Creative Dating
Jun 20th, 2007 by Glenn
If creative dating is a Mormon art form, is BYU the Louvre?
I’ll never forget the time my roommate and I went to Heritage Halls to pick up our dates freshman year. Their roommates answered the door and gave us the first clue – it was a scavenger hunt and the girls were the prize. We had to go to a little supermarket and find the person in the red hat carrying the carton of milk – she would have our next clue. Of course she made us sing to get it. Then we had to go to the Wilk, and then the Indian statue next to the library, and then the checkerboard – but that’s when our dates jumped out and said “what are you doing at the checkerboard?”
“We were just following our clue”
“What clue?”
“The one we got at the Indian.”
Um… no, actually. See, there was another group doing a scavenger date at the same time. They also used the Indian. We got their clue, and they got ours. We found them wandering around the statue of Brigham Young (no, it was not doing the funky chicken) and we set them on the right path.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the date – except that these girls had a giant construction-paper Ice Cream Cone on their apartment wall, and they added a “scoop” to it for every date. I was mint chocolate chip. I think that was a good thing. Too bad I can’t remember her name.
The scavenger hunt was a pretty fun date (but not nearly as fun as the time I got my friend to dress up as a hitchhiker outside of bridalveil falls – my date never saw it coming). It seems like there was a lot of creative dating when I was at BYU.
Is this a unique experience in Mormon culture? When I told my IU students about it, they acted stunned. The closest thing they had was creative prom invitations.
So tell me, am I alone here? Has anyone else experienced Mormon creative dating, or was it just me?
I also remember a lot of BYU folkspeech — traditional sayings and expressions that went along with the dating scene:
NCMO
Bun vs. Roll
Peach vs. Plumb vs. Alfalfa
Doorstep Dillemma
Linger Longer
Mack
Celestial=first base
Terestrial=second base
Telestial=third base
Outer Darkness=home run
Liners, too — my wife thought that BYU was famous for its liners:
“Your father must have been a thief, because he’s stollen the stars from the sky and put them in your eyes.”
Glenn, you left out one that I remember quite well: “She’s a sweet spirit”
(For those who don’t know, it’s a way of saying that a guy wouldn’t ask a girl out because he finds her unattractive, but he wants to say something nice instead. It was used mostly as a joke in my experience.)
On the general topic of creative dating, I think it is a particularly Mormon thing: it was quite common in Alaska among LDS youth when I was growing up, but not among anyone else I knew. Usually, though, most of the creativity went into the asking, rather than the date itself, resulting in a lot of anticipation for dates that often turned out to be pretty pathetic.
The one area like this where I don’t think it’s a Mormon thing is in creative ways of proposing for marriage: I know of legends (in the technical sense) about creative proposals (as distinct from creative propositions, which are pretty much universal) from Italy and other places as well.
I have to admit that I always found it strange at BYU, however, how many couples would plan what day they would get engaged on: i.e., the couple already knew they were going to get married, but they weren’t engaged yet, and they could tell you what day they would be engaged (e.g., “We’re not engaged yet, but we will be on Friday”). They would then spend huge amounts of time and preparation for the actual proposal and the (creative) response. I suppose that if you’re going to invest time in a creative proposal, it makes sense to know the outcome first, but I always felt like it was strange to not be engaged and yet still committed to getting married.
But then my wife will tell you that I never really proposed: we just sort of agreed we were getting married, went looking for rings, and started making plans for the wedding. So I guess I just don’t have the right sensibilities to understand these things.