Despite These 4 Romantic Hurdles, Gen-Y Still Has A Shot At Love

“For Love of the Game” is definitely a favorite movie in the Ambrose household.

As daughters of a former professional athlete, any movie that combines sports with a love story gets the nod from us.

As most women do, we were watching this movie for the millionth time and found a new part to reflect on.

As Jane (played by Kelly Preston) is freaking out about the potential of finding love with a famous MLB pitcher (played by Kevin Costner), she doesn’t understand why he chose her.

Why her?

This is such a typical female thing to do.

No offense to our fellow ladies, but “Why does he even like me?” is a very common thought, especially in the early days of dating.

So, while she was freaking out, he responded in a (surprisingly) non-assh*le way.

He said, “That day I fixed your car, Jane, I got lucky. And maybe you got lucky, too.”

Sounds like a full-on, classic, late-90s romance flick, right?

After we exchanged looks of shock and awe between kettle corn handfuls, it hit us.

A guy being honest and expressing his feelings on date number two? That never happens today.

But, it doesn’t just stop there. Dating back in the day was a completely different ball game.

Feelings were expressed, actual dates were kept and most of all, there were no games.

In today’s world, instead of being real, honest and open in our relationships, we pretend we don’t care.

We wait to respond (if we choose to respond at all), we fade people and we expect dates to end without an invite for a second one.

WTF has dating become?

Although we'll never know if our favorite 90s on-screen couples made it, we can only speculate they had a hell of an easier go at it than we do.

The sad truth about the difficulty in our dating present is the fact we do it to ourselves.

We don't take tips from the romances we grew up viewing, and we haven't learned from their potential successes at all.

1. We don’t set dates on the date anymore.

Back in the good old days, cell phones, email, Facebook and all that lovely technology did not exist.

When a couple was on a date, the guy's best shot at being able to ask her out for date number two was to ask her on the first one.

His only sh*tty alternative was risking it sitting in her voicemail box for days.

In today’s lovely over-communicative world, more often than not, dates are left when daters part ways. Date number two is always up in the air.

2. We act like we don't give two sh*ts.

We would love to know when the whole “Don’t let the person know you like him” game came into play.

It most definitely was not present at the time of our beloved movie. Instead of just airing out our feelings — which seems like it could be quite freeing — we hold everything in.

We don't admit if we like someone. We don’t admit we feel lucky to have this person in our lives.

We don’t admit our feelings are scaring us.

All of that could be super helpful knowledge to daters early on.

Hell, it could even save a sh*t ton of time that is usually spent deciphering mixed messages.

3. We never talk on the phone.

Imagine a time when you could only talk to someone if he or she was home when you called.

If the person wasn't home, you were forced to wait for a call back.

Anticipation of finally getting the person on the line probably amplified the excitement and butterflies.

It was harder to communicate, yes.

But, getting to know someone and making plans is so much easier on the phone.

You don’t have to interpret tone because you can hear it, and a conversation that takes an hour over text can take place in about five minutes on the phone.

4. We rely heavily on social media.

We creep and we judge. Dates have been written off by selfies, captions, the people the person follows, etc.

Back in the day, you couldn’t see if your date was active on Instagram, and you couldn’t tell when he or she opened your Snapchat.

All of those small, “harmless” pieces of knowledge make you question your new dating prospect.

All of these things most definitely suck early in the dating game. Wish as we may, there is no time portal we can hop into to cure our current dating world.

Our only choice is to suck it up and dream of finding simple, beautiful romances like in our favorite old-school movies.

For in those days, daters actually said the words, “I was lucky to meet you” in person.

We can also dream that someday, a guy will break this mold and say the words anyway.