Back in a land far, far away, in a time when no one carried their cell phones, we carried school books.

Not only did we carry school books, but we also we had a strap around our book. Mine was cars and something really corny.

We never had backpacks. We never had iPads. We had books, actual physical books.

For you millennials, those are basically things with hard covers and papers.

But I remember, I was once shy.

Now, I’m not going to be one of those bullshit people who think they’re dating experts when in reality they’re just marketing you a bunch of really bad programs where they can make money. And to really sell it, they come up with some shy-guy story of how they became a stud when in reality, they’re still sitting in their mother’s basement watching porn.

I’m going to tell you a story of young Dave.

Young David was this precious kid.

He was cute, he was adorable. His hair turned blonde in the summer. When it no longer turned blonde in the summer, he’d use some peroxide and sit out in the sun. He didn’t realize that it turned a Schwarzenegger shade of orange.

But he wanted to remain blonde, young, and fun.

I was shy.

I had a lot of trouble talking to girls. I remember in 10th grade, when the 9th grade girls came in, I figured, well, I’m the big sophomore, they’re the freshman. We’re going to finally date some girls.

Because during my freshman year, no girl wanted to date me. All of the guys, upperclassmen, dated these younger girls, so I went back to the drawing board again and basically masturbated my way, using my mother’s Jergens lotion and vaseline.

By the way, vaseline, that really takes you back in time. When you masturbate with vaseline, you literally need face scrub to get it off your dick.

There’s like pounds of that because you always wanted to use as much as possible. My mother always asked me, how come your underwear is greasy, David?

I’d say I’m just sweating a lot, mom, it’s what puberty is all about. Meanwhile, I had petroleum jelly stain circles exactly where my penis was. You could always tell where my penis had been after a masturbation session because it always left a mark in my underwear.

But this is not about a young man’s penis and petroleum jelly (if you want some spicy tips on jerking your dick, though, I’d refer you to this article here).

This article is all about my shyness.

Kate Olsen, Christa Santangelo. I remember I had such crushes on both of them, and whenever I saw them together at their locker, guess what I did? Instead of walking past them, I would walk the other direction and be 10 minutes late for class. The other direction actually took you halfway around the high school.

Why did I do that? Because I was afraid to say hello and I would look at my feet.

But my life could have changed.

It was the beginning of my sophomore year. There was this girl named Laura Stewarts. She was this gorgeous girl.

Probably the prettiest girl in the entire high school, and one day, one magical day, she dropped all of her books in front of me, coming out of the library.

That was my opportunity, to step up and be a man. Or at least a boy. And if you’re Jewish, I would have been a man, since I was 13.

What did I do? I looked at her. She looked at me. She waited breathlessly for this handsome sophomore man who had the security of a security blanket that was lost at a slumber party and was being used by the wrong kid.

This man, this boy, looked at her, and in that defining high school moment, looked at her and walked out. She never talked to me ever again. I saw her about 10 years later literally I couldn’t talk to her.

She has always been my Kryptonite. We’re Facebook friends, so I’ve since redeemed myself, just like all of the rest of you.

If you aren’t liked by people in high school, just redeem yourself and pretend you’re friends on Facebook. That’s the great way to do it, it’s the way that we can trick our mind, if we still actually give a shit about what happened in high school.

But really, those days were so different, because I if talked to Laura and I got her phone number, or talked to her, and just made some type of impression, getting together would have been so easy.

It would have taken a phone call. I would have asked her to go steady. And then guess what would have happened?

We would have been boyfriend and girlfriend and we would have had less of a conversation than you have texting somebody on Tinder.

Imagine if you could actually do that on Tinder.

A lot of you guys send dick pics.

That’s not exactly how you go steady with her, but imagine if all of the sudden, after three texts, you can just say to them, “let’s just go steady.”

Or the term back then was do you want to go out.

That’s what I use when I walk the dog.

Do you want to go out?

Back then, I used it with girls. Do you want to go out? Imagine if life was that simple.

We’ve complicated things so much with Tinder and Bumble and Match.com. We go through we go through massive quantities of conversation that never end and never go anywhere.

But imagine if we could just ask somebody and look to them and say do you want to go out. It was actually that simple with my girlfriend.

We just gave into each other and went steady and committed to getting to know one another like the good old days.

Well, here’s the point: why not? Why not just go back to doing that?

The thing is, at some point or another we all decided as a society that we’re not going to do that anymore.

But that’s a choice we can un-make.

Ask a woman tonight, this weekend, do you want to go out?

Why not?

Give it a try. See what happens.

Believe it or not, women respond to this kind of thing. They hate swiping just as much as you do.

Let’s make dating easy again.