Tell me about your dating experience.
I didn’t start dating until college. And then after college, I dated a little but I met your dad in 1981 when I was 22 or 23, so I didn’t have much experience dating. We dated for 4 years and in 1985, we tied the knot. I’ve been happily married ever since.
Do you think the fact that you had fewer relationships and got serious quickly with dad had more to do with the times or your personalities?
Hookups or as we used to call them, one-night stands, weren’t uncommon at the time — at least within my group of friends in DC. It was also pretty normal to casually date a couple of people at a time.
I experimented with that briefly but realized it didn’t work for me and sought out something more steady. I remember trying to date two guys in my early twenties and it just really stressed me out. I was like “I can’t do this.” It was the first and only time in my life I broke out in hives.
We definitely differ there! What was it that made you so uncomfortable with the situation — did you feel like you had to lie to them about not seeing other people?
I wasn’t blatantly lying to either of the but there’s lying straight out and then there’s lying by omission, and I really just didn’t feel comfortable hiding things from either of them. Neither relationship was particularly serious — I can’t even remember their names or what they did — but it felt very awkward. So I stopped.
Describe a typical date night.
Well in college it was going to a party or hanging out at some bar. No one had money or cars and there wasn’t much else to do in the small New England town where my school was located. And then post-college, your dad took me out to eat all the time and I love to eat, so that was part of the attraction. He was a yuppie who made substantially more than I did, so it was nice to be taken care of in that sense. We were living in DC at the time.
I had just moved there but he had grown up in the area, so he knew all the spots and had a really solid network of friends. One of our favorite things to do on a Sunday morning was to go get food somewhere and then watch a triple feature of Chinese movies with English subtitles at this little theater in Roslyn, VA. Every Sunday they would play one action film, one historical drama, and one romance. It was a great way to kill time on a cold day.
How wholesome and cute! Being a young urbanite in the 2020s, people are very casual about sex — although it varies from person to person. Did you and your girlfriends abide by any dating rules, like, “never have sex on the first date?”
I suspect that it was pretty much the same. If you felt comfortable with somebody, then there was nothing wrong with having sex the night you went on a first date. There’s nothing shameful about that at all. I think the more important question has always been, “do I want to be with this person?” If the answer was, “yes” there was no reason to hold back from sex on a first date, as long as I felt comfortable.
But everybody is different and I suspect there are people that aren’t as comfortable having sex on the first date. There’s no one-size-fits guide to this kind of stuff. I guess the stereotype in more conservative circles is that if you have sex on the first date, the man won’t see you as “marriage material,” but I had sex with your dad the first night I met him and here we are nearly 40 years later.
How did sex and dating culture change when AIDS came onto the scene?
It was a really scary time. Obviously I was in a serious relationship at the time so it didn’t personally affect my dating life all that much but it definitely put a halt to the free love era of the 60s and 70s. People who were dating more casually felt more of a pressure to partner up with somebody in a more serious way to lower their chance of contracting the virus.
And if people were still out there playing the field, I got the sense they were being a lot more careful than before, in terms of using protection and getting tested regularly. It’s bad enough to worry about pregnancy, let alone a disease that’s going to kill you because back then there really wasn’t a lot to be done.
So little was known about the disease and there was a lot of stigma surrounding it. No one in my close circle was directly affected, but there were a couple of people I know who contracted it and passed away very young. It was heartbreaking.
Wow. In a different way, I feel like COVID had a similar effect. Obviously the stakes weren’t as high but quarantine definitely kind of forced your hand in choosing one person to hunker down with. That’s how I ended up in a serious relationship myself. Before there had been infinite options. How do you think you would handle dating in your twenties in this age of dating apps and social media?
I imagine I would find myself pretty overwhelmed. As I said, I’m really a one man kinda gal so I don’t really see myself taking full advantage of the unlimited dating pool that seems to have been created through the internet. On the one hand, it strikes me as pretty cool that you have the option to connect with people outside of your own little bubble. I look at some people my age and you get the sense that they are in a marriage of convenience.
As in they hit a certain age, felt the societal pressure to settle down and have kids, and chose the best option they had amongst a small pool. They married more out of obligation than love, and it shows. So I think being able to connect with people online based on shared interests or life goals is a really positive thing.
But on the other hand, social media and all that seems very performative and there’s a level of transactionality that comes along with swiping left or right on a picture of someone versus meeting them and having a real life conversation to determine in you guys are a good fit or not.
What was porn like back in the day and what are your thoughts on how the over-saturation of porn today is affecting the brains of young people?
I guess there were the Playboy and Penthouse magazines, and if you were really seeking it out, there were these underground viewings of x-rated films in the theaters. But I never engaged with any of that stuff. I don’t know the extent to how widespread porn is these days but based on conversations we’ve had, it seems that porn keeps getting more extreme and violent and that’s pretty disturbing.
I don’t hold moral judgements against people who watch or participate in porn, but I get the sense that the industry is very exploitative, especially of young women. And I don’t imagine constantly exposing yourself to porn does much good for setting realistic expectations of sex or for fostering intimacy in relationships .
Closing thoughts?
Things seemed far less complicated in my day and honestly, I’m glad I was spared from having to navigate the complicated dating ecosystem of the 21st century.
Jules
Based in Brooklyn, Jules has dedicated her twenties towards harnessing her pussy power, exploring the muse, whore, and wild woman archetypes along the way. When not blogging, you can find her sweating the toxins out in a hot yoga class or sipping a matcha latte at a pretentious coffee shop, whilst she scribbles away in her journal.
