Do recession woes have you down? Are you worried about losing your job and/or your yipster lifestyle? As terrifying as doing your own laundry and switching from Americanos to drip coffee may seem, the recession could do wonders for your love life. And as we learn from Caitlin MacRae, economist, sexologist and Nerve intern, life as a normal person affected by the recession is a lot like life as a blogger.
10. Fine wine will once again be for stuffy rich people.
These days, everyone’s expected to be able to select the correct boujolais from a leather-bound list of hundreds, adding anxiety to an otherwise pleasant date. When the economy tanks and you’re forced to go back to meeting up at the kinds of bars you don’t find in Zagats, the two of you can relax and do shots of Jim Beam while wistfully reminiscing about your vintage merlots – and your vintage careers.
9. Lack of disposable income will force you and your date to engage in exhilarating illegal activities.
Before you had a job, before you were old enough to get into bars, you lived a romantic existence free of any sense of social propriety or personal accountability. Instead of planning extravagant outings, you figured out how to skulk around verboten locales, pool-hopping late into the night and making out in the backseats of unlocked cars. Just because you’re all grown up doesn’t mean you can’t still indulge in such shenanigans, and shimmying up to top of that water tower together is free, unless you need to post bail.
8. Bars are filled with the unemployed by three p.m., drunken hookups will be in progress by five.
When everyone works till seven, happy hour doesn’t really get going until eight, which doesn’t leave much time to get tanked and slur pickup lines at strangers before a responsible working-person’s bedtime. With more free time, you can look forward to those midday drink specials and the afternoon bouts of poor judgment they produce.
7. You’ll find out if those coffee shops really are hotbeds of early-afternoon sexual tension.
Your freelancer friends have long regaled you with stories of giddy midday coffee-shop flirtations, making their wayward life sound like Prince’s Black Album incarnate. You’ll soon find out if this secret holy land of semi-employed sexual tension actually exists, since you’ll be parked in this alleged paradise of furtive glances all day while Craigslisting for gigs.
6. Breakfast will replace brunch.
Somewhere between the lemon-pepper-vodka Bloody Marys and the sea-salt-and-pesto poached eggs, we lost sight of the real magic of weekend mornings: sloth-like apartment lingering. Instead of showering, throwing on a jaunty scarf and skipping down to the chirpy, overpriced brunch nook, you and your significant other – or last night’s trick -- can shuffle around in ancient pajama pants, fry up half a pound of bacon, and have morning sex without waiting for an overworked server to bring you the check.
5. Museum dates will be unaffordable.
Like an Alzheimer’s patient, we return to the $20-per-ticket Museum of Modern Art again and again for an ill-conceived date with someone we don’t know very well and already feel awkward around. The museum date is a clumsy murder-suicide: the two of you shuffle from sculpture to painting while acting like pretentious eggheads as you try to discuss art that you don’t understand. Catch a discount matinee instead, and grope in the dark.
4. Library-sex will make a comeback.
Combine America’s declining interest in knowledge, free admission, and sultry, stuffy sex-maniac librarians, and suddenly you have an accessible, sparsely populated impromptu orgy club. The public library, with its many dim corners and unlocked “reading rooms,” is a recession-era Plato’s Retreat. Take it from a former librarian: the microfiche room is far from obsolete when reappropriated in the right fashion.
3. That romantic getaway to a Costa Rican eco-lodge will become a sordid roadtrip to a dingy Niagara Falls motel.
Never underestimate the beautiful sleaziness of vacationing on the cheap. After spending several hours in traffic, then bundling up in twelve layers to go stare at a plummeting body of water, you’ll be eager to trundle back to the seedy Fairway Motor Inn for an evening of basic cable, vending-machine dinner and the sickest, hottest sex you’ve had since your first three months of dating. Splurge for the room with the mirror on the ceiling – we can’t even begin to explain how worth the money this is.
2. Tinier apartments lead to accidental sex.
Since rents never seem to drop with the rest of the market, you’ll need to downgrade from that sturdy loft to a tiny railroad apartment whose walls seem to actually amplify your neighbors’ late-night viewing choices. Might as well seize the opportunity to accidentally on purpose touch one of your five roommates’ breasts while reaching around her to grab your coffee mug in the morning. With everyone unemployed and starved for a little human contact – and the unpaid electric bill shrouding you in darkness -- you can get away with more than usual.
1. More dates take place in the cheapest available venue: the bedroom.
Pirated movies on your laptop, cheap take-out and some PBR serve the exact same function as the overpriced museum, the brunch spot, and the wine bar - and none of those places have the advantage of being right where you want to be in the first place. Happy poverty!
—Caitlin MacRae
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