The adolescent society of today views relation-ships much differently than they did back in the day. Due to the generally older marriage-age these days, there isn’t a rush to be serious right off the bat.

The classic mating ritual known as dating has changed its form and is now a social past time.

In college, a relation-ship is defined based on how many times a couple has hung out on the weekends, aka how many times they’ve gotten drunk and hooked up.

The word “dating” in college is reserved for couples who have hung out more than a few times, have found sober comfort in one another’s company and have decided to spend a large amount of their minimal cash flow on taking that special person out to dinner OR a movie.

As a sixteen year-old girl living in New Jersey, I had limited access to means of transportation. Therefore, dating older boys pro-vided a multitude of social possibilities.

Not only did I have a way to get to parties, but me and said guy would also have a nice quiet place to hang out. This ideal setting provided a stream of con-versation topics, changes in scenery and the require-ment of only partial or sporadic attention.

I was not the first person in America to find that just driving around on a Fri-day or Saturday night was the perfect activity. Our parents, however, were extremely skeptical of the driving around activity be-cause in their day “parking” took place in a car and was synonymous with sexual activity.

After years of sit-down talks with my mother and endless arguments about safety which of course included plenty of euphemisms and suspicions, I still had to constantly remind my mom that the boy and I were not going parking on Lovers Lane, we were just hanging out.

The confused look on her face, her disapprov-ing tone and her continual request to have him come to the door to introduce himself confirmed my suspicions early on that our generation is playing a whole different ball game.

The classic game of baseball is played getting up to bat and hoping for a home run to let you round the bases.

The modern dating game is played much like back-wards baseball. It starts out with having already hit a home run. The players then find themselves retreating to the dug out for a nice quiet conversation.