November 16th 2009

In German There's Not Even a Word For Dating...

The young woman perched on a chair across from me at Cosi, waiting for her black coffee to cool. Her name was Wlada (pronounced Vlada) Kolosowa. A university student from Berlin, she was taking classes in Washington, DC, and had been assigned by a German newspaper to write about dating in the United States.

“In Germany, we don’t date,” she said. “There isn’t even a word for dating. So what, exactly, is a date?”

Good question.

Historically, I started, a date was a form of courtship in which one person, usually a man, asked another person, usually a woman, to accompany him to some event. He picked her up and usually paid whatever costs were involved.

This scene still plays out somewhat today, I said, although there are additional configurations: woman asks man, man asks man, woman asks woman. One can date online for months and never meet the other person, speed date in a room of strangers, arrange to meet some place rather than go together. Whatever the form, I told Wlada, unlike hooking up or hanging out, dating usually carries with it intent, and that is to answer questions such as, Is this someone I’d like to spend more time with? Or be in a relationship with? Have sex with? Fall in love with? Or, very occasionally, someone I might like to marry?

Wlada seemed confused about such deliberateness, which I found amusing since she came from one of the most orderly countries on the planet. In Germany, she said, getting together with someone is an informal and often slow process.

“Most relationships start off as friends,” she said. “We meet up at a party or a club. I might say to a guy, ‘I’m going to a photo exhibit tomorrow. Would you like to join me?’ It’s all very casual. And not very sexual, at first anyway.” That’s why she doesn’t go to movies with someone she’s just getting to know, she said. “Because what do you do with your hands?”

In the U.S., she observed, relationships seem to develop more quickly. After she arrived this fall to take courses at American University, for example, a young American asked her on a date. She asked him where she should meet him. He told her he would pick her up in a car, that that’s what Americans do. Intrigued but nervous, she asked an American classmate about this and was advised to keep her distance in the car.

She was also told, “If he wants to have drinks, that could lead to coercion.” Needless to say, she wasn’t exactly at ease that evening.

If you go out with someone in Germany, “no one assumes you’re a couple,” Wlada said. “In America, they do.” Recently, she said, she went to review a concert for www.brightestyoungthings.com, accompanied by the website’s photographer whom she barely knew.

“People kept asking me about my ‘boyfriend.’ That wouldn’t happen in Germany.”

Wlada’s observations remind us that dating here does seem to come with certain expectations or even obligations. Past generations of young people in their teens and early 20s may have embraced them, but the current generation is more skeptical. Hooking up has taken the place of dating for many, but it, too, has drawbacks, one being that it fails to satisfy the human longing to get to know someone else well and be treated well.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt us to talk about a third alternative along the lines of the companionship model of which Wlada speaks – for it can and does lead to love, as she was told in a column last spring.

She had been assigned by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest national subscription newspaper, to interview young couples about the moment they fell in love. Her columns, some 50 or so, ran on the newspaper’s website for youth, called jetzt.de.

At first, she was assigned to do 10 columns. After column number six, her editor said to her, “We want you to keep going. People are reading these like crazy.”

What was the column that got the most hits? I asked. She smiled.

A guy and a girl met at a workshop, she said. When the workshop was over, they returned to Munich where they both lived. They started hanging out as friends.

One day the young man said to the young woman, “I’m in love with you. You don’t need to do anything about it. I just needed to tell you.”

Two weeks later, he suggested they try being a couple. The girl wanted to kiss him then, but didn’t. She realized she had fallen for him, but had to think about his suggestion.

“I didn’t want to end the friendship,” she told Wlada. Two weeks after that, they became a couple.