When given the choice to kibbitz or do an activity, most people will choose an activity. Which is why toiling is so popular on dates.
Toiling can take many forms: axe throwing, billiards, hikes, begging for change at traffic lights together, paint and sip, Skee-Ball, darts, going to the movies, maybe even the drive-thru, fear the skills of a hibachi chef together, whack-a-mole, bingo with the elderly, townhall public hearings, trivia night, and while we domesticated grain crops 10,000 years ago, we added the harvesting of domesticated strawberries only a few hundred years ago. It must be this novelty of the new that entices so many to romantically pick strawberries together.
Picture this.
In front of you is a green field delineated in perfectly endless green rows with barely enough space between for a person to walk this artificial trail and crouch down and thoroughly examine the plants for plump, juicy strawberries. While some will profess this is a solitary activity to be accomplished alone like the farmers of old that tended their fields in complete solitude before the invention of the radio, picking strawberries has become a system of duology with male and female components.
Consider the following.
A woman, excited to be doing an activity, finds the perfect strawberry dangling majestically from the healthy emerald plant. She crouches down, examining the fruit tenderly without pulling it off the stem. Turning it in her fingers, ensuring that it is healthy all around, that bugs haven’t infiltrated its purity. Upon the successful completion of her examination she pulls down, the plant resists, trying to hold on to its creation but the strength of humanity is to overcome the will of nature so with a violent recoil the plant retreats and the woman, jumping to her feet holds the berry above her head directed at her date who holds the basket but does minimal picking. “Look how juicy this one is!” she exclaims with boundless hope for a bright future.
The man holds out the basket for her to gently place the strawberry among all the other ones she has picked underneath the harsh merciless sun with no shade in site. The man emits pure confidence fore he knows the average strawberry has only 200 seeds while the average human male sperm count is over 15 million. Looking down upon the basket he holds he feels nothing but pity for all these soon to be devoured strawberries. He wipes sweat from his brow with his free hand, pulls the water bottle from his back pocket and takes a sip from the water bottle teat then offers it to his date while saying, “girl, you’re the one that’s juicy,” then smacking her ass when she takes a sip from the water bottle teat because big hydro decided water bottles can’t have normal tops.