Feb

9

Enter Pride and Prejudice, Exit Sense and Sensibility

Filed Under Relationsham 

Exit

Nowadays, entering the dating world can be very tricky. There are too many points of entry, with no direct intent in evidence. Simply, starting something is the equivalent of ending nothing.

To rely on the other person of interest to provide some answers during courtship is taking an open-ended, unsatisfying, risk. A reaction can range from neglect to indifference; playing hard to get to being just plain busy. A response so casual it’s hard to determine when leaving the door, if “this is just chai” or “about having children.”

Dating has quickly adapted to the fast and loose rules of Facebook, not feedback, where falling in love is as easy as a push of a button; an “add as a friend,” or “a listed as.” Conversations among contacts can be the product of boredom, loneliness, intrigue, flirtation, or a combination of any of the above, with plans never fully realized beyond the flashing cursor on the screen.

In response to a reader’s letter last year, The Globe and Mail columnist, David Eddie, made similar remarks about the current world of dating, and about the hunter and the hunted. He went further to suggest that language has also muddled the intent of courtship with terms such as “hanging out” and “hooking up.”

In the same letter, Eddie noted along with the “oxymoron” of the “online dating” world is the current crop of young men, “wishy-washy, weak-willed, namby-pamby numb-nuts.” For Eddie, the combination of the two phenomena, leaves little doubt as to why women cannot decipher if they are one’s lover, leftovers, anything in between, or not at all, even after a long period of time.

Although Eddie’s letter was to respond to a specific case, removed from the exposition he delved into before providing his sage advice to his dear reader, (sound familiar?) it got me scrambling to locate a quote by Jane Austen.

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

Sure, the hunter and hunted may have changed, and so to the battlefield, but the thinking, at least for women, has remained very much the same. A woman will hold onto her pride, and prejudice, for weeks, months at a time, sometimes years, in sizing the worth of her suitor, giving absolutely no chances of any kind to advances regardless of how innocent and immediate. Why? Because she has done light-years of thinking before the fact. By the time a woman accepts an invitation for coffee, she has conclusively decided the man in question now worthy of her company and has made sense, and recovered sensibility, of what a relationship may hold with the morphed overnight, bothersome-to-beloved.

The difference now is, because of the ambiguous exchange both sexes share, it is not so much that women are weighing their entry into marriage, but rather their exit from relationsham. That is, women are no longer thinking of what they’d like to be a part of, but what they would ultimately like to avoid. At all costs.

Technically, however, it’s obvious the relationsham has already started before it has begun. The only certainty, of the impassive banter exchanged, is its irresoluteness. Women are at an impasse without knowing they have even reached one.

Sadly, the exits are never clearly marked.

IMAGE | Matthew McCaslin | Exit | 2008 | Electrical exit signs, flexible conduit, electrical wiring 104 x 72 x 3 inches (shown) | Edition of 10 | Editions Fawbush | New York

NB: Thanks to Fictionally for the blog post inspiration.

Comments

One Response to “Enter Pride and Prejudice, Exit Sense and Sensibility”

  1. JM on February 13th, 2009 5:48 pm

    Ha! As for inspiration - I’m sorry I couldn’t find the quote. The comment I was going to leave re: relationsham though, was “guilty as charged”!

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