Jack Kerouac said it was a shame how boys and girls in America have such a sad time together nowadays…and that was in 1949. I think if Jack Kerouac got into a time machine and arrived in 2024, and happened to be shown a smart phone with Tinder and Bumble on it, he would jump off the nearest bridge or walk in front of a bus. Or, to really drive home the point, in front of a self-driving car.
Answer me this question: when was the last time you slow danced? Who’s wedding was it, and did the venue reopen after COVID? Or was is it your prom?
If you are under 40, you might not realize that slow dancing was a common occurrence for a hundred prior years, until about 15 years ago. If you don’t believe me, watch a rom-com from the 90s like When Harry Met Sally. Or Harvey, from the 1950s. Or talk to me and I can tell you about the halcyon days of 10, 20 years ago when, if there was a live band at a bar or gala, there would be 4-5 slow dances, and that was part of the whole evening…figuring out which girls were single and asking them to dance when a slow song came on. For me the last time was the gala for the Boys and Girls Club of Albany in 2018 and the girl’s name was Christina and I didn’t know her that night and we never hung out after that (her choice, but that’s the point, you could just ask a girl to dance and it wasn’t super high pressure because it was common).
Slow dancing was the ultimate euphemism. You were as close as you could be in public, feeling if your partner had rhythm, smelling their pheromones, feeling the texture of their skin, smelling their hair, looking into the irises of their soul.
When you slow danced, you knew whether you wanted to go further. It was Practice.
You can’t dance over a dating app. But you also can’t dance at a bar anymore, because slow dance music isn’t played at bars. And you can’t dance at a dance, because there aren’t dances anymore.
There isn’t much that is romantic anymore.
Statements like “there isn’t much that is romantic anymore” get me in trouble with the women I would be dating.
Even though it cuts both ways and men are equally, if not more to blame…nonetheless if I say “nobody is romantic anymore” women tend to hear “oh here is this asshole getting mad because women don’t want to have it as their life’s goal to be barefoot and pregnant while the man goes to the office and sleeps with the secretary.”
I think this might stem from a narrow view of the meaning of the word “romantic.” Words change over time and I think if you were to ask a young single person what romantic means, they might say “oh like candles and going out on a date where the music is low and the guy pulls out a chair and it’s all old fashioned.”
They might add, “it’s a whole vibe.”
Which, I guess, it can be a whole vibe, but really, “romantic” need not be an all or nothing characteristic, and it certainly doesn’t need to be limited to dating.
Here are three examples of things I consider romantic that aren’t about sex:
1) I like to boil a kettle of water and pour it into a tea pot I’ve owned for 9 years with two black tea bags and one lavender tea bag, and float an orange slice, and then lay out a red paisley place mat and drink the pot in small cupfuls over the course of three hours while I read at my dining room table.
2) I like to bathe, then shave and iron a three-piece suit, and go to a bar with jazz with a Moleskinne notebook with a black pen and order an Old Fashioned with Seagrams V.O. and a splash of club soda and mix the cocktail with a the stirrer-straw and then let it sit for one minute to “age” before I take a sip.
3) Even if I’m working remotely, or working on writing rather than salaried work, I like to shave and don slacks and a button-up shirt, play jazz, and make a cocktail to “get into character” before I begin a cerebral task.
What makes these things “romantic?” I think part of it is that none of the little things I do preparatory to whatever the task I have before me are necessary. They are all superfluous. I could read without 8 minutes of tea making and then supping. I could go to a bar without bathing and shaving and then writing in a notebook. I could fill in my spreadsheets and read my work reports without donning slacks and a button up shirt.
But what would that leave? Reading, going to a bar, and working. Like a robot would do those things. Because robots are efficient to a fault. I imagine Data from Star Trek asking Geordi LaForge:
”Commander, why do humans find it necessary to ask about weather, or to observe details of a room’s architecture, when they are within close proximity of another human? Would it not be more efficient to save one’s breath and simply state that one would like their interlocutor to hand them a wrench, or to copulate?”
Yes, it would be more efficient. But efficiency is not the measure of Good Living. I’d go so far as to say that efficiency is a measure of how quickly one is Racing Toward Death. Efficiency is robotic. Efficiency is what one employs when they are competing against time.
I would prefer not to constantly compete against time. For one thing, time will always win against an organic creature like me, whose existence is very much defined by time from the moment I am born until the moment I die.
Romance is a protest against time. Romance slows time, or our perception of it. You light a candle, you eat a meal that it took time to cook but which provides only marginally more nutrients than a frozen/microwaved meal, you lay out placemats and make a cocktail, you play music that you don’t need to hear to digest. You do these things, and they make you different than your dog or your cat that consumes the food placed in front of them like an automaton sucking up sustenance without pleasure. Because you are capable of controlling your environment; you are capable of controlling your perception of time, while a cat or a dog is not.
Romantic gestures are signals of interpersonal respect, because one person acts in an inefficient way to prolong their time with another person in a superfluous way, and the other person accepts the prolongation of the experience superfluously because they enjoy spending time with the first person.
First-date dinners, slow dancing, telephone conversations…these increasingly rare experiences are indicative of a general aversion to romance. Because romance is “a whole vibe” and “I ain’t got time for that.”
And yet, it seems like people do crave human connections and regret that they can’t experience them. Dating does still exist, and lots of single people still envy other people who are in relationships. Dating apps are a dime a dozen and thousands of people are on them for every 10-mile radius superimposed over any particular portion of a google map. It is still a general “goal of two Ones who share proximity on the physical plane to gain a double Oneness on the metaphysical plane,” as Johnny 5 told Benjamin in Short Circuit 2.
The problem is, most people are Doing It Wrong!
I mentioned as a Facebook update the other day that I went out on Saturday to Ryan’s Wake in Troy, and it was like having a martini at a mannequin factory. That’s not a dig at Ryan’s Wake, or the people there. There is a higher concentration, and a larger number, of good looking people at Ryan’s Wake than any bar in Troy. It’s just that all of those people just Stand There, I don’t think they play any music, and there is no cultural common ground like slow dances to bring any of the single people together.
And it does NOT seem to me that most of the people at a place like Ryan’s Wake are out because they want to be left alone. It doesn’t seem like they are out to blow off steam either. If you want to blow off steam there are cheaper places to get drunk and be loud. You go to Ryan’s Wake because you want to look your best and be in the place where other people are looking their best and you hope maybe you might meet some of those people. And then you will be someone who looks their best talking to someone who you think looks good. And then maybe you will talk to them and Do A Shot and then one of you might Ask The Other One For Their Cell Phone Number and later you might text each other and decide to get a drink on a Wednesday night and then you might have a couple of drinks and Have Sex With Each Other and then you are Dating.
Guys and gals have such a sad time together these days.
I think the problem is technology. Guys and gals are both competing against it.
It wasn’t that long ago that women were competing, dating wise, against air-brushed Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition models. And then they were competing against porn actresses. And now even porn actresses are competing against AI girlfriends that you can program to look however you want and say whatever you want them to say…but you can’t touch them or feel their presence. And men have been competing against machines since the time of John Henry and the steam engine minimizing their productive value, and now there are sex machines for women to go along with the porn for men, and nobody needs the other sex to get off. And there are Instagram and Facebook to highlight the best parts of your “friend”s lives, like they are existential successes and you existentially suck. And there are Tinder and Bumble and Hinge matches so you can have a “connection” if you scroll through one or two thousand people…so you don’t feel isolated.
But it turns out a “match” on a dating site isn’t really a connection, in the way that two people in close proximity can feel that they share a connection (like, for example, if they slow dance). And it is hard to remember that all of those Facebook and Instagram people are only showing you the best parts of their lives. So people feel isolated and not doing as well as other people, and their electronic “connections” are bullshit, and they go to the bar to be physically close to other human beings.
But then, at the bar (remember there is no such thing as a dance anymore, and certainly not slow dances) there are no “conventions” or situations to bring people together, because of the general suspicion of romance.
I was struck, on Saturday at Ryan’s Wake, by the way that so many girls and guys in their groups just stood there, arms kind of wrapped around their own chests like cold birds protecting themselves, yet with longing looks on their faces, making eye contact with other people in other groups, and then quickly looking down at the floor.
Probably I should have gotten up and walked over and inserted myself into a group of young women standing alone for hours and made up some conversation and suffered the slings and arrows of derision by their friends, because I was out there to meet girls like them and didn’t do anything to make that happen either.
But that’s a pretty tough “ask,” especially when I’ve done that before and been scowled at by the girl and all her friends, and seen friends try to do that and get scowled at by the group.
If only there were some place where there was music, and every now and then a slow song. Because then I would just ask a girl to dance. It is much easier to talk to a girl when you are dancing than when you are surrounded by scowling friends. And then, I could ask for her phone number, and maybe talk to her on the phone, and see if she wanted to get dinner at an Italian restaurant with candles, before which we might both bathe and wear Nice Clothes, implicitly acknowledging that we enjoy passing time together, rather than speeding through it as efficiently as possible.
“Dream on, Johnny,” as Johnny 5 said, in Short Circuit 2.
No, there is almost no room for slow dancing and first-date candles and meeting-in-person in the modern dating scene. And that is why boys and girls in America have such a sad time together, today.