The 1950′s in the western world was a gloriously simple time to date women. Initially there was the courtship, if that pootles along well you pop the question get married and after a few years you’re old and you die. So far as I can tell, in this modern age, you need a degree in something akin in complexity to the string theory element of quantum mechanics in order to comprehend the dating world. The sequence of events that seems to constitute modern dating goes like this. First you’re “hooking up” then you’re “friends with benefits” then “seeing each other” then “going exclusive” then “dating” then you’re “a couple” who-get-invited-to-everything-together-as-a-single-entity then of course your “pretty much engaged” then you actually are “engaged” then your “pretty much married” and then you’re “married” then one day you’re arguing about a sock on the bedroom floor for 3 and a half damn hours, then you’re separated, pretty much divorced, divorced and then you meet a woman in a café and before you know it you’re back at square one.

Performing brain surgery on a conscious, irate and caffeinated hummingbird would be simpler than that.

How did we get from the 50’s dating template to the present day? I’ve decided to blame the 60’s. The generation of free love spawned a diabolical shift in the way we interact romantically and the human need to categorise has left us mired in an impossible swathe of verbs with which we choose from to describe the state of our romantic endeavours. How do we get back to those simpler times and if we could go back, would we want to? I don’t think we would. As humans we are drawn to complexity, just take a look a the development of the modern microchip, the six wheeled robotic explorers on Mars and the clasp mechanism on women’s bras. Its all so stunningly complex and yet we love it, in fact we are all feverishly adding to the complexity as fast as we can. The intricacies of contemporary courting are many and they leave us either knowing exactly where we stand with a prospective future mate or with absolutely no clue what the hell is going on, either way we are way more free today than we ever have been and I think that that is the clincher. Freedom.

You see, we are freedom loving little creatures and getting hitched at 19 such as was common back in the old days, is hugely restrictive if at a later date, when you’re a real grown up, you decide that you like another lady (or gentleman) more than the person you chose as a life partner when you were too young to legally drink in that large corn producing nation just above Mexico. In reality if you are too young to drink the good stuff you have absolutely no business deciding anything, certainly not life-partnery-stuff. I firmly believe that all the best engagements were made whilst blind drunk, in your thirties and under the soused impression that the object of your proposition is far prettier, cleverer, funnier and more sexually appealing than the cold light of morning will show. I have no scientific or statistical basis for believing any of this stuff, but if Tom Cruise is allowed to go around believing that aliens populated the Earth via hydrogen bombs and volcanoes, I will go ahead and believe whatever I damned well please.

So now if you’ll excuse me I am going to head out for a drink and try, rather valiantly I feel, to avoid stages 5-10 of the courting rituals in our brave new world.