GM: Or did you not know what I meant by “going by the board”?
Sorry, yes, I did but didn’t address it - only a small sector of British society would ever have regarded single-sex schools as the norm, and only a slightly larger proportion would have encountered it at all. So there’s no general traditions or attitudes to be overturned.
My points have pretty much been taken Rune, but I do have to say it’s very interesting that your opinion was based on American movies. Maybe we should start creating movies where everybody has super powers and is saintly. Might improve international relations 
Well, that was my phrase, not his. Perhaps I’m doing the same trick of projecting my perception onto other people’s experience…
Well this explains a lot.
Brainiac4 moved in with me before our first date. He was born in Holland but left when he was two, must have been culturally imprinted in the hospital.
(We’d known each other about ten years at that point. There was no dating. There was friends, living together, living together and planning a wedding (that took about three months - and was only to make sure he’d put up with my dirty socks on the bedroom floor), and married.)
Some of us went to single sex schools, didn’t mean we’re complete idiots when it comes to the opposite sex.
- You meet your friends’ brothers and sisters, your friends’ boyfriends’ friends etc.
- If you use public transport, you meet people on the bus or train to and from school.
You have friends of the opposite sex and lots of romantic opportunity, you just don’t go to school with the people you’re snogging - unless you’re same-sex oriented - there was more girl-girl snogging in the corridors of my school than you would believe.
And you took pictures, right? Catholic school-girl outfits and all?
-Tcat
I really really prefer the US way of dating.
Most of my previous experience in the UK has involved meeting someone in a bar, going home with them, and if we like each other the next day we keep in touch.
When I was with a Canadian girl it was so much better. I was able to get to know her properly, enjoy her company and just do things like talk and laugh before things got physical. Plus alcohol wasn’t involved.
I know there are no set rules, and I could ask a girl on a date in Europe, it just seems harder to get in the same situation without seeming like a weirdo.
Sigh.
I think this is one area where the distinction between European and American is probably the least appropriate. The differences between the different European countries are huge, differences between urban and rural are huge, and I imagine similar differences exist within the U.S.
The car thing is certainly true for some areas, but again I imagine there will be areas in the U.S. where cars aren’t that dominant either. Certainly there are many places in Scandinavia that are very similar to parts the U.S. in terms of living conditions, driving behaviour and so on.
One difference that does seem to matter is the marriage rate and age at which children are born. These are both higher in Europe, and in some countries the difference is huge. The Netherlands, for instance, has the average age for a woman to have her first child just above 30.
Also, apparently more than half of all relationships these days start out on the internet, on one of the many dating sites. And these exist in various forms also - ones where you go out with a group to do some kind of hobby you like, hiking, paragliding, wine-tasting or whatever, and some where you go on more traditional dates.
In general though, in Europe when you date, you do tend to meet up somewhere like in a pub, club or restaurant, and rarely pick each other up beforehand. The world is at walking / cycling distance here or there is good public transport, and all three are superior to going somewhere by car, because traffic is far too dense in the cities, you can’t park anywhere anyway, and if you can, it really, really costs you.
… plus, there’s the drinking and driving thing. 
I mean, what kind of date flourishes on soda? Seriously.
More than half of all relationships start out on the net? For real?? Here, or in the US?
A-ha! It obviously comes down to a sporting tradition.
In the USA, we have baseball. Therefore, “scoring” is seen in smaller increments of progression toward success: 1st base, 2nd, 3rd, etc.
The closest thing to baseball in Europe is cricket. There, unlike our 4 runner stations on the baseball field, are only 2 runner stations in cricket. Therefore, less of a progression. 1st station = kiss; 2nd station = intercourse.
Less of a progression means fewer pretenses to socialize in order to work your way “round the bases”. Therefore, no reason to “date.”
It all makes sense now! 
Right metaphor, wrong sport. “Any hole’s a goal” is the maxim your logic is leading towards
Yeah, now that I’ve had time to reflect on it, that was the point my foreign-born classmates seemed to get hung up on the most. To them, the boy calling on the girl seemed to change the entire dynamic of the relationship, and I’m not convinced that it does.
Almost. Except that for nearly all of Europe, cricket is either:
- A funny, boring game that only the English play; or
- What?
The commonest pan-European sport has to be football (not the kind where you wear cushions, take a rest break every 30 seconds, and have about three different teams taking it in turns to play). That gets “goal-oriented” in there straight away. Or as the excitable Europeans tend to pronounce it, “G-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-a-a-a-l-l-l-l-l-l-l!!!”.
There’s something odd going on in this thread. There seems to be general agreement that things are not so different between European and American culture when it comes to relationships, with the caveat that there are some pretty big differences.
The only concrete examples of differences seem to be –
- Europeans don’t arrange to meet people at their residences. They prefer to proceed independently to a neutral site.
- Europeans don’t expect to meet their dates’ parents.
- For initial encounters, Europeans prefer to interact in public with alcohol whereas Americans prefer one-on-one settings, perhaps, because it makes it easier to interact on more than a superficial level.
- In Europe, if you get a second date, it pretty much means you’re a couple. Whereas, in the United States, you might still be at the “getting to know you” stage.
- In Europe, all physical contact, whether deep kissing, groping, or intercourse, comes together at the same stage of the relationship. If you haven’t had sex, you’re probably not going to get a second date.
Does that about sum it up?
OK acsenray, you’ve almost got it
Except…
Sleeping together on a first date isn’t a given, but is pretty common.
We like our alcohol, because we like our alcohol.
We like to meet in public, in groups because it feels safer.
When you’re pretty much “a couple” after a date or two, you need to feel safe on those dates, nobody expects the “couple” to actually talk or interact with anyone else, their friends are just there in case it all goes tits up.
I have a good exapmle of how all these “rules” fall apart when applied to individuals.
Take 4 couples, who all meet for the first time at a wedding of their friends (all real examples from my wedding if you must know).
Couple 1 meets, snogs, goes outside, has sex in the bushes, comes back inside, they’ll never see each other again.
Couple 2 meets, snogs, goes back to her house, he sleeps on the sofa, they exchange numbers, chat a few times on the phone and decide not to meet again.
Couple 3 meets, snogs, spends night together, swap numbers, and he has decided in the space of 3 weeks to re-locate to be near her.
Couple 4 meets, snogs, spends the night together, swap numbers, meet up a couple of times, she sleeps over at his house, he sleeps over at hers, they go out with both sets of friends. They’re now a couple.
None of these situations are unheard-of, but Couple 4 would be the most typical here. I imagine the same would be true in the USA.
I think it does, completely. The European (or at least British & Irish) ‘typical’ situation is all about equality and neutrality, as others have said. As soon as the male is expected to be the leading member, the dynamic has shifted away from this.
And the whole thing about not meeting just as a couple in the early stages has other benefits - Know me, know my friends, therefore know the whole me. If you meet someone’s friends at this stage, you’ll have a far better idea of what kind of person they are than if you see them by themself. Which obviously can make you realise you dislike someone far more quickly, but can also confirm your suspicions that they’re a good match for you.
Inspired by Daniel’s comment in this thread, in which he comments on the Friends storyline in which Ross and Rachel suffer a blow to their relationship. Daniel says:
I’m not so sure.
To review: Ross and Rachel were dating. Rachel begins a new job, abandoning her coffee shop waitress career to serve as a fashion buyer, working with the hunkily handsome Mark. She works long hours, and Ross - no bastion of secure complacency in the first place - becomes increasingly jealous of the time she’s spending at her job (with Mark). This friction causes several fights; at the end of one, Rachel announces that she just can’t handle it anymore - she needs a break. Ross at first thinks she means “from the argument” but she clarifies that she’s talking about a break “from us”. She doesn’t want to continue in their relationship. Ross is stunned and leaves.
In time-honored guy tradition, Chandler takes Ross out and gets him rip-roaring drunk. Ross ends up hooking up with the cute girl from the copy place for an evening.
That morning, Rachel comes by Ross’ apartment full of apologies. She wants Ross to give her, and them, another chance, saying she really wants to be his girlfriend again. Ross eagerly agrees; he’s ashamed of his drunken dalliance with the copy girl (who, humorously, is hiding behind his door as he and Rachel make up.
Later that day, despite efforts to prevent the gossip from reaching Rachel, she hears about Ross’ hookup and is devastated. She breaks up with him again. Future attempts to heal the relationship inevitably devolve into Rachel’s anger at Ross for his cheating, and Ross’ defense: “We were on a break!”
OK - sorry for all that background.
I’m not so sanguine about the idea that Ross’ defense is so lame. They WERE broken up.
Not to say Rachel has no cause to be hurt. Ross’ actions certainly suggested he didn’t take the (former) relationship seriously, if he was able to hop into bed with some chick within a day of breaking up with Rachel. But he isn’t a cheater: they did break up, at her behest. Much of the fault goes to her for pulling out the nuclear option in a fight – a fight doesn’t mean the end of a relationship, and Rachel was wrong to go there in the first place.
Anyway - kinda silly to get so wrapped up in a point that arises from a fictional lover’s dispute, but surely there’s some real-life analogs to discuss here.
I don’t think Ross’ defense was completely lame.
I swear I have no idea how this post ended up here, instead of in its own, new thread, as it was supposed to.
:smack:
A not uncommon pitfall. I’ve learned to make sure I altogether close (as in, I’m back looking at the Board’s page) the other thread, before even attempting to hit the “post new thread” button.