine in general terms. The entire dating world was much more defined, as in you knew exactly what to expect and what was expected of you.
I am sure it depends but from what I heard from my parents and my wife's parents, the late 70s and early 80s were some wild times. Some older people I've talked to said that by the 90s and on it was almost like Victorian Era times by comparison to the anything goes 70s and early 80s.
Something tells me that there was a big counter-counter cultural shift brought on by the Reagan administration that was also engineered by some higher ups who hated the free spirit of the late 60s and 70s. By the mid to late 80s, that All American consumerist culture of the 50s was back.
Anyone notice that most of the mid to late 80s movies and music had a nostalgia for the 50s? It's similar to how there was a 60s/70s craze for a while during the late 90s, early 2000s and how today there is a big 80s craze?
I am sure it depends but from what I heard from my parents and my wife's parents, the late 70s and early 80s were some wild times. Some older people I've talked to said that by the 90s and on it was almost like Victorian Era times by comparison to the anything goes 70s and early 80s.
We can thank HIV for that.
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