Touched upon in the What event officializes a 1 on 1 relationship? thread, I’m wondering how the dating scene is the same/different in Europe and the UK as opposed to in the U.S. I’ve only dated a few women from Europe and the difference I’ve noticed is that exclusivity is set immediately, as opposed to dating American women where there is a period of non-exclusivity.
Are you an American who dated a European? Are you a European who’s dated only within the continent or an American? How were your experiences and issues that arose?
When I lived in the UK couples went out for coffee, or went out to drink, or went out for dinner, but it wasn’t called dating…that seemed to be an Americanism.
I suppose it varies. My ex-wife (English, grew up in France) and I did everything that we’d call dating over here. But other couples we knew almost never met alone before they started their relationship; they were always going out in groups. I guess the biggest difference is that there’s a lot less formality to it. Here in the US there’s a lot of pressure on “your first date,” asking somebody “are you dating?”, etc. It’s not as big a deal there.
When I was going out with a woman from NZ she insisted that we were not dating. Strange, as I’m not sure how else one could describe our interaction, but it seemed to be rather important that it was not called that.
No personal dating experience, but in one of Watzlawick books, he tells the following interesting story about dating:
In WWII, large numbers of US soldiers came to the UK, and dated English girls/women. Sociologists realized that this was an unparalleled chance to study large numbers of people, and so interviewed the pairs. A large number of both English women and US men answered that the other partner was going “too fast” for them. This answer stumped the sociologists at first - how could both be too fast? Looking closer, they found that each relationship could be divided into about 30 steps - from first contact to full relationship including sex - for both Americans and English BUT there was a different order!
For example, a kiss was pretty low - about 5 - for Americans, but very high and intimate - about 25 - for the English. So if the couple was still at the starting stage - dinner and talk - and the guy brought her home and wanted to give her a goodnight kiss, she felt that most stages leading up to 25 had been jumped over; and she felt pressured to decide right now whether to continue with sex (as “logical” conclusion after kissing) or break off.
If she agreed to the kiss and then continued with sex (logically for her order), the guy felt that all the steps between a (harmless to him) kiss at 5 and sex much later had been jumped.
And of course, all of these steps , as all other cultural traditions, are mostly internalized and not conciously thought about, so people felt pressured and cheated out of the dating game without knowing the real reason, and not knowing, they couldn’t talk about which step should follow what.
No experience about dating an American woman, but I’m chiming to say that the very concept of “dating” eludes me. After several years reading here all sort of anecdotes and questions related to dates, I still don’t clearly understand what American people actually mean when they talk about that. From the outside, it looks like some formalized arrangement, akin to being interviewed for a job, followed, again like for a job, by a “trial period”.
For instance, I don’t think I ever had a “first date” the way it’s understood in the USA (or maybe I had, I’m not even sure). The whole thing is very confusing to me.
And yes, IME, exclusivity is generally expected over here. I think that most people would be very pissed off if they were told you’re “dating” someone else. You’re not supposed to be “hunting several hares at the same time”, as we say, or at least, doing so will reflects poorly upon you. You’re supposed to be interested in one person at a time. Otherwise, it means that you aren’t really interested in that person, s/he is just interchangeable with any number of other people, and s/he isn’t going to like it. Personally, I wouldn’t like it, and I’m not even possessive or jealous.
Man, in Bulgaria exclusivity doesn’t seem like a big thing at all. I was never interested in dating any Bulgarian men, but a friend of mine was invited on a date and when she got to the restaurant, he was already there, waiting - with his girlfriend.
I heard a few similar stories from other people as well. It seemed like extra-marital relationships were not a big deal, either.
Well. So, nowadays, how low or high is a kiss on the “American scale”? Because from my point of view, the next step after a kiss still is sex. At this point, I would assume the deal to be done and agreed upon, and sex is obviously going to follow, assuming I’m older than 17.
(I mean a “french kiss”, a kiss on the cheek being completely meaningless).
Was it really a “date” or did he just invited her to the restaurant and she assumed it was going to be a date?
More generally, if I invite a single American woman to a restaurant, will she assume I intend to “date” her or am I supposed to make clear in some way that it is, or that it is not, a “date”?
There’s a good quote by Jerry Seinfeld: “Dating is pressure and tension. What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night? The only difference between a date and a job interview is that in not many job interviews is there a chance you’ll end up naked at the end of it.”
I felt it was like that when I unwisely moved to LA after splitting up with my ex and going back to the US after seven years. I felt more pressure on the small handful of dates I felt fortunate enough to get than I did on my job interview to get out there in the first place, and I’d been interviewed by the college president and all the deans. I felt like, well, some other American who’d been handed a cricket bat and was shoved into the middle of a match, with no idea of what was going on or what to do.
I think it was a real date - at any rate, about a year later, they ended up dating for real.
If you just want to invite an American woman to a restaurant, as a friend only, you might want to specify that. It can be a messy area. But maybe others disagree with me.
So what you’re saying is in America, heterosexual individuals of the opposite sex have to state clearly that they have no sexual intentions towards someone when they invite them to do something socially?
This sounds weird to me, too! In the past week both me and my girlfriend, currently geographically separated, have each invited someone of the opposite sex friend to dinner. Nothing weird about it at all, and certainly no need to put disclaimers all over the invitation.
The description of American “dating” (mostly from this site) makes it look like a highly formalized, almost ritualized buisiness. I’d never deal with stuff like that.
Around here, people just hang out in groups, and pairs splitt off from the main group along the way - there is no set “process” between “friends” and “couple”, unless you get to know each other in a more formalized setting and don’t have friends in common, such as in school or at work. People know you’re a couple when you start showing up to group activities holding hands
You might have a few “dates” alone together, like going to a movie or a meal, but this would be pretty rare among strangers - typically you know each other pretty well by this point.
Ok, but then…Is “dating” still an common step before girlfriend/boyfriend when you already “know each other pretty well”?
Also, in this case, what are you referring to exactly when you say “date” : the evaluation in a restaurant, or a relationship in which you’ve already slept together but still don’t consider your partner as a boyfriend/girlfriend?
Wait, what? The OP said what you’re saying about Europe about America, i.e. you’re claiming the exact opposite.
For my two cents, I prefer the formalized structure to the “just hang out and have things flow from there” approach, but I don’t think that’s the way things are in the U.S., at least among people my age. I do have old-fashioned tastes, though.
So what you’re saying is in the UK, heterosexual individuals of the opposite sex have to state clearly if they DO have sexual intentions towards someone when they invite them to do something socially? THAT sounds awkward to me.
Seriously, though, in my experience it’s a case-by-case, situational approach. Sometimes a dinner invitation is just as friends, sometimes it’s with the hope of being more. Sometimes the prior relationship between the two will make clear which kind of dinner it is, but sometimes not.
Surely it can’t be the case that in the UK there are never misunderstandings between a man and a woman as to the nature of their relationship? :dubious:
What if you become interested in someone outside the group?
This is exactly as me and my friends put it. Going out with someone is an expression of interest in that particular person and that they have particular qualities that you really like and are attracted to. To be dating >1 person at the same time implies an air of interchangeablity about it all and that you’re not really all that interested in the person.
The whole US first date, second date etc etc thing just seems way too formalised to me. To use my recent experience, we met through friends/colleagues and hit it off instantly (with very obvious chemistry). There was a phase of are we/aren’t we questioning (internally!) as we swapped emails on a frantically regular basis (he’s currently US based and at the time I was in mainland Europe with frequent trips even further afield) before we saw each other again in his home-town and basically said that yes, there’s an ‘us’ here.
I suppose one could argue that we did have some ‘dates’ in the US sense of the word as we went out for dinner alone together whenever we could, but we were very obviously together as a couple even when as part of a larger group, if that makes sense?
In my experience, younger Americans do not do this. The older Dopers here probably have experienced this, though, and it doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t like that person. It just means that you haven’t yet decided which of them you like most, since it was not previously considered proper to “hang out” (a phrase denoting a concept that just did not exist at the time) with people of the opposite sex in groups. So instead of Sally going to the movies in a big group including Robert and James, both whom she finds attractive and wants to get to know better before she actually tries to start an exclusive relationship, like would happen in the kind of situation you’re talking about, she would go to the movies with Robert one Friday and James the next to see which one is actually the better guy.
In the ‘hanging out’ situation you describe, would Robert and James know that Sally was interested in them both? Would they both be expressing their interest in her?
I dunno, even the way you describe the ‘hanging out in a group’ concept to check out which of two guys you like the ‘best’ still feels a bit alien to me. I’m definitely not a representative sample, but IME, even when hanging out as a group, the interest has only been towards one other person if you see what I mean? For instance, when I met my b/f, even though we were hanging out initially as part of a large group of friends/colleagues the (even unspoken) interest between me and the guy was there as an exclusivity between us. The girl interfering and trying to get him to pay attention to her was seen as a bit ‘sad’, and if I’d have been checking someone else out at the same time, then I’m sure he’d have rapidly lost interest and seen me as not really all that interested in him at all.
For the hanging out situation, I meant interested in a “that girl is sort of attractive” way, not actively pursuing a relationship, i.e. in the “hanging out” situation Robert and James would just “have their eye” on Sally as one of many possible girls that they might consider dating. I mean, before you were involved with your boyfriend (assuming it was not “love at first sight”), you found some of the other men in that group at least a little attractive, right (as in there was a number more than one but less than all that you would consider dating if you turned out to have compatible personalities)? But you didn’t make advances towards them or anything because that would be very forward and weird without getting to know them first, right?
Well, the “hanging out” situation (like what you and most young Americans are in), you would get to know them by interacting together in large groups until it just felt right to be a little closer to one of them. The old-fashioned formal dating style with multiple people would not replace the stage where you two were already pretty much grouped as a couple (where a girl trying to intrude would be seen as “sad”), but the “getting to know each other” stage. Remember that single men and women casually interacting together in an informal context would be acceptable. (I’m getting thoughts here (which we laughed at) of my Latin teacher saying that boys shouldn’t lie on the couch in the room with girls sitting on it or vice versa because it was too “familiar”.)
Remember too that people (I’m going way back in time here) used to get married a lot more earlier on, so the original concept from which modern dating is descended was of men picking out an attractive woman, the woman evaluating them to see which one she liked best, and then of them getting married right away.
OK, this is starting to make more sense now! There are still some real differences, I think, but this is starting to seem less weird to me.
Right. I see what you’re getting at here and its starting to make more sense to me. For me, I never saw any of the other guys in the group as attractive at all (its what happens with a bunch of geeky astrophysicists… ), but I do see what you’re saying. However…
The girl trying to intrude would be seen as “sad” even at the getting to know each other stage if it was obvious that the two people trying to get to know each other were interested in each other; basically I think its the unspoken thing that if two people show mutual interest in each other, other interested parties back off even before the two get to the coupled stage… I think. That’s been my experience anyway, and I know of situations where there’s been this whole “hanging out in a group” thing going on, guy #1 has liked a girl, girl hasn’t been interested in guy#1 as anything more than a friend and has made this clear. Girl has been interested in guy #2 and the interest has been reciprocated, and there’s been a whole convoluted thing of whether guy #2 can legitimately declare his interest in girl without offending guy #1…
), but I do see what you’re saying. However…