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Before our interviews I had romanticized the dating cities with fewer options and envisioned a happier, smaller community where people really got to know one another, and instead of hopping around trying to find the best party, they all just went to their one local spot and had a good time.
I imagined every guy had a girl next door. They grew up together. Got to know each other their whole lives and had a really deep bond. One day they just started boning and then they got married. I’m basing that on nothing, but it seems correct, right?
But talking with so many single people in Monroe and Wichita quickly demolished my fantasy that things were simpler and nicer in small towns. They generally hated their lack of options and the troubles that came with it.
Despite the difference in size, the problems of dating in Wichita and Monroe overlapped quite a bit. All our singles in both cities felt pressure to lock it down and definitely felt like outliers by being single in their late twenties. This stigma of being unmarried in your late twenties was never expressed in any of the focus groups in bigger cities.
A huge problem is that everyone already knows all of his or her options pretty well. Josh, twenty-two, said his main pool of dating options is generally limited to a set of folks that he and his friends have known since high school. “If I see a girl at a bar and I don’t know her, within thirty seconds to a minute, I’ll find out who that person is by just asking around,” he explained. “Her life story. Who she’s dated. You basically know everything about the person.”
And from talking to these folks, it appears when you don’t know someone already, usually the “everything” is not “Oh he/she’s the best. Brilliant, hilarious, and without any baggage or complicated past to speak of. Strange you never met!” No, it’s probably closer to “Oh, him? He steals tires and then sells them on eBay to buy corn chips.”
In Wichita I met Miguel, who had moved from Chicago. He mourned the fact that he never met new people anymore. In Chicago he would meet all kinds of people: friends of friends, coworkers, friends of coworkers, and strangers whom he talked up in bars, in cafés, and even on public transit. In Wichita, though, Miguel said he mainly saw the few folks he worked with and spent his evenings with the same group of friends.
This cliquish mentality was reported in both Monroe and Wichita. One guy in Wichita described it like the gangs in The Warriors. People have their cliques and they rarely stray outside of them to meet new people. This leads to a lot of people dating their way through the same small groups, and after they’ve dated everyone, they’re left in a bad spot. Finding new people isn’t easy when no one new is coming to town.
Sometimes people think they’ve discovered a new person, only to discover that they share more connections than they realized. In both Monroe and Wichita we heard stories of people meeting someone they thought was a new person but then going on Facebook and seeing forty-eight mutual friends.
A girl named Heather told me that one time she met a great guy she’d never seen before and was really excited about the possibilities, only to discover that he’d once slept with a girl she totally despised. This soured the whole thing.
The girl? Actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
Not really, but can you imagine?
Soon afterward, a guy named Greg recounted a story of going out with a girl: On the date they started sharing the stories of how they’d lost their virginity. He soon figured out that the guy she’d lost her virginity to was a close friend and coworker of his.
That coworker? Football star O. J. Simpson.
Not really, but again, could you imagine? How weird would that be? To sleep with someone who lost her virginity to O. J. Simpson?! WEIRD!
“It’s like a cesspool,” said Michelle, a twenty-six-year-old from Monroe. “Everybody has slept with each other.”
Also, when you’re going out with people in such a limited pool of options, issues I’d never thought of came up.
One: When you go out on a date, you will run into everyone you know, so sometimes singles travel for a little privacy. “I went on a date last night, but it was in a totally different town,” a twenty-one-year-old Monroe resident named Emily told us. “I would never go on a first date somewhere in my town because I know all the waiters. I know all the bartenders. I know everybody.”