Hook-up: We indeed need to talk about the three date rule
Hookup: We indeed need to talk about the ‘three date rule’
7:00AM GMT seven Nov 2014
When women talk to each other about dating, it often feels as tho’ there’s an elephant in the room. You skirt around it, you glance shyly at it, you might even squeeze past it to get to the snack table – but you’re never, ever, ever supposed to talk about it.
That hookup elephant? That not all of us want to go to bed after three dates.
The well known rule – whereby the expectation is that after three dates a woman will ‘put out’ sexually speaking – never used to affect us much, in the UK.
Our romantic culture generally consisted of dangling out with mates down the pub, doing some drinking, and then sort of somehow ending up with one of them and not truly discussing the matter until six months in.
But with the ascent of online dating – which is reportedly now the way one in five relationships begin – we have become a date-centric society, particularly in London where it seems that anyone who’s single is on Tinder.
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We also seem to be increasingly taken in by dating propaganda from across the pond.
Modern day media has a lot to reaction for, but one of the largest impacts it’s had relates to what our idea of the sexual status quo looks like.
In the Nineties and Noughties we had an influx of American programmes which told us that a) everyone was beautiful, b) everyone was dating all the time, and c) everyone was having it off all the time.
Friends, tho’ still one of my favourite sitcoms, portrayed a world of nonstop pick-ups and constant conquests, with Joey’s ill treatment of the women he slept with being rich comedy fodder (a theme that became an even greater source of inspiration for the god-awful Barney in How I Met Your Mother).
But it was Lovemaking and the City that instilled in us the notion that there was something a bit wrong with you if you didn’t want to have hook-up with somebody after a duo of cocktails and a dinner date.
Hook-up and the City switched how we date (and more)
Looming large in my mind to this day is the gig where Carrie starts dating Aidan. When after a week and a half he hasn’t attempted to get her into bed, she assumes he’s either gay or not attracted to her. The message is clear: ten days after meeting someone, if you’re not having hook-up, there is a major problem.
Such sexual ’norms’ have slipped insidiously into our dating culture, perhaps without us even consciously realising it. And I don’t think it’s doing us any good.
Rachel Hills, a researcher, speaker and writer whose forthcoming book The Hookup Myth probes ideas around these supposed regular sexual behaviours, says, “There are a lot of people for whom three dates is much too soon to initiate sexual contact with a fresh person.
“But there is an expectation that you need to be sexually active very early on in a relationship – that can be intimidating for those who want to take their time.”
Let me be clear: this absolutely isn’t about biotch shaming or having rules about what “nice youthfull ladies” should or shouldn’t do.
It is a fantastic thing that we have sexual freedoms – if a woman desires lovemaking on a very first, 2nd, third or thirtieth date; I wholeheartedly believe there’s no reason to feel bad about that.
What I’m talking about is those women who aren’t comfy with going there so quickly, but feel coerced to conform – we’ve reached a point where sexual freedom only goes one way.
We now have the freedom to say yes, but not to say no.
Rachel explains, “It’s likely that the three date rule was invented to put guidelines around suitable female sexual behaviour; have lovemaking on the very first date, you’re a tart. Have hook-up after three, you’re respectable.
“What’s interesting is that it doesn’t just tell us when is too early to have hook-up. It also reflects an expectation that hook-up will happen relatively early in a relationship: not so early that you’re a bitch, but still sooner than many people would be able to achieve emotional intimity with someone.”
It’s a very unfashionable thing to admit to these days – that you might not feel ready to perform the most intimate of physical acts with someone after spending less than a working day’s worth of time in their company.
It feels embarrassing, like one’s inadvertently letting the feminist side down – surely it’s the duty of the modern, urbane woman about town to exercise her sexual liberation, hard-won by generations past, with wild, carefree abandon?
That’s why the issue remains this big, hulking, stifling sexual elephant.
Not everyone feels ready for hook-up after a few dates
But sometimes, with the right friends, in the right setting (with the right amount of wine), women will tentatively talk about it.
“I knew he dreamed to, so I just did it.”
“I felt like I’d want to at some point… so I thought I might as well do it now.”
“I didn’t want him to lose interest.”
“I didn’t want him to think I was a taunt/frigid.”
These are just some of the reasons single women I know have given for having lovemaking before they indeed dreamed to. Others have admitted that they simply didn’t know how to express the fact that they weren’t emotionally ready.
And this is the real problem of modern day “sexpectations” – okay perhaps no one’s going to actually force you into it. But if you don’t want to? The onus is very much on you to provide some kind of watertight explanation.
It’s not enough to say, “no thank you, not yet.” Rather, there is an staggering pressure to say, “no, because…”
Sometimes, it feels lighter to just lie back and think of England (or Benedict Cumberbatch).
It’s not only women who’ve bought into the notion they need to explain if they wish to abstain.
The guys I know are just as confused. They’re wooed that if a damsel hasn’t got her kit off three or four dates in, she’s simply not interested. It doesn’t occur to them that some women take longer than others to feel convenient with, or even desire, that level of physical proximity. They’ve been brainwashed by the same media machine as us.
So how do we switch expectations?
“Part of it is about telling a greater diversity of sexual stories,” says Rachel. “If we can see that not everyone is having hookup like this, it becomes lighter to talk about the ways in which our own sexual practices deviate from that ‘norm’.
Or at least to acknowledge that the norm is more arbitrary than it might seem.”
For sexual ‘freedom’ to be just that, it needs to be about what women want to do, not what they feel they ought to do.
Otherwise, it’s just another set of rules to control us.
Rachel Hills’ book, The Hook-up Myth, will be out in August 2015, published by Simon & Schuster in the US, and Penguin in Australia