Single or just a tease?

I got into an interesting conversation with a friend, partially inspired by Valentine’s Day hooplah and partially because she’s having relationship issues with another friend.
 
She wondered if she was a tease. And then she wondered what that actually meant.
Her actions are nothing out of the ordinary. She’s single, she goes out, she has a good time and she leaves.

She’s not the first girl I’ve known to encounter this problem, nor will she be the last. And it makes me wonder, why are we so quick to place girls in this category?

It seems like any girl who only goes out to have fun and nothing more is somehow “teasing” any potential suitors, and the same is true for guys.

That somehow single men and women mess with each other, play games with each other, when, at the end of the day, no one is promised anything, and no one gets hurt.

Yet, my friend is constantly called a tease by nearly everyone she knows, and she and I wondered if it was even possible to be single and not be one.

Furthermore, we wondered why it was a bad thing.

That is, after all, the point of going out. To meet and greet, to socialize. Should she be made to feel bad because she doesn’t fully participate in hook-up culture, because she sets a limit on her fun?

It seems there’s no reprieve for single men and women. One is either a slut, a womanizer, a jerk or a tease, depending on your personal level of involvement in the dating and hook-up world.

Why are so many women, and to a lesser but no less important extent, men, reprimanded for wanting to have a good time without commitment?

We lamented the eye-rolling of our friends in relationships, or our friends who have become recently single.

“Well, when you’re with someone,” is how this always begins, and it is followed by a thorough criticism of the actions of any single person within a 10 feet radius.

It isn’t that hard to be single, and it isn’t even that hard to be single on Valentine’s Day.

What is difficult is navigating the dating scene without being assigned a place, without being labeled because your actions demonstrate what appear to others to be the actions of a stereotypical single person.

So Valentine’s Day comes and goes. We pass it single and are perfectly content with being so.

­— ewenning@indiana.edu