In my time, we adopted the Tutzing approach when asking a girl out
Life during the Stone and Bronze ages sounds like it was a blast. From the little I understand, men spent their days scraping rocks together and hunting rabbits, rodents and kobus. No silly, not Kobus the mechanic from Brakpan, the Klippies sponge. I mean the mid-sized antelope that used to roam free on the Serengeti. Women gathered berries and nuts and guarded babies from being devoured by sabre-toothed cats.
Now and then a hero would strike gold and fell a woolly mammoth. The village would erupt in ecstasy and a drunken party would ensue. At the end of the festivities, Dinkyninum, the hero, would club one of the women over the head with a hyena femur, drag her into his cave and she would become his wife. Those were the glorious, simple days.
This is the story I shared with my 17-year-old during a recent “debriefing” regarding his latest heartbreak. By the end of the conversation my head felt like it had been subjected to a wash cycle on laundry day at Baragwanath, followed by a vicious 2,000rpm spin cycle.
Afterwards, I went into the bedroom, hugged the missus and promised to buy her a Lambo for Christmas as gratitude for rescuing me from the dating game two decades ago. The young man’s convoluted, botched love tragedy sounded like an episode from a Colombian telenovela.
I am so grateful that I grew up during that “kinder, gentler” utopia that Bush senior talked about 30 years ago. In retrospect, I owe the Benedictine nuns from Tutzing in Bavaria, Germany, a debt of gratitude for coming to Inkamana Abbey a century ago.
My high school was co-ed in name only. In reality, it was two schools; Inkamana Boys and Inkamana Girls, sharing the same buildings. Each classroom had a boys’ side and a girls’ side. Contact strictly forbidden.
I guess the Tutzing Sisters took the Holy Spirit literally. They didn’t want accidental repeats of Immaculate Conception. Perhaps they were onto something.
I believe a horny 15-year-old boy is capable of knocking up an ovulating girl by staring at her with sufficient intensity during a Mercury retrograde. Especially if he hasn’t manually freed his tadpoles in over a month, which is a rare occurrence, hence the lack of conclusive reportage on this phenomenon.
Anyway, the Tutzing approach is that most boys didn’t bother with girls. Dating among the pupils wasn’t prohibited, just strenuously discouraged. If a girl or a boy fancied someone, they had a 20-minute window during first break to make a move. But there was a catch. Even during recess, boys had a demarcated area where they could roam and girls, their own space. In front of the school building, in view of the principal’s office and staff room. In between was a strip of real estate about 20m by 15m where talking to one’s love interest was allowed.
Alerting a girl that you wanted to chat typically involved asking another girl to fetch her for you. And then you would meet halfway to thrash out your negotiated settlement.
The act of leaving the comfort of the boys’ zone was aptly referred to as “crossing the River Jordan”. This wasn’t easy because you could feel 200 pairs of eyes boring into your body as you approached. Your heart would start thumping, saliva would dry up and sweat would drip from your armpits and palms.
Very often, fellows would lose their nerve at this critical moment. A cousin once lost control of his sphincter while his mates were standing behind him for moral support and left them in a cloud of sulphuric emissions as he surged forward into battle. At least he maintained his steely determination and went through with it.
But woe if the object of your affections was offended and your love missive ended up in the hands of Sister Mary-George. She red-penned the letter like the English essay it was and then read it out loud in class, with special emphasis on spelling errors such as two “ms” in “tomorrow” and banished him to dating Siberia.
After regaling my young man with these anecdotes, he looked at me and said: “And you say our dating life is complex? I’m surprised I even exist.”
A cousin once lost control of his sphincter while his mates were standing behind him for moral support and left them in a cloud of sulphuric emissions as he surged forward into battle