By the time "When Harry Met Sally..." came out in 1989 to resurrect the kind of sweet-but-savvy rom-com that Hollywood made so well in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, the American dating scene would already have been unrecognizable to Golden Age talents like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
Things are so much crazier now, but I'll get to that in a moment.
There's a particularly old-school comedy scene in Harry & Sally involving dueling phone calls. A worried Harry phones his best friend Jess to tell him that he and Sally slept together the night before. At the same time, a worried Sally calls her best friend Marie to tell her she'd just slept with Harry. The catch? Jess and Marie are engaged, in the same bed together, and trying not to let Harry or Sally know that the other one is on the other line.
The back-and-forth dialog and the timing could have come straight out of a Carole Lombard/Clark Gable flick.
Watch:
"Tell me I'll never have to be out there again," Marie says to Jess after they're both off the phone. Jess puts his arm around her and says, "You will never have to be out there again."
After reading today's latest dating news in the Free Press, I am so grateful I'll never have to be out there again.
TRIVIA TIME: According to one YouTube commenter, filming those two minutes required 61 takes on three separate sound stages, all at the same time. Totally worth the effort, if you ask me.
The latest obstacle to the furtherance of our troubled species is — you might have guessed this already — Woke GenZ women.
“Dating right now is just walking on eggshells, honestly,” Sam, a 25-year-old D.C. grad student, confessed to FP writer Rikki Schlott.
"You just have to assume that most girls are progressive and constantly try to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing," he added.
I'm old enough to remember when the only personal detail I had to work hard to conceal on a first date was that I'd rather chew a hole in my own forehead than listen to even one song from her Tori Amos collection.
Sam said that he's "usually just trying to gauge where they’re coming from while obfuscating my views.”
Where GenZ women are coming from is increasingly left-wing and intolerantly Woke. A report last fall in the New York Post revealed that "more than half of millennial and Gen Z women find it a relationship red flag if a partner listens to 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast."
But "the biggest red flag for young women," according to the Post's poll, "was for a potential partner to identify as a MAGA Republican, with more than three-quarters (76%) of those polled admitting this would make them want to run for the hills."
Look, GenZ ladies. I once dated a woman who had to deal with my Steely Dan obsession, and now we've been married for almost 22 years. I'd add that my Republican grandmother happily married a Democrat and then he made such a full recovery that he eventually chaired the Missouri state GOP, but that's probably not what you want to hear.
The demographic killer detail in these reports is that while GenZ men are trending more conservative, young women are growing more and more left-wing. Then there's the ridiculous new "6/6/6" prerequisite that a potential male mate must be six feet tall, have six-pack abs, and earn six figures — no matter how homely or loathsome a woman might be.
The 6/6/6 rule alone rules out 99% of under-30 males for marriage.
Is it any wonder men are retreating from dating and marriage and settling for virtual companionship on pr0n sites and from AI girlfriends?
Welp, there goes the species. We had a nice run while it lasted.
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