The process used to be so straight forward.

First High School :

• Admit you like him/her (but not to the actual person)
• IM (from the time you finish dinner ‘til the time you go to bed)
• Round a base, or two (pre car: in basement parties when the strobe light goes on, post car: in the car)
• “We’re going Out” (requested and confirmed via IM, exhibited by girl wearing mall-purchased ghetto chain of boy…in New Jersey at least)
• More base-rounding (in tandem with celebration of every single month of the relationship with gas station bought flowers and mix CDs)

  Communication tools: Phone (likely your own house line at this point), cell phone (but not really until Junior of Senior year), IM (home computer only), and Email (not widely used in friend communication)

Then College:

• Rounding the bases (quickly, and sometimes in reverse)
• Talking (but not about anything having to do with a relationship at all ever)
• Going out (separately, but purposefully to the same places)
• Fighting (via passive aggressive away messages and drunken, too-loud comments to friends at parties)
• Repeat from top (but this time with declaration of “no attachment”)

  Note: I’m not familiar with the process people followed for entering into legitimate relationships in college. I’ve heard it involved sober conversation about like goals and relationship experience resulting in mutual appreciation and affection for one another. But this is the stuff of myths.

  Communication tools: Cell phone (including texting as of Junior/Senior year), IM + away message (on all day, every day), Email (generally reserved for fighting, not flirting), and Facebook (for a limited number of colleges, only senior year).

And now, The Rest of our Goddamn Lives: (unless you cheated and went to some form of Grad School then the above continues for 2-4 more years in which I seriously recommend locking it down via the above mystery process)

As far as I can tell there are no rules. No real process. No one thing people are most commonly doing so you can just follow that crowd (unless you’re Jewish. Then it’s JDate, so just do that). And to make matters worse (or perhaps what made matters worse) we now have at our disposal no less than a baker’s dozen communication tools over which we can play this game that has no rules:

• GChat, Facebook (and now Facebook chat!), MySpace (for the next few months before everyone switches to Facebook), Match.com/JDate/etc., IM, SameTime (if you work at PWC), Cell phones (used only for texting), Work phone, Personal email, Work email, Linked In (for stalking, not communicating, yet…)

And so now, in place of process, you hear the following:

• I don’t know where it’s really going. We’ve been playing a lot of Scrabulous
• How weird would it be if I just Gchatted her? I mean, her gmail is on her Facebook so that must mean she wants it to be known, right?
• Yeah, we’ve been texting for a few months now.
• I gave him my card but there’s no way he’s going to email my work email, right?!

We were more organized about dating in high school. Now you have to figure out how to
establish communication in one of the above eight forms some of which are viewed as legitimate, some of which are not by some people in some groups at some times under some circumstances. You just have to figure out which you’re functioning under and proceed as that dictates, usually.

I’m not longing for the olden days of “he pinned me” and “Pop, can you drive us to the drive-in?” but when people (parents) say, “what’s so hard about it? Just contact him” we have every right to whine, “over what medium!?!”

As a liberal I’m not fond of social rules, but this shit needs to be solved. We need to write dating communication rules, post them on Facebook, and not accept behavior that is out of line with them. Then everyone’s intentions will always be clear and we’ll all be married by 32 (34 for men, 28 for Southerners).

Tomorrow – rules, draft 1.