Clueless Sex

It was after three years of living in New York that I began thinking something was wrong -- deeply, heart-wrenchingly wrong -- with the Western dating system. I would come home after an evening of swapping New York "war stories" with girlfriends, in which we regaled each other with horrific dates or detailed every phone call and e-mail exchange from a short-lived fling in order to decipher why our intended had unceremoniously disappeared. Most of these evenings ended up with one or another of us whining about our loneliness and wondering when it would end, to be comforted by yet another in our gaggle that we should just get on with our own lives and not worry about men, and that soon enough, when we were least expecting it, love would walk in through the front door or sit next to us on a flight.

The next week we would switch roles and the whiner would offer warm words of advice and hand-holding to the comforter. I heartily participated in all of these discussions, more often than not as the one plunged in despair when I first arrived in New York, and later, hardened and somewhat resigned, as the one extending succor.

After months of these cocktail-drenched evenings, two fleeting thoughts slipped across my mind, which later would take on shape and bulk and eventually morph into full-blown arguments. The first of these took hold when a friend was complaining how a man she'd met at a party two weeks ago had seemed very interested and had taken her number but had not called since. And today she'd discovered that a colleague she had a crush on had a girlfriend. Two leads that had seemed promising just last week had fallen through, which in New York is enough to induce a midmonth slump.

I bit my lower lip and, ever helpful, said, "What about that guy you were talking about last month, the one you made out with at that bar in Soho?"

"Oh yeah, him. He's too young. I can tell he's not interested in something serious," my friend said.

"Okay, well what about that guy Jason who's really into you and asking you out all the time? I think he's kind of cute," I offered hopefully.

"Eew," she said.

"Okay, what about going online? I know you're not really that into it, but ... I don't know. It just seems like there's no other way to meet somebody," I said, the first tendrils of my seedling thought stretching their tiny arms.

"I tried it. I only met freaks. I was just wasting my time," she moaned. "I just don't know where I'll meet someone."

Then the petals of my thought opened to reveal its essence. Yes indeed. Where are we in the West supposed to meet someone we'd like to marry, or at least be committed to? If we graduate from university without having found someone, we assume we'll meet someone over the next few years. But where exactly?

In many workplaces, romantic relationships are frowned upon, and people are often averse to dating someone in the office for fear it will end badly and they will still have to see their ex-lover on a daily basis. We are told that it's best to meet friends of friends. We all think this is a brilliant idea, until we realize that we've already met all of our friends' friends ... two years ago.

Then of course, there's the online route. Although the popularity of online dating in the last few years has somewhat reduced the stigma of having had to resort to the Internet to find a date, it's hardly a preferred method. Having found a girlfriend or boyfriend from an Internet site still seems the refuge of the desperate and socially isolated. And then there's the nagging little fact that many of us have tried online dating to no avail.

So then what?

This is when I found myself saying to my friend, "You're right. I don't know where you'll find someone, short of bumping into him on the street."

From that point on, I became mildly obsessed with the inadequacies of the Western dating system, or rather lack of it. Where exactly are we supposed to meet someone to marry?

For years, I never questioned the Western dating system. The tenets on which it rests seemed perfectly sound: after meeting a man or woman through work or friends, one gets to know him or her, and if one likes what one sees, one continues to deepen the commitment, which sometimes leads to marriage. What surprises me now is how much this system leaves to chance encounter, to a kind of fate or fortune. For a decidedly unmystical society that seems to have the answer for everything else -- the best medical care, cutting-edge technology, superhighways, and space shuttles -- it seems odd that people are left to their own resources, casting around for another lonely soul, for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives.

If the institution of marriage is present in every society that we know of, from Lapps in northern Sweden to aborigines, and nearly all cultures promote marriage as the foundation of society, isn't it odd, then, that there is very little provision for how it is supposed to occur in the West?

It was so obvious no organized system for marriage existed in the West that people simply failed to blame the obvious for why they couldn't find someone to marry. They were told by their therapists and their friends that it was because they were too neurotic, too unhappy, had to work on themselves before they could be happy with someone else, or that they wanted it too badly. People are told to blame themselves, and they do: they try to lose weight, they develop new interests, they get a nose job. We wonder what's wrong with us when really we should wonder whether there isn't a better way of doing things. It is a curious misplacement for a self-congratulatory culture in which people are constantly trying to shift blame away from themselves.

Once I began questioning the efficacy of the Western dating system in resulting in marriage, I started wondering why it is that wanting to be committed to someone else is too often associated with weakness in the West. I noticed that when people were happily self-sufficient, they liked to preach how they weren't looking for a serious commitment and didn't have time for one. It was only when they were dissatisfied that they began to think of marriage or commitment as a solution. But how many people are happily self-sufficient?

Does marriage have to be a salve to loneliness to have value? Isn't it valuable to begin with? In the West, the modern ideal is to be independent, on one's own, and to be able to make the choice to live with another human being, to welcome someone else as a bonus to one's existence -- if and when one is ready.

By Anita Jain

happened to find this article at salon.com