It was finals week when I received an unexpected text message.
The sender was a guy I had worked with last year and someone I hadn’t spoken to in months. So when I say this message was unexpected, it was very unexpected.
He wanted to know if I wanted to catch up sometime since I was done with finals.
How he knew that it was the day of my last final, I don’t even want to know, and that thought was surprisingly not my first concern.
My first concern was that he asked me out in a text message.
Technology has absorbed our lives and we can’t live without it.
I love technology and would probably die without it, but now it seems that we rely on it a little too much, especially when it comes to dating.
Technology is not my only concern when it comes to this issue.
I was a bit skeptical about meeting him, purely on the whole text message issue, but after encouragement from my friends, we set a date.
We met at a nearby restaurant the following week and the meeting was ok, to say the least.
The original plan was to just grab a drink so that I could meet some friends downtown, but drinks turned into dinner when he just decided to order.
The list goes on: yes, the restaurant was crowded but there is still such a thing as personal bubble space.
Conversation topics could have been better, manners were decent enough and if this were a date, he could at least offered to pay.
Don’t get me wrong: This guy is truly a great guy, but there just was not that spark.
Yes, I am extremely picky. (Everyone should be when it comes to things like this.) But I want to be treated like a lady by a gentleman and a scholar.
Whatever happened to men holding the door open, pulling out our chairs and helping us put on our coats?
These things are so easy to do, yet they have somehow become a novelty.
Our society somewhat expects how a relationship should go and how the members of that relationship should act.
If we expect men to act like gentlemen, then it has to be a two-way street.
There is a quote by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen that I absolutely love.
He says, “The higher (a woman’s) virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
I try to act like a lady as much as I possibly can, but it is no easy task at times.
The best we all can do is to try because we need to treat others with respect if we want to be treated with respect ourselves.
When we can start to do that, a new title is earned, and people, especially members of the opposite sex, will start to view us in a new, more positive light.
Jackson is VN editor
