Dating in Our Times

A view from my generation

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash.

In my mid-30s, I found myself single for the first time since I was 17. I’d gone straight from my first high school boyfriend, whom I stayed with over four years, to my second boyfriend, a college friend I ended up marrying. I’d never dated; both of them were part of my groups of friends, and we got together without anything remotely resembling a date.

Then, at 35, I got divorced. I had no idea what dating would be like.

People who didn’t live in California thought I might have a hard time dating in San Francisco, because it was so full of gay men. Let me tell you, San Francisco was not full of gay men; even in that gay mecca, they were a minority. There were straight men everywhere, and it turned out to be far easier than I’d ever dreamed of to connect with them.

Finding a man who wanted a relationship was another matter entirely.

---

I did all the things. I went out dancing often; I lived a short walk from El Rio, a self-proclaimed dive bar that was actually very nice, with an outdoor patio in back. They had a wonderful world music night on Fridays and salsa on the patio Sunday afternoons, and I became a regular at both. I went out intermittently with the doorman and DJ, a guy from Guyana who had a day job in IT. I met various other international guys there: Jesus, a tall Mexican who had the air of a gypsy or a pirate; Luis and Alvaro, Nicaraguans who’d walked to the U.S. with their families, worked as bike messengers, and drank too much on the weekends; Mario, a Peruvian who, in typical San Francisco fashion, I realized I’d also met a few years earlier at a small wedding.

I didn’t expect to meet a serious prospect by going dancing, but I loved dancing and I certainly didn’t want to live like a nun. And that wasn’t all I did. I tried Match.com for a while; this was before dating apps existed, and it took a lot of work to navigate the site and keep track of people. I met Don, a nice enough guy who lived down the peninsula and didn’t seem to want to make much effort to get together. For his birthday, just before he would have gotten a green card, he was laid off from his tech job and had to return to England — but there was no there there even while he was in the U.S. Somehow, I didn’t really connect with anyone else on the site.

I went on a Sierra Singles hike from Tennessee Valley to Muir Beach and back on a beautiful warm evening. I met lots of interesting women, and one guy twenty years older than me who, for some inexplicable reason, thought I might be persuaded to go out with him.

I met Thom on the street, walking home from work, and rebuffed his advances till I met him again salsa dancing at Little Baobab in the Mission. I met Jim on the roof of my building. I met a couple guys at my local cafe. I met a guy at a party who expressed interest in me to our mutual friend Steve, who’d invited me to the party; when Steve suggested he give the guy my phone number, he complained that he’d have to get off the couch to write it down. Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered.

At a silent meditation retreat, I met Juan, another Peruvian. When he came to my apartment, he commented on my lack of Buddhist decor. Not long after, I broke up with him because it was clear he didn’t want a relationship. Then, one day my phone rang and I was surprised to hear a woman I barely knew on the line. We’d met at some parties hosted by a mutual friend. “I have some bad news,” she said. “We’ve been dating the same guy.” It was Juan. While I’d broken up with him because of his clear lack of interest, he’d acted very serious with her. But he hadn’t come to our friend’s parties all summer because he knew we’d both be there. Some Buddhist.

There were guys everywhere. I went on dates, I went out with some guys for months — a few even hung on for a couple years. But none of them seemed to want an actual relationship.

Then I met Rafael. He was certainly much better suited to me than any of the other guys I’d encountered. But what also stood out was that he was also looking for a relationship.

---

Before I met Rafael, I traveled to Buenos Aires for a friend’s wedding. Talking to her about her previous experiences with men was like talking to any woman in San Francisco. There were plenty of single men — they just didn’t want relationships. I stopped in São Paulo on the way home to visit another friend, and his women friends were saying the same thing.

What was going on?

Then it dawned on me.

My parents’ generation had fewer options. You didn’t decide if you’d get married and have children — you just did it. Sure, there have always been outliers who bucked the trends and norms. But there were fairly rigid trends and norms to buck.

While we’re still subject to many of the same expectations now, they’re no longer a given. Now, we have much more freedom to live our lives however we want, to forgo having children, to create different kinds of relationships — or not.

Boomers may have started the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, but the Flower Child generation was the first to grow up with it as a way of life, not a revolution. We have more choices. I got that message at an early age; when I was a child, my mother often told me I didn’t have to get married or have children.

Because it’s still so new, my generation and later ones have had no models of how to live with this freedom. For many men, that’s meant they can do whatever they want. For many men, that’s meant screwing around to their heart’s content and never choosing one person.

Add to that the shopping nature of dating apps, which make it seem like there’s always someone better available at the next swipe, and you’ve compounded the issue. Add the culture in big cities, which tends to be more open-minded and permissive than in rural areas, and you’ve compounded the issue more. Add the culture of San Francisco, which is even more open-minded and permissive than in many other cities, and you’ve compounded the issue even more.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s totally natural for us to choose one person. The book Sex at Dawn makes a persuasive case for the fact that humans aren’t really monogamous, something that should be clear to anyone with a pulse. When you look at more “primitive” societies, such as hunter-gatherer cultures we can still observe, you see that even when people pair up, there’s more freedom to unpair, to have more than one pairing, or to have someone or ones on the side. That doesn’t mean I’m inclined to go out and not be monogamous. It’s very different to live that way in a culture that’s structured for it than in ours, and I don’t have the time or energy anyway. While our natural tendencies are something to consider, there’s also a lot to be said, given the way we live, for building a life with one special person.

I also realize I’m speaking from the perspective of a heterosexual woman. I haven’t experienced dating as a heterosexual man, and I don’t doubt that some men who are trying to have relationships are meeting women who don’t want them. Increasingly, women are realizing they may be better off single.

In my own experience, and among my own group of friends, I’ve found that it’s more often the men who don’t want to get into relationships. If men are encountering the same roadblock with women, then that only reinforces the fact that this is a major cultural trend.

Don’t tell me about the exceptions. I know there are exceptions. But I think there’s a larger social phenomenon going on here that I don’t see people talking about much — that Flower Children and subsequent generations are the first to live in this more flexible way, and that many of us are floundering as we try to navigate this new reality without a roadmap. I wonder if we can come up with some kind of roadmap, some kind of model. That seems worth a try.