Crush, Stalk, Talk, Confess, [Be a] Reject

Come to think of it, I don't think that anyone seems to know how to actually start courting people. The usual pattern that I seem to see seems to fall into the basic pattern of:

• Crush
• Stalk
• Talk
• Confess
• [Be a] Reject

This is kind of sad for a multitude of reasons: it seems that folks nowadays are finding it much harder to find other folks to date seriously (with intent of going further than just being boyfriend/girlfriend).

*chuckles* I know this only through anecdotal evidence and some (limited) personal experience. A quick straw poll among the people that I know seems to suggest that this is true among them. How odd that this is happening, if we suppose that Darwin's theory of evolution is true, since Darwin's ideas include the assumption that species will want to maximise the likelihood of perpetuating the species. In the case of humans (due to way our societal structure), it probably means being able to find someone to settle down as soon as possible.

People in the past seem to have a much simpler time—life was fairly uncomplicated, and thus the concept of settling down is much more tangible and appreciated than anything else. But fast forward to today, where we have a lot of distractions in the world; it makes a lot of people not want to settle down to a couple status early, since it is often perceived that being a couple means losing all the "joys" of being simple. Increasingly, we find that most of the higher educated are pursuing this path, with most of them being ambivalent to the whole issue of "settling down".

Is this a cause for concern? Well, from my personal viewpoint, it is a resounding yes, since it means that I don't have much choice of nice girls to actually date and eventually settle down; I'm part of the "old breed" of people who don't really "date for fun". From a larger perspective, this is very worrying, racial and class issues aside. With the advent of technology, it seems that people are more and more reliant on the use of technology to aid in procreation, which means that couples settle down much later in life, and probably have fewer children, if at all.

If this attitude towards the concept of marriage and "settling down" is going to be persistent in human society, I foresee that we will have lots of problems ahead. Among other things, all the economic infrastructure that we have set up now will be weakened over time as the people who help to contribute are starting to dwindle in number. Sure, we can use automation to help deal with the short flow, but will all these automation of economic tasks really help us in the future as a long term solution?

Okay, enough of the "big picture" perspective; it's back to what I originally wanted to talk about: people not knowing how to court other people. In this time and age, when folks have much less opportunity to actually go out of their homes to meet up with people, it becomes increasingly hard to find interested parties to actually learn more about them. The pattern that I outlined is one that is based more or less on my perspective (aka the "geek/nerd" perspective); mileage differs for individuals. It is sad; most of the time, males who are interested in females will always seem to be overtly so, while the converse doesn't quite hold. And like how most guys are, I don't even want to try to analyse what is going on in a female's head—basic laws of logic break down at this juncture, making any form of analysis completely useless. So I just observe and figure things out one step at a time.

The rejection; this is something that everyone seems to undergo all the time. Males particularly (since I'm male, I will have that bias hahaha). It seems that it is almost always the case that the female will always treat the male as some kind of good friend instead of anything else, even when he is making "his moves" on her. I'm unsure if this is due to the innate naivete of the female (she just doesn't see it) or that of the male (he thinks it is clear, but actually, it isn't). Usual reactions from the female from a "confession" include either a completely shocked look followed by a "I'm sorry"-like statement and possibly perpetually ignoring the male to the [extremely] rare occurrence where she actually concurs.

If only there exist a manual on how females think hahahahaha... It would make the life of most males (and all the geeks/nerds) much easier. What is it in the mind of the female that makes it so much different from the thought processes of that of the male? Why is it that the female seems to think things in a much more complicated fashion than that of the male? These questions never did seem to have any coherent answer, but it seems that at least in the past, there were actual working solutions which could be used to side step the problem and still solve the bigger problem of actually getting people together and just settle down. Nowadays, even with so much more knowledge than before, it seems that we have lost the ability that we used to have some time back. People are fast turning into creatures without good skills in the social context, or rather, at least those folks who are smart but without the riches/good looks yet; no one denies the ease in which people who are rich/famous/good-looking are able to blend into most social contexts.

Okay, I think that I've side-tracked by too much to make any more coherent sense. I guess I'll stop here for now.