“Back in my day” has always been a statement that our generation fears to hear uttered from our senior family members. It is usually a sign that a lecture or long critique is about to follow about how “kids these days” don’t do this or are too wrapped up in that. This past Easter, after the food was devoured and the plates were cleared from the table, I willingly began what I thought was going to be one of those conversations. As we explore our generation and how we are viewed, a subject that came up a lot was dating and romance. Dating has come a long way with the help of technology, making it a drastically different process than when my grandparents started dating in the ‘50s. I wanted insight from reliable sources on how older generations perceive our Tinder swiping, text message sending generation of lovers. And I was willing to endure whatever criticism came my way.
My panel of experts consisted of my maternal grandma and grandpa, my grandfather’s sister and her husband, my paternal grandmother (my Nana) and a family friend, Mrs. Strohm, who we have adopted as a third grandmother.
“Nana, how did you meet Papa?” I asked my paternal grandmother.
“What?” she said.
I repeated my question louder. “HOW DID YOU AND PAPA MEET?”
“Oh. That’s a long story,” she said.
I exchanged a worried look with my brother, but I had anticipated this.
“I met him at the Berkshire country club [in upstate New York] when I was on vacation,” Nana said. “I went with my girlfriends and he was there with his friends. We won a dance competition. Everybody knew him from his dancing but I didn’t dance. Turns out I lived about five blocks away from him and he told me he could take me for a ride on the back of his motorcycle. He was very well-known, not good well-known. Nine months later, your father was born.”
My dad rolled his eyes. “It was basically Dirty Dancing,” he said, and everyone at the table laughed. Nana was 25 when they met in 1957 and Papa was 35.
I followed up asking what everyone’s dating experience had been like.
“Some people dated when they weren’t even allowed to go out with their significant other,” Grandma said. “In our generation we never had such a thing like a cell phone, and there was more talking to be done among people than there was with this texting.”
Mrs. Strohm nodded in agreement.
“We had one telephone in the house and everyone used it,” she said. “I think there was a lot more of dating people you knew, like family friends. For instance, if my mother and father and your mother and father we friends therefore I would know their boy and that would be one of my dates. And my father was very strict. If you weren’t home by the time he said, you couldn’t go out for a month.”
I asked her how she and her late husband Andy met.
“That’s a story,” she said. “I used to go to a Catholic youth organization back in those days and it had a country club and they had tea dances on Sundays and I would go and they would be terrible and filled with people I did not want to see. So I would go to the YMCA and I met Andy there. I never told my parents I met him at the YMCA because first of all, he wasn’t a Catholic and second of all my mother kept saying—he became a Catholic the day before he died—but my mother said, ‘Why was a Protestant boy at a Catholic dance?’ and I said, “ I don’t know, Mother” but really it was a Catholic girl at the YMCA.”
Everyone laughed at this too.
“I didn’t tell my mother that until a long time after I was married. She would have had a fit. We dated for three months, and my father told me I couldn’t be married until I was 21 because I had just come out of the convent. So I met Andy when I came out of the convent and then I had to wait two years until I was 21 and then we got married.”
That sounded like another love story ripped straight from the movies and I couldn’t help but think how romantic that sounded. I then asked my panel if they believed that young people today were able to have better relationships due to the aid of technology and its ability to keep us constantly connected.
Mrs. Strohm spoke first.
“I don’t think so. We had more time than young people have today. We didn’t have all the extra activities that young people have,” she said. “In my years, we did not go away to college. If you went to school, you went around the corner or to the closest college and came home day and night. Most of us dated the boy around the corner, the ones that you saw every day or at school. Or you met them at a dance and don’t tell your mother.”
Jim smiled and spoke up for the first time. Jim is a veteran of the Navy and was in Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. He always has the most interesting stories to tell.
“I used to like communicating with the girls,” he said. “In my day it was a big thing if you held hands with a girl.”
I decided to dive further into the topic of updated communication. My thoughts automatically thought of the new dating app craze, Tinder. I did my best to illustrate how the app works to my people, explaining that you create a profile and can accept or decline people based on a picture.
“So like speed dating?” Grandma said.
“Kind of, but virtually,” I said.
“How about that!” Nana said, seeming genuinely intrigued by the concept.
“I guess it beats meeting somebody in a gin mill,” Jim said. My mom clarified that meant a bar.
Grandma and Mrs. Strohm asked more questions about the logistics of the app, but the conversation turned to the security of the app.
“But how do you know if you’re getting the person?” Nana asked.
“I guess there’s no way of really knowing until you meet them. You trust the picture,” I said.
“How do you get on this website. Do you have to be interviewed before or something? How do you know if the person you’re meeting is a good person either, though?” Grandma said.
I shrugged and she continued.
“Isn’t it kind of scary, because you hear about the kind of things that happen when people meet on the Internet? How do you know that the picture is the person you’re really going to see?” she said.
My dad joined the conversation at this point.
“It’s more like a blind date, isn’t it? When you go on a blind date, someone hooks you up with somebody and maybe you know about the person and maybe not,” he said.
“Blind dates were in my time,” Nana said.
I have gotten “the Internet is unsafe” talk from my parents multiple times, so I wasn’t surprised at their concerns. I explained to them that there are ways of being safe using these sites and that online or app dating can be a great way to meet people that you otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet.
Mrs. Strohm furrowed her brow a little in disagreement.
“Well you could meet someone who lives 30 miles away if you knew someone who knew them. Or at a party or something like that,” she said. “If I had a daughter or a son, I would not want them going out with someone who they met on the internet or somebody that I didn’t know their background.”
I then asked them what they thought their younger lives and communication habits would have been like if they had access to current technology.
“Years ago, you didn’t get to know a person until you’re with them or married to them or whatever for a while,” Grandma said.
“That’s because there wasn’t enough communication when they were going out. Communication is great now. I mean, sometimes weeks went by before you went out on the next date or knew what they were doing. I think I was one of the last people without a cellphone, but now I feel naked if I leave the house without it. I can’t get in touch with anybody,“ Grandpa said in reply.
“And there really weren’t opportunities to meet people outside of your scope, you know, your church, school, family, that was about the extent of it,” Mrs. Strohm said.
These were the answers that most surprised me because I think I was expecting them to say that nothing would be different. These answers went against the elderly stereotype that they think everything in their time was better than now. I was impressed that they could look back at their personal experiences and see that things could have been different and even an improvement, though they were still speaking in generic terms about today’s technology.
As she usually does, my mom read my mind and answered the question.
“I think it’s hard to ask that question of what it would have been like for them because I still don’t think that even people in my age group know enough about technology now to know if I would have been able to use it before,” she said.
She was right, also per usual. My panel had no idea how to send a text, let alone a Snapchat, Facetime or status update. It’s impossible for our generation to expect them to understand how we communicate and date when they cannot understand our medium.
Mrs. Strohm said it best at the end of the discussion.
“I think each age group and the time that they’re living in is the best time for them, and as you look back, it was different than it is today and your children will look back on yours and theirs will be different than yours. It’s something you’ll always have to adjust to,” she said.
My mom then turned to her parents and said, “You guys didn’t tell how you met yet.”
“That’s easy. I was an innocent young girl working in a butcher shop part time after school and he was the dirty butcher in the backroom,” Grandma said.
“I asked her to come into the icebox to look at my tenderloin,” Grandpa said.
A roar of laughter erupted and dessert was served.