Modern Dating: A Field Guide - Softcover

Atik, Chiara

 
9780373892778: Modern Dating: A Field Guide
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0373892772 ISBN 13: 9780373892778
Verlag: Harlequin Nonfiction, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

From the creators of the popular online dating site howaboutwe.com comes the definitive guide for navigating the modern dating world.

The single woman is having a moment. In the worlds of work, personal finances, and education, women are more successful than ever before. When it comes to dating, they're happy to take their time exploring lots of different relationships before deciding if they want to settle down. Women today, like the generations of women before them, want to fall in love. But they want it to happen organically, at its own pace, and with the right person.

Rather than listing a set of "rules," Modern Dating offers advice on modern challenges, like how to send a relatively unembarrassing sext, how to create a failproof first date idea, and how to make sure you're getting into a relationship for the right reasons. Instead of telling you How to Win a Husband in Just 3 Easy Steps!, it will gently guide you through all the triumphs and pitfalls of what dating is actually like, from one-night stands, to confusing texts and emails, to your first online date.

Frank, funny, and totally relatable, this is a book that really gets at how women are dating today—the ideal travel companion for your dating life. The only rule is that there are no rules, but this book will be there for guidance, or just for laughs, every step of the way.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chiara Atik is a playwright and screenwriter. Her play Poor Clare, was the recipient of the 2022 American Theatre Critics Association's New Play Award, the LA Drama Critics Circle winner for Best New Play, and a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. Other plays include Five Times in One Night, Bump, and the comedy Women, a modern re-telling of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which was a New York Times Critic's Pick for Comedy and won the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Chiara is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theater. She splits her time between New York and Los Angeles.  

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YOU SAY "SINGLE" LIKE IT'S A BAD THING

There are a billion and one reasons why you might be single. Maybe you just got out of a serious relationship. Maybe you've decided to take a break from men for a while. Maybe taking a break from men is the last thing you want, and you can't imagine committing to just one. And of course, maybe you do want a relationship, but you just aren't in one right now.

Whatever the reason, the point is, you're single right now, and whether it's by circumstance or design, you might as well enjoy it as best you can. Because being single, at least in the way women get to be single today, is a luxury our mothers and grandmothers didn't have.

For centuries and centuries, a woman's lot in life was based on the supposition that she would get married, and the sooner the better. In the Middle Ages, a girl would live in her parents' house until the ripe old age of seventeen or so, at which point her father would march her down the aisle and hand her off to a husband. The next twenty-five years would be spent getting pregnant, narrowly escaping death during childbirth, and picking out new tapestries for the castle great room, or whatever it was that women did back then. (Peasant women basically did the same thing, minus the tapestries and plus a good ten hours a day of toiling away in the fields with a baby strapped to their backs.) The only exceptions to the rule? Nuns and prostitutes, aka celibacy and syphilis. So, yes, the Middle Ages were pretty bleak.

As the centuries went on, things for women got better, but not by much. Women in colonial America were finally able to inherit their husband's property, thus providing some of the first examples of American female autonomy. And never-married women who could scrape together enough money could often manage to buy cottages, where they would lead relatively quiet lives and do their best to avoid anyone suspecting them of being a witch.

With the industrialization of the nineteenth century, single young girls were given the opportunity to leave home and earn a living in mill towns, the very first example of the single life in America. Sure, they lived in all-girl boarding houses, worked an ungodly number of hours, and made very little money. But they were also allowed to sneak into town for the occasional evening's entertainment, one of the very few opportunities for young women to meet men unchaperoned. (Unfortunately, birth control at this point was still ages away, so this single life was pretty finite.)

To be a happy single woman, you needed to be rich, and if you weren't born rich, it was very hard to make your own money.

So the single woman continued to unhappily exist until the twentieth century, which is when things suddenly, miraculously took a turn for the better. First, the car was invented, and what's more, women were allowed to drive. Instantly, women had more autonomy: the ability to leave the house, to get to a job, and, best of all, to meet men unchaperoned. Is it any wonder that the sexually promiscuous flapper of the 1920s coincided perfectly with the sudden mass popularization of the automobile? Women have always been sexual creatures; it was just a matter of getting a moment alone with a guy outside of the damn parlor. Suddenly, women were smoking, drinking, dancing, and having sex: the germination of single life as we know it. But birth control was still dicey, and women hadn't entered the workforce quite yet, so they still got married ASAP. If a girl was dating a guy she mostly got along with, and they were both of a certain age (say, twenty-four or so), they would probably get married, because that's just what you did. No "I like you, but I need to see what else is out there . . . " exit clause allowed. (If, five years down the road, the two discovered they weren't so compatible after all, well, tough cookies.)

And then, boom! The Sixties happened, and everything exploded. The most important development, of course, was the birth-control pill: that miraculous little thing that you swallow painlessly in the morning to have worry-free sex all month. (Well, relatively.) The other important development was the rise of the "career girl," a woman who entered the workforce not because she had to support her family or help with the war effort, but simply because she wanted to. And when a woman got a job, she often got money, and her own apartment, with no one to look after but herself. So naturally women started to realize, Wait a minute, if I can have sex outside of marriage, and support myself outside of marriage, WHAT is the big rush? And for the first time in history, there really wasn't a rush, biological or financial, to get married. Was the Sixties single woman free of stigma? Of course not, but it was a start.

Which brings us to today. Women today get to enjoy all the perks of the sexual revolution and feminism, with the added advantage of the fifty or so years over which they've sunk in. Society is used to a single woman now. However you may feel about your singleness, no one is going to give you a dirty look for buying condoms, or signing a lease on your own, or booking a vacation for one.

All the things that you enjoy or appreciate about being single—absolute control over the DVR, coming and going whenever you please, making decisions based on your desires alone, the excitement of going out and meeting new people, the lack of responsibility for just a little while longer—these are all things that your grandmother probably didn't have the opportunity to choose for herself.

And as you no doubt know, being single doesn't mean being lonely. You may joke about becoming a cat lady, but you're probably not spending your Saturday nights knitting. You've got friends, you've got interests, you've got hobbies, and you have every opportunity to pursue them. Is being single amazing all the time? Definitely not. But then again, as your coupled-up friends can tell you, neither is being in a relationship.

This is not to say that it's bad to want to not be single. It's okay to want a boyfriend, to want to get married, and to want it to happen sooner rather than later. And maybe every once in a while, you do get a little lonely. That's normal. You don't have to want to be single forever. But as long as you are, you might as well enjoy it while you can. Someday you might stop being single, and if all goes well, who knows? You might never have the opportunity to be on your own again.

So, seriously: Live it up! Your great-grandmothers would want you to.



FIFTEEN THINGS TO ENJOY WHILE YOU'RE SINGLE

1. Sleeping Diagonally on the Bed

Can we momentarily let go of the illusion that sharing a bed with someone is actually comfortable? It's tolerable at best. But having an entire bed to yourself is great.

2. Wild Nights!

It's pretty nice to be able to go out and stay out as long as you want without having to worry about whether your significant other is tired, or his feet hurt, or that you said you'd call, or that he's just ready to go home and have sex now.

And if, at midnight, a friend calls and invites you to come out, you can just go.

And if, at 2 a.m., you meet someone you like, you can just kiss him, or go home with him, or just get his number.

And if, at 4 a.m., you feel like getting a slice of pizza, or a whole pizza, or a whole pizza with extra-garlicky garlic knots, you can, no problem. Who's going to care?

3. Quiet Weekends!

Conversely, if you want to spend an entire weekend ensconced in your room and watch seasons one to four of The West Wing, and...

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Verlag
Harlequin Nonfiction
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0373892772
ISBN 13 
9780373892778
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
HarperCollins Publishers Ireland
enquiries@harpercollins.ie

Mayor Street Upper 39/40
Dublin
D01 C9W8
Irland

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