WILSHERE: Dating rules are outdated

Girls have a number. That number can’t be too high or too low, and either one is claimed to be indicative of her personality. Guys always have to pay and always have to be the ones to make the first move. Girls shouldn’t text first, or else they look too eager. They can’t wait too long to respond, but they should play hard to get. At the same time, they have to show some interest. They should text every three days, as to not appear “crazy” or “attached.”

The deeper one gets in reading into dating rules, the more constructive, the more formulas and the more exclusion one will find.

Throughout the years, society has created and enforced various dating rules. These rules have been reinforced by popular culture and teen magazines. They lead you to conclusions of love through simple flowcharts and embarrassing stories. These are the magazines I grew up reading, the ones that preached independence and freedom while also preaching the correct timing of text messages and how that correlated with how successful your relationships were going to be.

Every piece of teenage life was criticized and critiqued, from what foods you should eat on your bowling date to how you approach the topic of spring break with your crush. I was a young and impressionable middle schooler, so I collected this advice and kept the clippings on my wall, following their relationship formulas like they were the quadratic formula, strategically planning messages and moves. Dating rules can still be found in our media today. One just needs to log on to Total Frat Move to read how one should behave in a relationship.

Dating is hard. Communication is hard. Granted, I still struggle with sending messages, as I become anxious about how they’re going to be received and if my grammar mistakes will go unnoticed. I no longer look to magazines to tell me how to form my correspondence. I believe in a system of trial and error, and more recently, the error has been exponentially growing. That is dating, though. It’s a process of mistake-making and learning from those mistakes.

I question the nature of dating rules. I am skeptical of literature — or word of mouth, for that matter — that equates someone’s worth to how many people they have or haven’t been with. I am skeptical of anyone who tells me that I need to laugh at a guy’s joke even if he doesn’t have an ounce of humor in his body, just to appease his ego. I question rules that prescribe different tasks in a relationship to either a man or a woman, which could be as small as someone opening a door or as big as who gets to propose if they’re getting married.

There is no happy medium, and there is no one set of rules that can be applied to groups of people, including those who are not included in heterosexual dating practices or who have been excluded from the conversation. One cannot include formulas and ratios in dating, nor should generalized statements found on glossy pages dictate how we date.

This is not to say that one should be without rules. This is to say that we should be questioning those put in place, those that seem as outdated as charm classes and spending Friday night waiting by your rotary phone so your boo thang could call you. If one wants to text their prospective boo first, they should be able to do that without repercussion. If one wants to break the social norms we have created, one should be able to do so without backlash. We should be the ones making the rules for ourselves and not subscribing to ones stuck in time from decades before us.

We are living in an age of progression. This means that we should be questioning convention and pushing the limits that have been enforced upon us. We should be autonomous with our choices and make the relationships that we want to have if we want to have one. We no longer need to subscribe to prescribed gender roles in relationships, because those are the ones that remain due to convenience. If we want to play the game of dating, we should make our own rules.