We left town for the day just this week, gone for 8+ hours, and it never occurred to me to lock the doors. I don’t have a key for the back door and have just one for the front (that does get used if we’re going away for more than a few nights). I don’t lock up before bed, which some overnight visitors seem uncomfortable with (and if it bothers them I will lock the doors). I don’t lock my car. When my husband takes the car to work, he often leaves the keys on the floor in case I feel like walking down to use it for anything.
I have, however, lived in larger areas that I wouldn’t dream of leaving the house/car unlocked. I have also thought about, in passing and as mentioned by Martian Bigfoot, what would happen if someone did waltz in and walk off with our stuff in regards to what the insurance company might say. I may live to regret the choice I suppose if anything happens.
Basically, this. Of course, it has a lot to do with where you’re talking about. In larger towns and cities, people have probably always locked their doors.
In a lot of small towns, and particularly in the suburbs and beyond, it was (and probably still is, to some extent) the norm, to never, or seldom, lock ones doors.
I have relatives that live in ‘the country’ (it’s 15 miles to the closest town, and a 1/4 mile to the nearest neighbor, and the neighbor is another relative) and they didn’t start locking their doors until just a few years back. And that’s only when they leave the house for more than a couple of hours. If they’re at home or just up the road at the neighbors, the doors are unlocked. They still leave their car keys on the floorboard, night and day. Try doing that in any big city, or even mid-sized town, these days.
I don’t know about Americans, but I’ve been raised during the 70s in a French village where it was the case. Many people, as far as I can tell, indeed didn’t lock their doors, at least during the day. My grandmother locked the door at night. I don’t know if other people did the same since obviously I didn’t visit/interact with them at night. The crime rate was zero. I don’t remember any instance of burglary in the area (not just the village) during my childhood.
It’s not the case anymore. Though quite rare by city standard, burglaries do happen (in fact isolated houses are specifically targeted) and people lock their doors. The population has become more mobile, residents and criminals alike. When I was a kid, almost everybody had lived there his whole life and apart from some relatives of the locals during summer, there was essentially no visitors. Any “outsider” would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
So, I’ve no trouble believing it could have been and could still be the case in rural America.
Forgot to add, in response to the OP : of course it’s a good thing not to have to lock one’s door. It’s not about bad guys being responsible or not for their actions, but about the lack of bad guys (at least the sort of bad guys who would steal your stuff). It’s telling that you didn’t get it immediately, in fact.
That said, rural life had many drawbacks, and having to lock your door might be well worth not having to deal with them, IMO.
Well, living my life in St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Gary, IN just might have something to do with my lack of “getting it”. It’s a pretty foreign concept to a city dweller.
I suppose it does make some sense if you’re living way out in the middle of nowhere with the neighbors miles away, but I also don’t get people who come into where I live and brag about not locking their doors - it might be safe where you live, but here it would be foolish at best. I was once teased when I did go out to the boonies about locking my car, but I pointed out to the guy that given where I *live *as opposed to where I visit it wasn’t a habit I could afford to break.
That, and when I went to visit the in-laws in rural Tennessee we had to lock our cars because otherwise a certain number of them would have riffled through our stuff and/or taken it. They also had a bad habit of borrowing peoples’ cars without asking permission. So, in that case, being out in the country you still couldn’t leave your stuff unguarded even if they didn’t lock their doors.
Not just “earlier generations,” either. I know plenty of houses that are only ever locked when the family is away traveling. Some people leave their car keys in the ignition, too.
Bingo. It’s like the old joke punchline: “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you.” Putting a Club on your car’s steering wheel won’t stop the gang of international car thieves; it will stop the slim-jim wielding booster.
Growing up in the 70s, early 80s the door was never locked. Good thing because I think my parents lost the key the day they moved in. Although my father was a police officer and that was well known in the community so maybe other people locked their doors in the neighborhood.
Now I only lock my door when no one is home and at night.
I felt weird about locking my indoor apartment door with both the lock and a deadbolt whenever I came in, even though I now live in the city - there was an outside house door with a lock, after all. The house door was set so that you could not keep it from locking. My parents were visiting and would give me funny looks about locking my apartment door even during the day, because there were only three apartments in the place and my parents didn’t lock their door at home. Who exactly did I think would try and get in?
Of course, it was THAT night at 4 am some high and/or drunk guy uses a porch chair to beat the downstairs house door in and then comes up to our apartment door trying to kick it down.
I didn’t feel quite so weird locking both inside locks after that.
I grew up in the VA suburbs of DC in the 1960s, and we always locked the doors to our house when we were away. We never locked our car doors when the cars were in the driveway, though.
That’s pretty much how I do things now, only I’m in a MD exurb of DC.
When my parents got married (1984), the neighbours were shocked to find that the front door was locked. The neighbours wanted to introduce themselves, and were used to walking into each other’s homes uninvited.
Nowadays, I couldn’t imagine leaving my door unlocked, even when I’m at home. It just seems terribly dangerous. Then again, most of us now don’t even know our neighbours’ names. The two things are probably connected.
I agree. It’s highly unlikely the phrase was meant literally. It could be the door to my heart, or just the door is open for an ex-lover to return to you.
Even those who long for the days when you could leave your door unlocked would never express it in that way.
I also find it astonishing that it took 19 posts for anyone to raise the possibility it wasn’t literal.
My first impression was that it meant a bedroom door, actually - something along the lines of “no fight between us will be allowed to escalate to the point that one of us locks the other out.”
Anyway, I grew up in a Nebraska town of about 600 people on a good day. We never locked our doors. I wasn’t even sure how, or where the key was. We did lock it up the summer before we sold it, but by then I was off to college.
Do you listen to much FM radio country these days? It’s big on gushing idolization of rural America and light on subtle metaphors. Googling the lyric, it is in fact from a “small towns are great” song and so I’m almost certain it is literal.
That’s what I was thinking. Or even more literally, if they were keeping the door to their heart open for their lover, they would keep the door to their house open for them as well.
No, it was very much meant literally. Labrador Deceiver has kindly tracked down the song. If you listen to it you’ll see that very plainly it is meant absolutely literally in the song.
The relevant lines are:
The thing is, while I can somewhat grok the concept of a small town where crime is so rare and neighbors so well know that leaving your door unlocked is not dangerous, this notion that the narrator will NEVER lock his door strikes this city girl as quite bizarre. Really? Never? Not even if you go away for a week or some desperado rolls into town? It seems a stubborn refusal to adapt to changing circumstances to me. But whatever.
It’s just the way small towns are. It’s only a slight exaggeration that if a strange car pulls up into your driveway all the busybody old lady neighbors will know about it before you do.
