According this recent New York Times Style section article, the end of courtship is nigh. It’s dead. Gone. Buried. Mourned. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are now living in a post-courtship dating world where instead of the traditional dinner-and-a-movie, you get a “last-minute text to tag along.” The article posits that these “texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other ‘non-dates’ [are] leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.”
Writer Alex Williams interviews an assortment daters and experts and cobbles together various hypothesis as to why “traditional courtship” is biting the dust, especially for millennials: “Asynchronous communication” (classified as text, e-mail, IM and Twitter) absolving one of the need to be charming; hookup culture and the confusion about intimacy which it has spurned; online dating and the accompanying FOMO (fear of missing out); Facebook as a replacement for all the things one would normally learn about a person on a first date; the “mancession” and “the end of men”; confusion about gender roles. Etcetera. Keep reading »
