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Location is a major factor. Midwest, South and very conservative, rural areas, church or religious culture still plays a role in dating and relationships.
Yes, I suppose it is.
And, "back in the day", that was the case- in certain areas.
The power of the "church" was not even close to universal, even 100 years ago. Believe it or not, at least one or two couples met through other means back in the day.
And, "back in the day", that was the case- in certain areas.
The power of the "church" was not even close to universal, even 100 years ago. Believe it or not, at least one or two couples met through other means back in the day.
I didn't say all couples met through the church, but that church, the cultural practice and custom, still affected a large portion of dating and marriage dynamics. It means Jimmy could have met Jane in high school, but both Jimmy and Jane likely attended church, or are part of a culture that encourages religious behavior. Jimmy could be Lutheran and Jane Methodist, but they were still raised in a particular religious culture that encourages or perpetuates certain gender roles and relationship principles.
Sure, the strictness of this cultural norm varied throughout the country, but it was still prevalent. Replace school or church with any other social situation "back then." Meeting through friends... who were likely Christian and brought up in the same way. Social customs leaned very conservative, and gender roles were predominant.
My husband's parents met at a lake. Both after college. His father was raised in a very religious and conservative household, and his mother was brought up Methodist, but not as religious or strict. They were still expected to marry someone with "good Christian values" no matter where they met. And this is in California.
One doesn't need to attend regular or weekly church services to be affected by religious culture and practices.
Sure, the strictness of this cultural norm varied throughout the country, but it was still prevalent. Replace school or church with any other social situation "back then." Meeting through friends... who were likely Christian and brought up in the same way. Social customs leaned very conservative, and gender roles were predominant.
My husband's parents met at a lake. Both after college. His father was raised in a very religious and conservative household, and his mother was brought up Methodist, but not as religious or strict. They were still expected to marry someone with "good Christian values" no matter where they met. And this is in California.
One doesn't need to attend regular or weekly church services to be affected by religious culture and practices.
This is assuming that people are "Christian" at the very least, I suppose?
I'm a confident woman, and while I am introverted and picky about how I spend my time in social situations, I didn't lack for attention. It wasn't like I was desperate. I wasn't. Far from it. I was approached by men of all ages, even with three kids in tow. If I *wanted* to, I could have cold approached, gotten numbers, hit up men out in the wild. I was engaged in activities through meet up and all that jazz.
I just didn't pursue men this way. It wasn't my M.O., and the vast majority of these activities did not lead to me engaging with available men or the type of men I was into. They were either married (photography clubs and atheist/agnostic meetups) or much too young or not my type. The vast majority of my social circle is made up of married women and moms. So if I wasn't approached by men when I was out doing my thing, the other option was the bar or whatever, and I wasn't a bar person.
For me, my type, online dating was a fabulous approach. I could easily screen and weed people out. I knew who was available, their age range, and very important deal-breakers that I want to know from the get-go. The idea of chatting it up with someone I meet out and about, sensing some chemistry, and then finding out there are serious compatibility issues, sounds like a massive waste of energy and time. So I totally roll my eyes at the suggestion to just meet people the "old fashioned" way, because it's more organic. Uh huh. Until I find out the person is a racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic *******. Then, no, no amount of chemistry or attraction is going to right all of those wrongs.
Good thing with online dating I can know these things and more before anything gets started. Yeah, I'm picky as hell, and I own it.
And that's fine. But the idea that people who use online dating as a tool are or may be desperate or lacking in something, is erroneous and fallacious. (this sentiment is expressed quite a bit here) There are many who have no problem finding their type out in the wild, in person, and that's fine. My type fits a specific niche, and there was/is no shortage of this type online in the areas I have lived and used online dating.
A very liberal atheist living in Atlanta? It would be hard-pressed for me to find another skeptic/nontheist in the South. That was just one area that was important to me when I was dating. If this wasn't a huge deal for me then I'd imagine my dating pool would have expanded quite a bit. But it was/is important to me, hence my using a tool such as online dating to screen for this important issue.
Online dating serves as a useful, effective, and convenient tool. No, I couldn't buy into the fanciful thinking of dating of years' past with the words of wisdom to just "go out and meet people." (how would this workd for a child-free person living in the Midwest or South where marrying and having children are standard practice? What are the chances of these people actually meeting like-minded individuals? Slim.) In this day and age, people are realizing they don't have to marry for the reasons that past generations married.
People are realizing they don't need to marry someone that they settled for, or because they're a friend of the family, or came from a family of good religious ethic. They don't have to marry someone due to a surprise pregnancy. Many are choosing to wait, if they decide to at all. Women no longer need to marry for security or cultural customs, to be a help meets. More and more women have voices in what they want for their relationship or marriage. Relationships in many progressive areas are becoming more egalitarian.
As an aside, a particular observation sparked my interest in studying relationship dynamics and marriage/dating through the ages. While visiting my exH's family, and staying with his grandparents over the holidays one year, he commented that his nana is a Democrat, but pops is a hard core Republican, and that while she had her own views, she had to keep quiet. She wasn't "allowed" to have strong opinions, of if she did, she couldn't voice them.
Yeah, **** that noise. Nope. Back then, women didn't have a choice, a real, honest, choice in the type of men they married. They were expected to marry a good Christian man from a good family. Sure, he needed to be "nice," the kind of nice many roll their eyes at because it reeks of misogyny and patriarchy. But it isn't really "nice." And this isn't some unique, exception. This is standard for older generations. This is a generation that believed certain things didn't need to be said, and couples avoided issues. It wasn't like women had much of a voice, either. The culture, by and large, didn't allow for that.
So for me, compatibility goes way beyond a dude being nice, caring, dependable, outgoing, attractive... the typical cliche stuff. Because those aren't inherent markers for compatibility for me. A lot of people fit this description. If that's all I was looking for, I wouldn't have needed to use online dating.
Yup which is why I stated that if a person prefers men within a specific niche or isn't very social(introverted) that I can see why old works for them. My friends tend to date men that are common enough(Educated, black, attractive, fit, religious, into sports and night life, makes an average income). This isn't as difficult in the cities I've lived in. For someone that is more specific or where there type is more difficult to meet in person then old will obviously work better.
As for the rest of your comment-as I said these are my friends beliefs about old-so I'm not sure if your response to me is about their beliefs?? I can't argue about their beliefs regarding old since these are not mine. To be honest it's hard for me to have an exact belief about it since outside of this website and the white people I work with or know of-no one very close to me uses it and since i haven't I cant really form an opinion on it. All I can say is to each their own, if it works for you then that's really all that matters. Meeting people in person works for me so this is what I do, what others do is up to them.
As for my friends beliefs-as ignorant as these beliefs are, this what they truly believe and this is why I have a difficult time believing they would do old on the sly like al joad suggested. I also don't believe that every person under 30 uses old to meet people as al joad suggests either. People really should do whatever it is they believe will yield the best results for them and not care what others choose to do or their beliefs about what they do.
Unless you weren't involved in church, or you were from an area where "church" wasn't the be all/end all.
At least where I'm from, this really didn't come into play with "past generations".
That's true--my grandfather was from a secular Jewish family and my grandmother was Irish Catholic. I have no idea how they met, but it certainly wasn't church.
This is assuming that people are "Christian" at the very least, I suppose?
Guess I can't relate.
Well, in the context of older generations, the 40s, 90+% of the U.S. population was either Protestant or Catholic, and in the 70s it was still quite high in the upper 80s. That wasn't to say every Christian attended church weekly, but that the vast majority identified with either Protestantism or Catholicism, and our culture and social expectations and standards reflected this.
My husband grew up going to church on extremely rare occasions. His parents were/are fairly progressive with respect to their Christian beliefs, but they, mostly his mother, still had an ideal in her head about relationships and who he'd marry, largely due to being a product of her own cultural upbringing in a predominantly conservative culture.
She was shocked to learn he's atheist, and said "I didn't want to raise you to be atheist." She quickly got over the shock, but yeah, even quasi-religious people have thoughts and attitudes that are simply ingrained in our culture.
My mom is not religious, but she was still brought up in a culture, in So Cal no less, to "keep her legs closed" and her brothers were expected to marry their girlfriends if there was a surprise pregnancy. These customs or traditions weren't plucked out of thin air. My father wasn't chastised or criticized for marrying a black women for no reason. He was criticized for his choice of partner due to his cultural upbringing, and there are religious views that "support" it, albeit fallacious and erroneous, but people still use their brand of belief to support their bigotry.
Church/culture/religious views... whatever. It impacted every aspect of people's lives, and this includes religious beliefs in all flavors and forms.
I'm not sure why so many guys buy the whole "If you're confident, you can do anything" nonsense that women peddle. Women are just as shallow, if not more shallow than men.
Right? That "be confident" stuff has been volleyed around at least as long as the "write her a personalized message" stuff guys are told to use for responding to OLD profiles. Everyone's confident. Great. What now?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Joad
Plenty of people with no skills have jobs. They're just low-skill jobs. I assume the dating "skills" you lack involve looks and status. You can still meet women online, they just won't be Kate Upton or Jennifer Lawrence, but you have to start somewhere and build your confidence. And despite what you wrote in your other post, confidence matters a TON for guys trying to meet girls. It's every bit as important as looks or money. The fact that you believe otherwise is a big part of why you're obviously struggling in the dating game.
Actually, there are plenty of women amongst the pool of women who use OLD with so-so looks and antagonistic attitudes like the two women you mention. Otherwise, they wouldn't be using OLD. That's not the issue. Liking them and having reason to do so is. Confidence matters, but no doubt you have to pass the eye test first. Words don't jump off of an OLD profile, so obviously, it's not confidence that's going to get you a response right off the bat. If that was all that mattered, my only message from a woman the last time I put my profile on Match to doodle away time wouldn't have been from a chubby, chain smoking 30-something who should have an idea that we're just not going to match up and a 40-something sista. I guess my confidence was so amazing (my profile is pretty sweet, when active, TBH) that those two just skipped over that part where I wanted a big family. If we had crossed paths in person, neither of them would have been brave enough to approach in person--mainly because I wouldn't have looked their way.
The explanations given for the shifts in trends are actually plausible.
It's funny, though. I'm the oldest sibling of four.. My three younger siblings are millenials, I'm not. Yet I'm the one who meet my spouse online. One of my brothers started dating his wife when they were in high school (though they did not marry till after grad school). The other met his doing college athletics; she was a pitcher, he was an outfielder.My sister meet her husband through a mutual friend.
Looking back to previous generations, my paternal grandparents did indeed meet at church. It wasn't a strict evangelical thing, It was simply the cornerstone of social culture in a rural agricultural area. It was where people who lived on the surrounding farms gathered, because there was no organized town nearby, just miles upon miles of cropland. So the church was the community, with lots of social activities. This was in the late 1920s. Then there was a war, and he left for that and she went to work in a munitions plant, and they married when he got back.
My maternal grandparents meet via my grandma's older sister's husband. It was a setup... he brought home a buddy who worked with him at the cement mill for dinner, because he wanted to introduce them and see if they hit it off. This was in the mid-1950s.
My parents meet in the 1970s. They were in a bar with their respective groups of friends, and my mom hit on him.
Last edited by TabulaRasa; 03-19-2016 at 10:45 PM..
The explanations given for the shifts in trends are actually plausible.
It's funny, though. I'm the oldest sibling of four.. My three younger siblings are millenials, I'm not. Yet I'm the one who meet my spouse online. One of my brothers started dating his wife when they were in high school (though they did not marry till after grad school). The other met his doing college athletics; she was a pitcher, he was an outfielder.My sister meet her husband through a mutual friend.
Looking back to previous generations, my paternal grandparents did indeed meet at church. It wasn't a strict evangelical thing, It was simply the cornerstone of social culture in a rural agricultural area. It was where people who lived on the surrounding farms gathered, because there was no organized town nearby, just miles upon miles of cropland. So the church was the community, with lots of social activities. This was in the late 1920s. Then there was a war, and he left for that and she went to work in a munitions plant, and they married when he got back.
My maternal grandparents meet via my grandma's older sister's husband. It was a setup... he brought home a buddy who worked with him at the cement mill for dinner, because he wanted to introduce them and see if they hit it off. This was in the mid-1950s.
My parents meet in the 1970s. They were in a bar with their respective groups of friends, and my mom hit on him.
Nice
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If we had crossed paths in person, neither of them would have been brave enough to approach in person--mainly because I wouldn't have looked their way.
