Texto 3
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.
Ao dizer: "Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret." (2º parágrafo), a entrevistada expressou-se
