It seems to me that each succeeding generation is waiting longer to get married and have kids. My wife had a great-grandmother who got married and had a child at 14. On The other hand, I have a nephew who is 42 and still looking.
Young folks are finding out the hard way that college is the best place to find a mate due to the diversity, quality and number of members of the opposite sex. But if you leave college unattached your prospects for finding a date, outside the family of course, are limited to bars, the gym, and the Internet.
In the 1800’s lots of young adults met their mates at community dances that all the cowboys looked forward to even if they danced like flat-footed, heavy-handed arthritic apes. On the night of the dance cowboys from far and wide would take their weekly bath, sprinkle on a few drops of eau de toillette, ride their horse an hour away only to find there was no fiddler and no women to dance with cheek to cheek. In that case a few of the cowboys would willingly put on an apron or tie a bandana to their sleeve to indicate they’d be dancing the female part. Such hoedowns were known as heifer dances but I don’t think the concept would work in today’s LGBTQ+ society.
Another traditional place people are looking for a mate is at a bar but I don’t think finding a life-partner while in an inebriated condition is wise. Such prospects are always uglier, older and far less interesting in the light of day. I have a recently-divorced friend who recently reentered the dating scene and he said the date he had with a lady he met at a bar, “Was like a year in solitary confinement.”
People must really be desperate to resort to speed dating or weed dating. In speed dating you pay a fee and then ask questions for five to ten minutes of several prospects to find out if they know how to tie a fly or shoot a shotgun. With weed dating you volunteer at a community garden hoping to meet someone you like. If you get into an argument with a potential candidate over whether a zucchini is ripe you switch rows until you find someone more compatible. This might work in an urban setting but it seems to me weed dating won’t go over with the cowboy crowd because women you meet in the urban community garden are more apt to be vegan and wouldn’t be the type you’d want to take home to mama if you live in Hico, Texas, or Cherry County, Nebraska.
Then there’s the gym. I know you won’t believe this after getting a gander at my glorious glutes and abs but I’ve never paid to go to a gym in my life. I’ve heard the gym scene is highly competitive and I can see where all that Spandex and heavy breathing could lead to romance but I’ve never heard of a single instance where a man met a women at a gym, got married and lived happily ever. But I have heard of at least two instances where it led to divorce.
Finally, there’s the Internet. People don’t realize this but this experiment has been tried before in America back in the 1800’s. A lonely Basque sheepherder might correspond with someone selected by an aunt back in the old country and then the sheepherder would pay for the shipping and then wait to see what stepped out of the stagecoach.
It’s the same way with Internet dating today which seems to be very popular. The problem with Internet dating is that someone can misrepresent who, or what, they are. There ought to be warnings on some of the prospects like, “bring a leash.” Thank goodness today it’s catch and release and shipping fees to send one back are much cheaper if the article is not as represented.
I know one fellow who was told his blind date was 42-24-38. Then he found out that 42 was her age, 24 was her IQ and 38 was the number of days she’d been released from the detox center. He learned real fast why they’re called blind dates because with your first look you wish you were blind.
