Planes & Trains

A friend and I have been laughing at ourselves a bit too often. The reason? Our fatally low standards of how we've come to define a sweet, kind and decent man. They're embarrassing.

It's easy to use affectionate words for a reaction without backing them up with any real follow-through. The instant satisfaction has been given, the words have been said, thrown up into the air as effortlessly as tossing a balled up piece of paper; whether we catch that paper is up to us. When we walk away from it, it simply becomes garbage.

I've found, more often than not, we are mixed with counterparts who are everything but the very term. The current state of dating has a low blood-pressure. Its lifeline is rapidly flat-lining and just like the passing of the family's matriarch, things fall apart and there's no getting back to where we used to be but can we pin-point an exact hour when we were forced to give into the lackadaisical version of "dating"?

Stay with me, here's where my incurable, romance-infested heart steps up: I'd like to think it all started to change when trains became a nostalgic way of travel and not so much a necessity. On a train, there's a slow start and an assurance you will get to your destination; on a train you're grounded; on a train you can stroll about at anytime, taking in the scenery of the journey; on a train you can find yourself waving to your loved one as they chase you down the platform until all that's left are those you left behind and the empty coffee cups on platform benches. 

Airplanes--the deathly gallows of romanticism--have sped things up so much that If we wait on the tarmac for more than 10 minutes after landing, we turn into an other-worldly beast. How else did we plan on getting from Florida to Oregon in less than 5 hours?

Planes hardly teach us patience and God only knows that has been my villain throughout the greater part of my life. The constant excuse for my lack of and resistance to patience has mostly been the pride I have for my biological makeup: This is the way I was created, surely there are things I must change, but my impetuousness--that's a trait I cannot trade.

So, it's only natural that I blame my steadily declining standard of a decent, kind and sweet man on the cultural decline of train usage. 

How have I come to this resolve? On the broader sense, I don't blame this all on planes, trains or men--women take it and dish it just the same. Plan and simply put: Technology is the genesis. Shake your heads in disapproval or agree with me mightily, the advent of technology and not only that but the quickness of it-especially in our time-has possibly been so rapid that we cannot grasp the rope as fast as the moving belt below us. We're tripping. And we are and are not to blame. How could we have guessed our evolving, creative and earnest minds would result in a, "I want it when I want it and when I don't, I don't" kind of mindset? The plane isn't fast enough anymore and the train is just an archaic means of tourism, just like courting has become in the dating world. 

Somehow there are some who are adapting to this technologically-advanced dating-sphere. With online dating services like Ok Cupid, even Match.com and and even those "gamers", the Darwinian class of modernized daters who use programs like World of Warcraft and Second Life for coupling up, are leaving those of us in the old world, searching for the road in the dust.

But this is what we have. We cannot transport ourselves to a Jane Austen-era and if I'm going to California, I'm undoubtedly, though reluctantly, taking a plane.

We have to work with it and have hope in a minor revolution of a society who can use technology for its basic purpose and not let it evolve our entire societal makeup. While we are figuring out how to do this, we reluctantly, have to take the plane until we find the steady train that's going our way.