That Was Then

All the world's a stage/and all the men and women merely players (Shakespeare, 1-2). Most people say the players of today’s stage grow up too fast. If that is a fact, the question people should be asking is why? Can it be blamed on television? videogames? the sex education program at their school? The experts seem to agree that a combination of these and other aspects of a teen’s life all influence the rate of maturation. The next step in understanding this idea is to study the ways in which this pace changes other facets of the teen’s existence. One way in which these factors manipulate an adolescent’s life is in the arena of dating.
To clearly illustrate this, one may compare the changes in dating from the Baby Boomer generation to Generation Y. Just the other day, I was complaining about how my boyfriend doesn’t text me enough, and my mom informed me that she and her extremely serious high school boyfriend would sometimes go for an entire week without talking! My take on why this had changed so much is that in the current day and age there are so many outlets and ways for teens to communicate, so we do so constantly and if that consistency is broken, we feel ill at ease. In my mom’s day, it was no big deal because no one talked 24/7. The people my age are accustomed to seeing people on television and at school texting all the time, so therefore they feel that if they are not following suit they must be an outcast.
Another reason that people have different expectations of dating is the base idea of what it means to be “dating” someone. “Full of wise saws, and modern instances/and so he plays his part” and thinks he knows it all in the dating world (Shakespeare, 21-22). A study done by Multnomah Bible College right here in Oregon showed that people twenty years ago thought of dating as “going to the movies on a Friday night” without any belief that the two would necessarily reconnect at any later date; “Dating someone one Friday didn't mean he was committed to...