7 Ways Dating Used To Be A Horrifying Game Of Roulette

That's a courting stick -- a hollow, six-to-eight-foot wooden tube that the prospective lovebirds used to communicate in something approaching privacy while saying at a respectable distance, lest the Devil go in them and they start furiously holding hands or ankle 69ing, which is a thing. Meanwhile, to ensure that the young couple wouldn't just throw the stupid fucking thing away and start going at it, the entire family lingered nearby, watching. Watching and scowling.

What makes this practice especially ridiculous is that, as we've previously mentioned, under their thin veil of chastity and marital sanctity, Puritans were actually total hornbags. With that in mind, I refuse to believe that they only used the courting stick to discuss riverside walks and Jesus. They totally used their primitive tin can telephone for low-rent sexting. Maybe they even sometimes managed to distract the eavesdropping family members by having a friend throw fake plague rats through the window halfway through the conversation, causing enough of a kerfuffle for them to move the tube a little lower and proceed to invent the term "blowjob."

Have you ever thought that fruit is secretly conspiring to sabotage your romance? Do you suspect on some level that the pineapple on your table is just waiting for the correct moment to completely fuck up your prospective sex life?

Wikimedia Commons
"As soon as you lower your guard, I'm going straight up your ass."

Unless you're reading this article on a stolen tablet you used to club the guards into submission during your escape from Arkham Asylum, of course you haven't. That would mean you're either crazy or a fan of old-timey ladies' advice magazines. As you're probably aware of, the 1950s were still firmly entrenched in the "shh, little lady" stage of genital equality. The thing is, it's hard to understand just how freaking ridiculous it got until you see actual examples, like the 1954 edition of Women's Own magazine.

Via Jezebel

Most of the advice is your regular 1950s fare. "Let the man order the food," because fuck your allergies and preferences. Things get really serious and strangely era-specific when we get to the advice regarding the things women may and may not eat. Fish is right off the table, because eating it is "difficult to manage." This is mysterious, because knowing what sorts of recipes the era liked to throw around, fish seems like one of the easiest available consumables to manage. Maybe they just slapped a whole live salmon on peoples' plates back then? Though to be honest, I think I'd be rather impressed with a woman who consumed a whole salmon in a restaurant setting like it was a horse heart and she was Daenerys Targaryen.

Anyway, the best advice here is related to eating fruit, and it's simple: Ladies, you put that goddamn quince down this instant. This is not explained in any way, apart from an offhand mention that "it will cause some embarrassment." I like to think that this is because the women of the era were rapidly recognizing the reality of how they were treated, and decided to fight back by eating all their fruit like this:

Wikimedia Commons
The article never said who would get embarrassed.

According to the 1950s etiquette, women were given the option to end the date by placing an unfolded napkin to the left of their plate, perhaps accentuating the gesture with some "I want to get the hell away from here" eyes and body language. After that, it's her game, as though that napkin somehow called upon the forces of General Patton himself, and now the tables have turned for our hapless heroine.

Provided that the guy even gets the clue, that is. If he doesn't notice or chooses not to acknowledge it, well, screw you napkin. Regardless of your gender, have you ever once paid attention to your date's goddamned napkin unless they were actively using it to clean the blood after a battle with a particularly belligerent lobster they ordered for an entree? That's "five years into the marriage"-level body language fluency right there.

Don't worry, the guy's not a serial killer (maybe!). He's just embarking on a strange 17th-Century Welsh custom called lovespoon, which is totally the sort of thing a serial killer would do in his spare time, when not making room in the crawl space or masturbating with steel wool.

Wooden lovespoons were custom-made romantic gifts, hand-crafted to convey romantic messages, emotions, and promises and brag about the skills of the carver. They started out fairly basic, but over time, competitiveness kicked in and they became so ornate that they were virtually impossible to use for anything other than 17th-Century Welsh ass-spoonings -- the most hilarious and welt-producing spoon warfare in human history.

Lovespoons
"Fedora: Really, you should be carving this spoon for me."

Shit, wait. Phallic pieces of wood delivered with a bunch of symbols with the expectation that there's sex somewhere down the line? Man, these were basically the era's equivalent of a dick pic and a bunch of emojis. Maybe our ancestors aren't so different from us after all.

Bzzzzzzt! And, just like that, you've ruined it all. "You've done something with your hands, woman! Have you no manners at all?" the man screeches at you, scoffing at your obscene behavior as he flees the room, shedding pomade and mustache wax in a cold panic.

Wikimedia Commons
"Handsssss! Hisssss!"

The book is actually quite sneaky about the whole "Thou shalt do jack shit with your hands" thing. The original advice they give is that the woman should refrain from knitting when conversing with a man, which I can kind of buy, because a casual conversation can easily fall off-course when half of the participants wield foot-long needles and keep making booties. However, they immediately up the ante by advising against any and all hand motions. Have you ever talked with someone who doesn't move their hands at all? That's Stepford Wife territory right there -- which I kind of suppose was the point. Well, it's that or someone over at Esquire had heavily invested in the restraint industry and was trying to make social handcuffing a thing.

Luckily, even this fucked-by-history era had ways to let its hair down, like sweet wartime dancing. That's something pretty much any point in human history has treated as a joyous event, be it the slow sarabande of 17th-Century French courts or the straight-up Kevin-Bacon-infused foot loose shenanigans of Footloose. Surely, the dance floor was one place where the people of the late '30s could let their hair down and whisper sweet nothings in one anothers' ears ...

Via Bustle
... or not.

I think the whole "shut up while dancing" thing may have been a legitimate attempt to bring joy to the dance floor by keeping couples from fighting or interrupting that sweet guitar solo from "Sister Christian." However, given the "man wants to focus on the dance" wording, I can't help but picture a dude doing his level best to remember the steps, his neck veins slowly bulging as it becomes increasingly evident that he has the rhythm and grace of a rhino on bath salts. "Uh, Steve, do you need help or something?" "SHUT UP WOMAN, I'M DANCING! "