I was in a lot of advanced classes in high school and I was STAR student of my graduating class. That means I had the highest SAT score of my class and I was in the top 10 percent for GPA.
As STAR student you are expected to name a teacher as your STAR teacher. I named one of my high school English teachers whose name I no longer recall.
She was most likely gay though, of course, she could not tell her students that. She had short hair and wore no makeup and didn't dress in a very feminine style. I went to her home once for some reason and she had a female roommate. I think that was probably actually her girlfriend, not just a friend she was living with to help make ends meet.
I named her as my STAR teacher because her class had been enormously helpful to me personally. Some of her assignments really helped me grow and I was very grateful for that though she likely didn't really understand how important she was to me and my life.
One of the assignments she gave us was a weekly journal to help us grow as writers. We could talk about anything we wanted and it would be treated as confidential.
The year I had her class I went on a handful of dates and that was one of the things I wrote about in that journal. I concluded that "dating" was not for me and I swore off it and I've never gone back to it.
When I talk about having a "no dating" policy, that tends to get really negative reactions from people who feel like I am saying bad things about their lives. It is often drama and I have been accused of having extremist views and so forth.
When I say I have a "no dating" policy, I am talking about that heteronormative practice where men spend money on women in hopes of getting laid, basically. But that isn't what everyone means when they talk about dating.
To further confuse things, at some point I threw in the towel on trying to avoid using the term for anything else and have been known to talk about "dating" someone to mean we were involved even if he never once bought me dinner. I'm human. Life is complicated. I don't always have some perfect answer.
Just like the word friend covers a wide array of relationships from casual acquaintances to very strong interpersonal bonds, dating is a term that gets used to cover a variety of things and I think this is part of where I get into hot water when I try to talk about this personal policy of mine.
Courtship is that process of getting to know someone over time in order to try to establish a serious romantic relationship. Not all dating is part of courtship.
Some dating is just casual hookups and sometimes what people intended as casual hookups turns into a more serious relationship and that's part of why the word has kind of a vague, hand wavy definition: That vagueness has value for giving people maneuvering room while trying to navigate what may or may not be a budding relationship.
The internet has changed both how people hook up and how courtship happens. From what I have read, online dating apps have been a boon to both interracial relationships and the LGBTQ community.
This makes perfect sense to me. Online, you can talk with someone of a different ethnicity or the same sex or whatever without worrying so much what other people think. Those initial stages of wondering if you like them can happen without prying eyes and without you having to worry about "explaining" it or whatever.
And you can also get to know them without either of you needing to pay for an activity as a means to get to know each other. From what I gather, a lot of relationships these days begin with talking online and then the initial meetup is something light and casual, like a cup of coffee, and it's common for it be handled as Dutch Treat.
In other words, you each pay your own way. You pay for your coffee and they pay for theirs.
Why is that called Dutch Treat?
My understanding is that it's a common practice in the Netherlands that dates are handled that way. Men don't automatically pay her way as a means for them to spend time together and get to know each other. Often, you agree to an activity you both like and you each pay your own way.
The entire point is to spend time together. It isn't a transactional thing where he is paying for her time and attention.
The Dutch also have a reputation for having an unusually good track record on women's rights. I don't think that's mere coincidence.
I think a lot of social problems are rooted in these old-fashioned expectations that the man will be the breadwinner and the woman will be a homemaker and those expectations shape a lot of details of our behavior starting from the very beginning of the relationship, from the first date where he pays her way and in exchange he feels entitled to something from her.
It's problematic in part because those patterns did not start off with an expectation that he was buying her when he paid for dinner. Decades ago, in a small town where you knew everyone, it was probably just that he had the money to pay for dinner if they wanted to go to a restaurant together.
According to my father, in his youth it was common for a woman to start doing the cooking and cleaning for a man after his wife died and then marry him one year after the funeral when the community would finally feel it was okay for him to remarry. So, no, him paying for dates is not and has never been the only way relationships ever got started.
In my teens, I swore off engaging with men in a way that would foster the idea that they had bought me and I think that policy has had a powerful positive impact on my life. I think a lot of people are moving in that same direction as a natural course of events because women are more likely to have decent paying jobs these days and what not.
I'm not the only one who is critical of these old-fashioned social norms and sees a problem with a man paying her way from the start as an expectation for how the relationship is supposed to work. I'm not the only one thinking "That's part of a larger pattern and if I don't like that larger pattern, then this small detail also needs to go because it's like a seed that sets the stage for the entire relationship."
You see this struggle to find a new paradigm show up in movies, often romantic comedy type scenes. I really like this scene where he says he's not asking her out. He's just trying to feed her. Because when I say I have a "no dating" policy, I don't mean that I would never have dinner with a man nor let him pay my way for something. I just mean I don't want some man thinking he owns me and the relationship is about money first and foremost and I'm sensitive to those initial interactions and the precedent they set for the course of the relationship.
There are two sides to every story. In my late teens, a friend of mine who seemed to be rapidly on her way to becoming an alcoholic told me "The way to get drunk for free is flirt with men at bars."
She was using them to get free liquor. She had no plans to sleep with them.
A male friend of mine once talked about how much money it can cost to "date" a woman in hopes of eventually getting laid and said that paying for a prostitute can be a real bargain in comparison to that. And he said you also know you will get what you actually want, which is sex.
I don't think the policy of expecting men to automatically pay for (hetero) dates is a good policy for anyone. It's also not absolutely necessary for either courtship or a casual hookup -- which is not to say men should always insist on splitting everything equally in a heterosexual relationship.
They often have more money than the woman and it can, at times, be a practical matter for him to pay for certain things so the relationship can happen at all. Men who latch onto a detail like that and try to insist on something like that are often no different from the friend I had who decided flirting with men was a way to get free liquor: They aren't really looking for a means to establish a healthy relationship. They are looking to get over in some way.
I was a full-time wife and mom (AKA homemaker) for a lot of years. Self-proclaimed feminists often have been openly hostile to me.
It feels to me like I live in a world where people think either women can be devoted mothers or they can be human beings with actual rights (and lives and minds of their own) but not both. Those views actively shape the lives of women, and not in a good way.
At least in the US. From what I gather, life in Europe isn't quite so harsh for women and their children and the social policies there don't seem to force women into such strongly polarized positions as they seem to do here in the states.
As STAR student you are expected to name a teacher as your STAR teacher. I named one of my high school English teachers whose name I no longer recall.
She was most likely gay though, of course, she could not tell her students that. She had short hair and wore no makeup and didn't dress in a very feminine style. I went to her home once for some reason and she had a female roommate. I think that was probably actually her girlfriend, not just a friend she was living with to help make ends meet.
I named her as my STAR teacher because her class had been enormously helpful to me personally. Some of her assignments really helped me grow and I was very grateful for that though she likely didn't really understand how important she was to me and my life.
One of the assignments she gave us was a weekly journal to help us grow as writers. We could talk about anything we wanted and it would be treated as confidential.
The year I had her class I went on a handful of dates and that was one of the things I wrote about in that journal. I concluded that "dating" was not for me and I swore off it and I've never gone back to it.
When I talk about having a "no dating" policy, that tends to get really negative reactions from people who feel like I am saying bad things about their lives. It is often drama and I have been accused of having extremist views and so forth.
When I say I have a "no dating" policy, I am talking about that heteronormative practice where men spend money on women in hopes of getting laid, basically. But that isn't what everyone means when they talk about dating.
To further confuse things, at some point I threw in the towel on trying to avoid using the term for anything else and have been known to talk about "dating" someone to mean we were involved even if he never once bought me dinner. I'm human. Life is complicated. I don't always have some perfect answer.
Just like the word friend covers a wide array of relationships from casual acquaintances to very strong interpersonal bonds, dating is a term that gets used to cover a variety of things and I think this is part of where I get into hot water when I try to talk about this personal policy of mine.
Courtship is that process of getting to know someone over time in order to try to establish a serious romantic relationship. Not all dating is part of courtship.
Some dating is just casual hookups and sometimes what people intended as casual hookups turns into a more serious relationship and that's part of why the word has kind of a vague, hand wavy definition: That vagueness has value for giving people maneuvering room while trying to navigate what may or may not be a budding relationship.
The internet has changed both how people hook up and how courtship happens. From what I have read, online dating apps have been a boon to both interracial relationships and the LGBTQ community.
This makes perfect sense to me. Online, you can talk with someone of a different ethnicity or the same sex or whatever without worrying so much what other people think. Those initial stages of wondering if you like them can happen without prying eyes and without you having to worry about "explaining" it or whatever.
And you can also get to know them without either of you needing to pay for an activity as a means to get to know each other. From what I gather, a lot of relationships these days begin with talking online and then the initial meetup is something light and casual, like a cup of coffee, and it's common for it be handled as Dutch Treat.
In other words, you each pay your own way. You pay for your coffee and they pay for theirs.
Why is that called Dutch Treat?
My understanding is that it's a common practice in the Netherlands that dates are handled that way. Men don't automatically pay her way as a means for them to spend time together and get to know each other. Often, you agree to an activity you both like and you each pay your own way.
The entire point is to spend time together. It isn't a transactional thing where he is paying for her time and attention.
The Dutch also have a reputation for having an unusually good track record on women's rights. I don't think that's mere coincidence.
I think a lot of social problems are rooted in these old-fashioned expectations that the man will be the breadwinner and the woman will be a homemaker and those expectations shape a lot of details of our behavior starting from the very beginning of the relationship, from the first date where he pays her way and in exchange he feels entitled to something from her.
It's problematic in part because those patterns did not start off with an expectation that he was buying her when he paid for dinner. Decades ago, in a small town where you knew everyone, it was probably just that he had the money to pay for dinner if they wanted to go to a restaurant together.
According to my father, in his youth it was common for a woman to start doing the cooking and cleaning for a man after his wife died and then marry him one year after the funeral when the community would finally feel it was okay for him to remarry. So, no, him paying for dates is not and has never been the only way relationships ever got started.
In my teens, I swore off engaging with men in a way that would foster the idea that they had bought me and I think that policy has had a powerful positive impact on my life. I think a lot of people are moving in that same direction as a natural course of events because women are more likely to have decent paying jobs these days and what not.
I'm not the only one who is critical of these old-fashioned social norms and sees a problem with a man paying her way from the start as an expectation for how the relationship is supposed to work. I'm not the only one thinking "That's part of a larger pattern and if I don't like that larger pattern, then this small detail also needs to go because it's like a seed that sets the stage for the entire relationship."
You see this struggle to find a new paradigm show up in movies, often romantic comedy type scenes. I really like this scene where he says he's not asking her out. He's just trying to feed her. Because when I say I have a "no dating" policy, I don't mean that I would never have dinner with a man nor let him pay my way for something. I just mean I don't want some man thinking he owns me and the relationship is about money first and foremost and I'm sensitive to those initial interactions and the precedent they set for the course of the relationship.
There are two sides to every story. In my late teens, a friend of mine who seemed to be rapidly on her way to becoming an alcoholic told me "The way to get drunk for free is flirt with men at bars."
She was using them to get free liquor. She had no plans to sleep with them.
A male friend of mine once talked about how much money it can cost to "date" a woman in hopes of eventually getting laid and said that paying for a prostitute can be a real bargain in comparison to that. And he said you also know you will get what you actually want, which is sex.
I don't think the policy of expecting men to automatically pay for (hetero) dates is a good policy for anyone. It's also not absolutely necessary for either courtship or a casual hookup -- which is not to say men should always insist on splitting everything equally in a heterosexual relationship.
They often have more money than the woman and it can, at times, be a practical matter for him to pay for certain things so the relationship can happen at all. Men who latch onto a detail like that and try to insist on something like that are often no different from the friend I had who decided flirting with men was a way to get free liquor: They aren't really looking for a means to establish a healthy relationship. They are looking to get over in some way.
I was a full-time wife and mom (AKA homemaker) for a lot of years. Self-proclaimed feminists often have been openly hostile to me.
It feels to me like I live in a world where people think either women can be devoted mothers or they can be human beings with actual rights (and lives and minds of their own) but not both. Those views actively shape the lives of women, and not in a good way.
At least in the US. From what I gather, life in Europe isn't quite so harsh for women and their children and the social policies there don't seem to force women into such strongly polarized positions as they seem to do here in the states.