Quick question: If a woman gets up from a table at a restaurant, is the man she’s sitting with ill-mannered if he doesn’t stand? The answer: Who knows? The important thing is that he doesn’t slap her on the ass as she walks by or start putting the moves on the hottie at the next table while she’s gone. In other words, dating manners are not what they used to be.

In fact, manners in general have been on a slow and steady decline for years—just ask anyone who’s had six people show up for a dinner party without RSVPing or who’s watched a beautiful young woman nonchalantly pick her nose while waiting at a stoplight.

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Who Killed Emily Post?

Why have our manners gone missing? For a number of reasons, according to Peter Post, grandson of Emily Post and author of several etiquette books, including Essential Manners for Men (2003) and Essential Manners for Couples (2005).

“People growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s grew up in a ‘me-ism’ world, where ‘I’m what’s important, not you,’” says Post. “The general attitude became ‘I can do things the way I want and if you don’t like it, tough.’”

And then, along came technology with its instant-gratification mind-set.

“The speed with which things happen is much faster today,” says Post. “Everything’s instant. We all have to be available 24/7. We no longer sit back and consider ‘Is this the right thing to say? How am I handling myself?’ There’s no time for that.”

As a result, people have found little time to practice good manners, if they’ve even learned them at all. “If you think about where you learn your manners, it’s usually from your parents,” says Post. “But we no longer have that nuclear family with Mom at home and Dad out working. Today, we have both parents working, single-parent families, even no-parent families. If you’re not around people who teach you manners, you don’t learn them.”

In other words, we’ve all grown up in a perfect storm of mannerlessness. The inevitable result?

“We have people coming out of college who may have job skills, but they don’t know how to hold a fork,” says Post. “They’ve just never learned their basic social graces. They aren’t sure what to do.”

Which may just be a gracious way of saying we’ve all become a bunch of rude jerks. Or, at least some of us have, such as this fellow that Sally, a 50-year-old single from Brooklyn, met not long ago.

Museum of Bad Manners

"I started corresponding with a man via the Internet who described himself as very educated, well read, and attractive, and I decided to meet him at a museum show in Brooklyn. We met, strolled around, and everything was fine until he started lecturing me on every exhibit, to the point where I couldn’t get in two words edgewise. Then he chastised me for touching some of the furniture, claiming it would ruin the patina of the wood. (The furniture was not enclosed in a glass case or anything, and I certainly wasn’t manhandling it.) The corker, though, was when he pushed aside a little girl who was using a computer by an exhibit we were looking at. He claimed he’d been there first. I wanted to die of mortification."