Dating THEN & NOW !

James Senior

James, the Great Grandfather of Jimmy Junior, was born before the birth of the internet, mobile phones, emails, text, etc. He still considered himself lucky however, because electricity had been invented and if he walked 3 miles into town there was a public phone box he could use.

To secure a date, James would have to know who the unattached ladies in his local area were. The trouble is he wouldn’t know whether they were single or not, so he would have to walk the streets knocking doors. He would probably to be confronted by an overprotective mother or irate husband, but perseverance on his part would mean he had a list of local ladies to contact.

His next task would be to write them a letter introducing himself, and that would have to be done by hand as computers and printers hadn’t been invented yet. There were typewriters of course but they cost more than James’ annual salary and even then each letter had to typed individually.

After saving up for the stamps he would have posted his bundle of letters and waited up to a week for them to be delivered and another week for the possibility of a reply. If no replies were forthcoming then poor James was forced to widen his circle and it would mean him being out pounding the streets again. If he’d exhausted his list of local ladies it would mean a visit to the neighbouring town at least, or even throughout the whole County. All this just to search for potential single females who might want a date with him.

He didn’t have a car but there was the weekly bus service and he could always borrow his cousin’s horse of course.
After months of trying, and spending most of his weekly wage on paper, envelopes and stamps, James may get lucky and a reply lands on his doormat. Excited at the prospect of finally securing a date he knows nothing about his potential life partner.

She hasn’t mentioned much about herself at all in the letter, except that she lives with her parents. He doesn’t even know her age, as a lady never reveals such information so soon. Is she blonde, or brunette, does she like the novels of George Bernard Shaw, has she seen any Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton movies, what does she think of the latest modern style of music by George Gershwin. So many questions and no quick way of getting those answers.

Nevertheless James Senior wasn’t going to let this little filly slip through his fingers and after 4 years of letter writing they finally met up for their first ‘proper’ date. It only took five more years of getting to know each other and they were married.