Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I was waiting for a bus at the depot in Bigtown. Among the crowd was a schoolgirl, around eighteen years of age (but maybe sixteen, seventeen, nineteen – how would I know?).
A bunch of school lads arrived to wait for the same bus and immediately the girl darted out to join them. Then another bunch of lads arrived, with a girl in tow, and they all plunged into animated conversation quite close to me.
An old duffer’s observations
I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, nor wanted to. It was doubtless just social chit-chat. But I was interested to observe the interactions among them, and how different it was from my own, long-ago, schooldays.
First of all, no girl in my day would have dreamed of darting in to join the boys, no matter how much she wanted to. For to show such an interest in the opposite sex would have been considered much to ‘forward’, even brazen.
Couldn’t be girly or creepy
Nor would any of the boys have attempted to join with her. That would have been far too ‘girly’, maybe even a bit creepy.
And in any case both parties would have been completely tongue tied and merely stood not looking at each other. So a far more likely outcome of such a meeting would have been a shy exchange of nods followed by a total ignorance of one another’s presence.
How things have changed
The second group to arrive also showed how much things have changed. It was common enough in my day for one girl to be found in the company of many boys. But she would not have been following them, they would have been following, indeed clustering about her, eager for a glance, a smile, maybe even a word.
And she would certainly be branded either as a ‘tomboy’, or if she flashed her eyes and giggled a bit too much, a ‘hussy’ who ought to know better.
Unrequited attraction
In direct contrast, these two modern day ladies made it honestly obvious, by their body language and smiling eyes, that they fancied two of the lads in particular.
While the two lads thus singled out, made it equally obvious they regarded the two lasses as part of the gang, and no more than that.
Not seen in my day
I have to say I envied the easy way all the young men and women interacted. An interaction seen, in my youth, only in those Hollywood films featuring colleges where nobody actually attended lessons, but instead spent their very sunny days dancing around in drug stores or driving about in sleek cars.
Yet it surely has its down side. In the days of mutual awkwardness, once you’d won a girl of your own, you hung on in there. And as often as not married her.
For Life.
A factor in divorce rates?
Nowadays as we all know, it’s much more a matter of easy come, easy go. Lads surrounded all their lives by women as willing as them to be friendly, see far less reason to cling on to any one of them.
And that is why, I suggest, we see so many mums, attractive and intelligent and friendly, yet left alone with their new babies. That’s why so many marriages don’t last.
Whereas once they almost all did. Some happy, many unhappy.
I wonder which is best.
