Things that forever changed the dating game

ON 26 July, 2004, former Ugandan President Godfrey Binaisa (R.I.P) married a Japanese woman, Tomoko Yamamoto, in a unification church blessing ceremony. That an ageing former head of state had chosen an oriental soul mate an advanced age was not the news. What made news was the fact that the two met on the internet.The coming of internet arguably caused the biggest cultural shift since the industrial revolution. Have you ever actually stopped to ponder how much the internet has changed the dating world?Nowadays, people can meet online, making the world much smaller. The internet has saved many long distance relationships that would have died before the skypes and emails and facebooks of this world came around, but it has also complicated communication in dating. We have so many choices and, as the old saying goes, “a man is only as limited as his options.”“Googling” or “facebooking” someone can ruin that blind date you were planning on with that mystery person. And of course, you can stalk someone seamlessly across the internet if you choose that creepy course. We have yet to see all the changes that the internet has brought to dating, but I think it’s the biggest change in dating since the era of secularism. Secularism There were a number of movements that minimized the influence of religion, and advocated scientific and societal shifts. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged the notion that women were created from a man’s rib. Essentially, the theory turned humans into animals, and proposed that we all choose our partners due to unconscious natural selection. The Telephone “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Those were the first words spoken into a telephone by Graham Bell, the inventor of the device. Okay, so he wasn’t asking his assistant out on a date, but he would eventually shape how we date: getting a phone number became an integral part of the modern mating ritual. In the old days it was written on a piece of paper in a bar, or under your desk in the classroom, yet today all that is simply punched into a cell phone. The ‘60sThis decade was responsible for the “Free Love” movement, which originally advocated rejection of the institution of marriage, but also kick-started sexual liberation. It ushered in modern times: decades of decadence and excess to follow in the wake of the conservative ‘50s.The CarCars are dating vehicles (excuse the pun): a cool ride makes a guy more attractive. In college, cars help students get to their dates and provide a place to make out at no cost.AIDSThis terrible disease sobered society after the free-wheeling ‘70s. The best known way to prevent this disease was through abstinence. Most people born after the 1970s forever blame AIDS for their horrible sex lives growing up. What this disease did was instill a basic fear of sex in nearly all humans. AIDS doused the intoxicating flames of the ‘60s and ‘70s with a deadly reality.

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Things that forever changed the dating game