Gary Opened My Eyes

Gary. Gary is a friend of mine; I met Gary at the beginning of the school year. I have under no circumstances had a more interesting African American, male friend before. Gary created his own business, has an eclectic music preference, and is very studious. None of these reasons intrigued me enough to create this blog. What sparked my interest was the essay Gary recently wrote, and allowed me to read it. From the first sentence I was hooked. Although the essay read as if it were a Zane novel, there was an obvious message. In a mind provoking way, Gary wrote about the dying bread of the gentleman. Gentleman? After reading his essay I was left feeling incomplete. . As you would expect from an average college male, Gary loves meeting new girls. When Gary first befriends a girl, his intention is to get the “friend” to have sex with him. There was more that I wanted to know. I asked him how he could orchestrate such a beautiful essay about gentleman, but blatantly disrespect women every day.  He answered by saying that young women of our generation tolerate mal dating behavior. Even though I agree with a small portion of his statement, I do not believe that is entirely the women fault. Gary’s roommates began to vocalize their opinions. It soon became three against one, and I was the only voice for women. A point that I gave was that guys should want to court his lady. There were to fundamentals with my argument that seem to be a foreign concept to them. Should want? They did not understand why they should want to spend put forth effort. All they wanted to do was satisfy their primal urges, reproduce. The second concept that they could not grasp was courting. My generation only recognizes the word court as a building to hold legal proceedings. Courting is the basic of dating: going to restaurants, seeing a movie, opening the door. As I watch movies, such as the Notebook, I know that there is more to dating and love than what I have seen or experienced. In the movie Noah wrote Allie a letter every day for a year; nowadays a girl can barely get a guy to text her back in a timely fashion. Steve Harvey wrote a successful book titled Act Like a Woman, Think Like a Man. The book was eventually turned into a movie. For a short moment the popularity of the book sparked the topic of chivalry. Sadly, like most fads, the spark was quickly extinguished.  I know that times are changing, and I shouldn’t expect a guy to ask me to go steady, but there are some basic principles that I wished still developed. I am thankful to Gary for writing his essay. I am now on a search to find out why the course of dating, love, and marriage has changed so drastically. I will go through the decades and see what the costumes of dating for that time period were. Hopefully, by the end of this journey I will not become pessimistic toward love.