“Wait, wait, wait. You just had to guess if they were attracted to you? That’s terrible.”
“How did you pass time on public transit?”
“I don’t have to ask my friends if someone likes me. Everyone I know has DateChip installed in their brains.”
“Tell me again about the part with the bars.”
“I mean, sure, I’ve heard of a few people who’ve met that way. But only after noticing they were single through DateChip’s surveillance mode. How did you know if someone was single? You had to figure it out? What does that entail?”
“Wow, that sounds really awkward and anxiety-inducing.”
“I get that it’s ‘just how things were done back then’ but all of this lead up to asking someone out sounds vaguely like stalking to me, in this the year 2072.”
“What is flirting?… Oh, so it’s one of those old slang terms like necking or petting. What other old slang terms were there?”
“‘Hitting on’ doesn’t mean what I would guess it means, right? Why is it called that?”
“So what’s the difference between flirting with someone and just being nice to them and joking around cause you want to be friends?”
“That sounds like a nearly imperceptible difference. Seems like something that would be easy to waste hours on with obsessive analysis, about which you would only really be sure retroactively. If then.”
“How much did you have to flirt and hit on before you were going steady?”
“Sorry, I forgot which terms were from when. How much did you have to flirt and hit on before you were hanging out?”
“But how did you know for sure it was a date and not just spending time as friends?”
“You had to ‘feel it out’? But wasn’t that what all the flirting and hitting on was supposed to accomplish?”
“Yes, I am familiar with the term plausible deniability.”
“This is madness. I’m so glad I didn’t exist during that time period. If I had to choose between DateChip and indoor plumbing, I honestly don’t know what I would pick. Times were really rough back then.”
“Yeah, no, fuckboys are still a thing.”