Dinner and a movie. A walk in a park after a picnic for two. They might not be original, but these are classic date ideas.

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Dinner and a movie. A walk in a park after a picnic for two. They might not be original, but these are classic date ideas.

Do people your age go out on dates? Or are you more likely to hang out with a big group of people that includes people who are seeing each other exclusively?

In "The End of Courtship?" Alex Williams writes about Shani Silver, who recently waited to hear from the guy who had asked her on a "date" that evening: at 10 p.m., he texted to ask if she wanted to join him and "a bunch of friends from college" at the place where they were hanging out:

Turned off, she fired back a text message, politely declining. But in retrospect, she might have adjusted her expectations. "The word 'date‘ should almost be stricken from the dictionary," Ms. Silver said. "Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret."

"It‘s one step below a date, and one step above a high-five," she added. Dinner at a romantic new bistro? Forget it. Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along. Raised in the age of so-called "hookup culture," millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship.

Instead of dinner and a movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other "non-dates" that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.

"The new date is 'hanging out,' " said Denise Hewett, 24, an associate television producer in Manhattan, who is currently developing a show about this frustrating new romantic landscape. As one male friend recently told her: "I don‘t like to take girls out. I like to have them join in on what I‘m doing — going to an event, a concert." 

(…) Relationship experts point to technology as another factor in the upending of dating culture.

Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of "asynchronous communication," as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it‘s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.

"I‘ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out," said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: "Is anything fun going on tonight?" (…)

BY SHANNON DOYNE Disponível em: https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/learning/2013/01/14/ is-the-date-a-thing-of-the-past/? Adaptado.

Observe o parágrafo 4: “Instead of dinner and a movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.”

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