My friend sent me this link about how casual dating should be encouraged and it got me thinking: is there a lack of casual dating in the DC area? Is it replaced by dates with expectations for both parties with respect to upcoming committed relationships based on one or two dates? And if so, is that necessarily wrong or bad?
For one, I agree that this is an issue and that there isn’t enough of the “let’s see where this goes” mentality at the begining of a “relationship”, but I feel like I need to qualify the hell out of that previous statement. For one, I think that age plays a huge role in this. For example, in college, casual dating is almost impossible because everything is so intense in college. Relationships begin and break in hours simply because everyone is so close to everyone else. And even casual hookups are a totally different world because there is no dating at all involved. It’s a different species altogether.
But after college, from that period of 22-27 I think that there’s a ton of casual dating that takes place…especially in big cities. We’re out of college and want to appreciate our freedoms. We don’t see a need to necessarily label or corner ourselves with someone else. Once we get past the 26/27 year-old range, then yes, casual dating changes and has many more expectations tacked to it from the get go.
I think that the bigger problem is more communication. Like, if we could just start off a date or any sort of encounter without the problems of communication or the lack thereof.
One of my solutions to this problem is the concept of “hanging out” rather than going on a date unless I’m actually super-interested in the girl. If it’s a date then it is serious and there are expectations. Not marriage or kids or picking out colors for the living room, but expectations in the sense of when the person should call, or what a person “really” meant when they said they had a good time, or what a kiss meant, etc. That’s when it really gets tricky, I think.