Last night, I went out to celebrate my friend's 25th birthday. I'm going to skip over all the melodrama my friends and I are feeling about the fact that we're all reaching the quarter-century mark, because that's not the point of this post. This post has a more anthropological focus.
Before I begin, let me give you some background information. I am marrying my high-school sweetheart. That means that I stopped dating when I was 17 years old. We met in math class. We flirted over parabolas and the quadratic formula. We actually had a real first date, in which he picked me up from my house, and we went to see a movie, during which we blushed when our hands touched in the bag of popcorn. It was all very chaste and Pleasantville of us.
Well apparently, while my fiance and I were making googly eyes over malteds and going to sock hops, everyone else went to college and learned the age-old practice of the drunken hook-up. Ah yes, the romantic moment when you lock eyes across the beer pong table. You stumble towards each other, clutching your red solo cup of natty light and try to come up with what passes for witty conversation at 2am. Some people turned these encounters into relationships, however many people graduated from college still single. That takes us to the 21 and over dating population, which can be found in bars all across America. And this takes us back to last night, when my friends and I went out for a birthday celebration.
After dinner, we ended up at this bar on the Upper West Side. We picked this particular place because the birthday girl shared her last name with the name of the bar, so of course we HAD to go in. The experience started out spectacularly when an old drunk guy ran his hand up and down my friend's arm. Blerg. The fun continued when two (thankfully younger) guys came up and started chatting with us, and it became clear that Lame Guy #1 was desperately trying to get laid, while Lame Guy #2 was just there as a wing man--and not even a very good one, since he spent more energy staring at his phone than engaging in conversation. Yuck. Finally, the night came to a close after a wasted douchebag came running up to us, and started out by just staring at us before pointing to each one of us and saying, "Wow. You: Gorgeous. You: So hot. You: Beautiful. Ladies, you're incredible." The best part of it was, apparently he was at the bar with a girl. (Well, I used the term "girl" loosely. She had to be in her late 40s. He was not.) Ew. I mean, come on! It's bad enough that the single guys are creepers, but now the ones with girlfriends feel the need to creep as well?
All I gotta say is, if these are the kinds of experiences that I'm missing out by having my last first-date in high school, it doesn't seem like I'm missing out on much.
