Dating Culture In Usa
Dating Culture 101 in the United States While in some countries dating is considered as a serious family matter, independence plays a key role in shaping dating culture in the United States. Dating is often based on a personal decision in America rather than driven by the influence of parents and arranged marriages. Dating in The USA. A lot of people from many countries are interested in the USA. This huge and densely populated country has created a lot of iconic images in media and mass culture which can be seen in different countries all over the world. As you may expect, dating is a little bit different in China than it is in most Western countries. The basics are the same—people are people everywhere—but there are still a few differences regarding culture and social cues to note.
Speaking about dating culture in America, what comes into mind is surely their love for freedom. As know worldwide, American has this freestyle dating, with no rules to follow. But do you know that American still has it? Despite of their modernity and love for freedom, there are still customs to obey and follow when it comes to dating. Let's find out what's dating culture in US!
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Contents
- 1 Several Steps To Follow
1. You May Ask Someone Out Through A Call
Welcome to one of the most liberal country in the world. Americans are really open for any sort of things, and it applied on their dating culture as well. While in some other countries you have to wait until some certain times until asking someone out, you don’t necessarily have to wait for that long in America! Once you take interest at someone, you can ask them out as soon as possible. You don’t even have to wait until you see their face! You can ask someone for a date via phone call or even Facebook! They are carefree and open minded that they don’t mind with that.
2. Marriage Is Not (Always) The Ultimate Goal
US people will think through and through before they decide to get married. They will make sure that their partner is the right one worth spent their life with. Thus, people who date in America are not all ended up being married. It is okay for them to have sex and kids, but marriage is definitely different things.
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3. Love Is Being Thrown Out Everywhere
It seems easy for American to say love at the first meeting. As their culture is not as strict as other country, they are also a little loose on this one. An American who is looking for a serious relationship tend to be cautious with this one, and do not easily believe with the word love as it being easily thrown out here and there.
4. Having Sex Doesn’t Mean Dating
Free sex, one night stand, and other similar things are really common in the US. You don’t have to love each other to have sex. And you don’t even have to date to have sex. So if you are having sex with an American, it doesn’t mean he likes you or he want to date you. He may simply want to hit on you.
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5. Moving In Together Is A Common Thing
As free as their mind could be, American dating rules is free as well. As the leader of Western life, American allowed cohabitation between a man and a woman. As long as you are a legal adult, you can move in together with your partner. If a relationship is already several months or years long, couples usually moved in together. The man could move to the woman's place, or vice versa. They could also find a new place together.
6. Parents Involvement Are Minimal
In some countries, parents are deeply involved in their children’s relationship. They even becoming the matchmaker between their children and set up the marriage for them. In the US, once you hit 18 and becoming legal adult, you are free to make a decision on your own. Parents did not involve much in their children’s dating. In some cases, couples are getting married without even tell their parents. The parents would also be understanding because their adult children take responsibility on their own.
7. An Excessive PDA
Americans love passionately and tend to show it in public. Kissing and hugging in public is a common sight when couples meet each other. Americans didn’t mind with those things as long as the couples didn’t offend another person. They love to show their love to each other anywhere and anytime. This is a sight that wouldn't happen in Eastern country. Western countries like United States in more loose to this kind of thing.
8. Make Sure Of Your Relationship Status
There are all sorts of kind of relationship between man and woman in America. Say it a short fling, playful date, short meeting, and a serious relationship looking forward to a marriage. You may call it what you like, but one sure thing is you have to make your relationship status clear for your partner. Are you officially date them? Do you want to date them? Or your relationship is no more than a short fling without involving deeper feeling? This is important for American so that they won't let themselves carried away.
9. Your Pet Take Part In Your Relationships
Believe it or not, your home pet take part in the longevity of your relationship. When you have moved in together with your partner, its part in your relationship become bigger. Americans really love to have pet, an it often sparks jealousy towards your partner. A few American couple break up because they didn't like the pet that their partner have. So, make sure that your partner doesn't only love you but your pet as well.
10. Turn Them Down Politely
As said before, Americans are careful with their feeling and like everything clear beforehand. Before you officially dating an American, there were several meeting between two person involved. During those meeting, you have to quickly decide whether you like them or not. If you feel not into them, do not as for further meeting, it means you give them a false hope. Just turn them politely by saying that there will be no next meeting for both of you. It may seems rude, but it would be ruder if you let their hope flying high.
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11. You Had To Have A Steady Job
Living cost in a modern country like America is no joke. Thus every American shouldn't be jobless. If you are already dating and plan to move in together, make sure that your job is steady enough to cover the living cost for two person. When you are not married yet, being jobless is a big no. Living cost should be covered by both man and woman, and being jobless only putting your relationship on the edge and breaking up seems not in a too distant future.
Also read: Signs of Friendzone Relationship
12. Take Care Of Your Hygiene
American known for their high standard of living. They can't really tolerate dirty things, in any kind. You have to keep yourself neat and clean, so is your house. Couples, especially those who are living together, often fight about this. Make sure that you and your house are not smell bad.
13. Do Not Smoke In Front Of Your Girlfriend Or Boyfriend
Although most of adults in America are smoking regardless of gender, there are people who are not fond of it. They find it annoying when someone smoke in public, and dislike it the most when their partner smoking in front of them. If you just started dating, ask your partner if they are okay with smoking. If the answer is not, never try to do it in front of them.
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14. Have Some Sense Of Humor
American never judge someone by their looks. Instead of outer appearance, personality caught them first. They love someone who can make a good laugh, have a sense of humor, and throwing funny jokes. They love to laugh, and is there a better person to make you laugh other than someone you date? If you can make her comfortable, love is around the corner. Physical appearance comes in second, as American prefer someone with a good sense of humor.
Being a country with lots of freedom doesn't mean America doesn't have some customs and culture to follow when it comes to dating. Although some people may think differently, but despite the free mind, America did have some dating cultures that set their attitude on dating. Thus, now you know about the dating culture in Use. So in case you ever heard, always spread love on every corner.
Several Steps To Follow
Despite of their love to personal freedom, American did have several steps to follow when it comes to dating. Here are few of those steps of dating culture in US:
1. Hooking Up
Hooking up is a next step after you meet each other. It doesn't necessarily happen during the second meet and so on, as you can hooked someone up on your first meeting! In this stage you start to show that you are interested on him or her, and asked them for a next meeting.
Dating In Western Culture
2. Seeing Each Other
In this step you start to know each other deeper. As you learn more and more about his or her personality, you may like them more or turned down by their attitude or words. But it's worth to try though.
3. Officially Dating
After a series of meeting, getting to know each other better, what comes next is none other than he finally ask you out, officially! American loves such sweet words like 'Would you be my girlfriend?' or 'Would you date someone like me?' And if she says yes, then you are now officially a couple.
Whenever possible, I love to use the word courtship in everyday conversation with young and old alike.
It’s one of those words with which most people are familiar, but have vastly differing opinions of what it means. For many, courtship is an old-fashioned word. It summons visions of men wooing women with small tokens of affection and asking their hand in marriage on bended knee. For social scientists, studies of courtship usually look at the process of “mate selection.” (Social scientists, among whom I number myself from time to time, will never be accused of being romantics.)
For the purpose of this article the preparation for and proposal of marriage is what makes the act qualify as courtship.
As cultural historians Alan Carlson and Beth Bailey put it in the Mars Hill Audio Report, Wandering Toward the Altar: The Decline of American Courtship, prior to the early 20th century, courtship involved one man and one woman spending intentional time together to get to know each other with the expressed purpose of evaluating the other as a potential husband or wife. The man and the woman usually were members of the same community, and the courting usually was done in the woman’s home in the presence (and under the watchful eye) of her family, most often Mom and brothers.
However, between the late 1800s and the first few decades of the 1900s the new system of “dating” added new stages to courtship. One of the most obvious changes was that it multiplied the number of partners (from serious to casual) an individual was likely to have before marriage.
So one important point to understand right up front (and about which many inside and outside the church are confused) is that we have not moved from a courtship system to a dating system, but instead, we have added a dating system into our courtship system. Since most young adults will marry, the process employed in finding a husband and wife is still considered courtship. However, an extra layer, what we call “dating,” has been added to the process of courting. If you are familiar with computer programming terminology, you can liken dating to a sub-routine that has been added to the system of courtship.
Over the course of this two-part article, I would like to trace how this change occurred, especially concentrating on the origin of this dating “subroutine.” Let me begin by briefly suggesting four cultural forces that assisted in moving mate selection from, as Alan Carlson puts it, the more predictable cultural script that existed for several centuries, to the multi-layered system and (I think most would agree) the more ambiguous courtship system that includes “the date.”
The first, and probably most important change we find in courtship practices in the West occurred in the early 20th century when courtship moved from public acts conducted in private spaces (for instance, the family porch or parlor) to private or individual acts conducted in public spaces, located primarily in the entertainment world, as Beth Bailey argues in her book, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America. Bailey observes that by the 1930s and ’40s, with the advent of the “date” (which we will look at more fully in the next installment) courtship increasingly took place in public spaces such as movie theaters and dance halls, removed by distance and by anonymity from the sheltering and controlling contexts of the home and local community. Keeping company in the family parlor was replaced by dining and dancing, movies, and “parking.”
A second cultural force that influenced the older courtship system was the rise of “public advice” literature as well as the rise of an “expert” class of advisers — psychologists, sociologists, statisticians, etc. At the same time that the public entertainment culture was on the rise in the early 20th century, a proliferation of magazine articles and books began offering advice about courtship, marriage and the relationship between the sexes.
As Ken Myers says in Wandering Toward the Altar, from the late 1930s on, young people knew, down to the percentage point, what their peers throughout the country thought and did. They knew what was “normal.” Prior to the 20th century, “normal” was determined within families and local communities, but now a “higher authority,” with wide-spread circulation and readership, began to form a national consciousness.
Thirdly, we see a change in sexual norms in the West. With the onset of the sexual revolution the question arose, “Why would a man court and woo a woman when he could gain a chief benefit of marriage, namely sexual gratification, for free with no commitment?” (Friendship “with benefits” is a contemporary example.)
Closely related to this is the invention of birth control. There is too much that could be said here, so I’ll be brief. Simply put, with the onset of the widespread use of chemical and other means of birth control, the language of procreation — of having children — was separated from the language of marriage. As U. of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass argues in his chapter on courtship in Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance, under the old system of courtship, marriage and bringing a child into the world were inextricably linked. But no longer. With the ever decreasing risk of pregnancy, having sex and being married were no longer tied together.
Fourthly, we find a change in the models and metaphors used to describe the home and family. Prior to the 20th century, when we talked about courtship we used language and metaphors of home and family: “He’d be a good father,” “They could have such a happy home together,” etc.
The new system of courtship that played itself out in the entertainment culture and public square largely was understood and described by the advice and “expert” class with metaphors taken from modern industrial capitalism. It’s as if those who wrote and commented on male-female relationship had stopped reading the Song of Solomon and Jane Austen in favor of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.
The new courtship system gave importance to competition (and worried about how to control it); it valued consumption; it presented an economic model of scarcity and abundance of men and women as a guide to personal affairs — There aren’t that many good men left, so you better get one while the gettin’ is good!
This new language of courtship had great symbolic importance and continues to shape the way we think, speak and act concerning relationships to this day. Have you ever known a girl who went out with a guy who was a complete dolt but who could help her get ahead socially? (And not to pick on women, it just as easily happens in reverse.) Those decisions are based more on economic theory of the 19th and 20th centuries than on any sort of biblical notion of desire for the opposite sex.
So these are four important cultural forces in the early part of the 20th century that assisted in moving our culture from the older courtship system that existed prior to the late 19th century, to a courtship system that includes “dating,” which, I will argue in the next article, is much more ambiguous and confusing. I will also talk about dating itself (including the origination of the word date), and how it has changed over time.
Copyright 2007 Skip Burzumato. All rights reserved.
About the Author
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Skip Burzumato is the rector of St. Andrew’s Reformed Episcopal Church in Savannah, Ga. He has been in ministry for 16 years, serving in the inner-city of Memphis, Tenn., and as a youth, college, and singles pastor in various churches. He earned degrees from University of Memphis (B.A., M.A.) and Reformed Theological Seminary. Before entering the ministry, he served in the U.S. Navy and is also a trained musician, having worked as a recording engineer in Memphis, Tenn. Skip has been married to his wife, Stacey, since 1986. They have four children: Bradley, Gracie, Nicholas and Elizabeth; and one dog, Mazer.