Celebrities are truly obnoxious. That doesn't mean most of us can stop ourselves from reading the covers of gossip rags while checking out at the Teet. And no matter how much we mock celebs, some large percentage of the population always ends up following their high-priced lead. It's like the trickle-down effect for fashion.
Chasing celebrity trends is a national pastime. Raise your hand if you own a pair of Uggs or know someone who does (raise both if they're pastel ... shame). Did you once wear a trucker hat? Sure, sure, it was for a Halloween costume. And hey you, hipster over there sipping a black, free-trade bold blend out of your Mudhouse cup, you're not immune to the baa-effect of trendy trends either. Vintage t-shirt, black Converses ... it's been done, and done and done.
So ha! We've all got a bit of follower in us -- that's what makes fashion fads and cultural moods ebb and flow like waves on a Laguna Beach.
But there's got to be one thing that stands above the wishy-washy "what's hot" lists. Human companionship, relationships, love, marriage: These things are supposed to be immune to shifting styles. These things are the basic stones in the foundation of the world community.
And then the celebrities strike. Nowadays, babies are the new Birkin, especially if they are adopted from a war-torn country. Engagement is the new dating and marriage is the new engagement. Dating older women is the new dating older men. Heaven's to Betsy! The topsy-turvy tinsel town world has got a hold of love with its trendy talons and it's not letting go.
Don't pee your Juicy sweats in fright just yet. The likelihood that the average American will give their child a fauxhawk remains very low. But, relationships do have their way of changing with the times, albeit a good bit slower than J.Lo. changes her wedding band.
In our parents' generation -- ewww, parents in a relationship column -- couples did things like "go steady," which basically meant that Bobby and Susie May were getting it on (a.k.a. necking) in an illegally parked pale-blue Thunderbird and she was probably wearing Bobby's Rydell High letter sweater.
Necking and sweaters and pinning -- how ridiculous. Thankfully, that '57 Chevy made a left turn somewhere in the 1960s. Sex was revolutionized in the 1970s (Relationships? What relationships? Bras? What bras?) and things like, totally chilled out, dude, in the 1980s. So basically, now, dating's pretty awesome. We're past all the silly formalities of calling and courting. Girls can pay for dates, guys can pay for dates, girls and guys can skip the date and just go neck in an unoccupied dorm room. Laissez-faire love.
Or is it? It may be that it's no longer neato to wear your beau's class ring, or wear your hair the same length as your soul mate, or wear a suit jacket with his shoulder pads, and certainly dating has become a bit more casual, but dating these days is still trend-affected.
In the year 2000 ... and six, dating fads are found where pretty much everything else is: on a Google search. Online profiles leading to online dating and online chatting and emoticons and maybe even, if you're lucky (or unlucky depending on how that jpeg rings true to life), a real-life meeting. These things are certainly something hot and potentially passing for coupling citizens of the World Wide Web. A finger should point at Facebook fanatics as well. Defining a relationship with a variety of predetermined scroll-down categories (now including a convenient "it's complicated" option) ... that's definitely new, definitely different and definitely trendy.
The tricky thing about trends is that they're hard to predict. Did game show gurus in the '70s think that a quiz show where sex was described as "whoopee" would be the forefather of such relationship-reality gems as "Flavor of Love" and "Date my Mom"? In 50 years or so, what we do now in our dating lives will be the topics our grandchildren discuss in their sociology classes -- those slackers. Mull that image over for a sec, not because it's creepy to think about having grandchildren but because what starts with a trend, usually ends with, "What was I thinking?"
Megan and Meghan's column runs bi-weekly on Tuesdays. They can be reached at fanale@cavalierdaily.com and moran@cavalierdaily.com.
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