Male / Female Hour: Asking Someone Out

It's ironic. Every one of you knows how pro-marriage I am. I'm sort of obsessed with it, actually. I ask young women wherever I meet them— airplanes, a waitress at a restaurant, wherever— a few questions, and they always say yes. So if you could have one of two guarantees, guaranteed, and it doesn't mean you can't have the other, it just means one is guaranteed, guaranteed a great marriage or great career, which guarantee would you take? So, it often engenders a discussion which is healthy. So I'm very pro-marriage. But it's precisely because I am so pro-marriage that I also believe that sometimes divorce is necessary. How could it not be? Why should good people— why should a good person have life imprisonment? Life imprisonment should be reserved for bad people, not good people. Sometimes it's two good people who just can't make a go of it. This notion that people divorce too easily— everyone I know who's divorced went through hell getting divorced. I don't know anybody who got divorced because they just woke up one day and said, "Okay." Now, it happens, but it's pretty rare. All right, anyway, I just wanted to— I needed to be intellectually honest with you that in my deep affirmation of marriage, I do not exclude the possibility of divorce. Anyway, when you know there is no divorce, I don't think you treat your marriage with the same respect as if you can lose it. If you knew you could never be fired at your job, do you think you would work as hard at your job? I don't think you would. One of the reasons people work hard at their job is that they don't want to be fired. You should— you work hard at your marriage if there's a possibility you'll be fired. It sounds unromantic what I said, but it's actually— it increases a romantic relationship by knowing that You can't take your spouse for granted any more than you can take your job for granted. Did not mean to go off on that tangent, but it is a very important one. My subject has nothing to do with that, but it was important to say. My subject on today's Male-Female Hour is the result of speaking to a young woman who you've heard on my show and you will hear regularly this summer. And that is her lament— is that fair to say, lament— that men don't ask women out anymore. So I'd like you to call in if you, uh, if you perceive that, or you perceive that in your daughter's life. Or for that matter, your son's life. It's, to me, foreign, a foreign concept. I grew up, you asked a woman out. That's it. That's how you went out. At college, you saw a girl you found attractive, you went over to her, Then you make some, I don't know, comment on the class or something. Hey, you want to go for a coffee? And she may say no. So that's part of males getting stronger. That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. There's almost no male of my generation or the next generation, and certainly past generations, that was not turned down by a female. And who knows the reason why, but in any event, it makes, it makes you stronger. And women love strong men before anything else. That's what they love, whether they admit it or not, whether it is politically correct to admit it is a separate story. But anyway, that was the way it worked all through history in the Western world, at any rate. A man asked a woman out. It's not easy, by the way, because a man knows at any time, you know, she might say no. But life is not easy. And it's died, and the question is, if it has died, maybe, you know, this just might be the experience of one woman, I doubt it is, I've heard it a great many times. But if it is true, you have a— you might be— you could comment on your daughter's life, obviously, ideally on your own. But what has happened? And it's an interesting question. Would the— would a liberated young woman want to be asked out? How would she even react where males are regarded with such ambivalence? It's a different, uh, it's a different world now. You know, I often think when I say it's a different world, I think of every generation does it say, oh well, you know, in my generation, in my day, and I don't want to fall into that trap. But this might not be a subjective, oh, in my day. It might be an objectively true, oh, in my day, maybe it was worse. Maybe it's better today where men are not asking women out. But that's also difficult to imagine. How do they ever get married? Maybe they all meet on on internet sites. The amazing thing is there, there is the hookup culture, so that's kosher, but asking a woman out on a date, that doesn't appear to be. What is your experience and your children's if they're dating? 1-800-PRAGER-776, the Male-Female Hour.