Reading a piece about dating in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, I felt like a Rip Van Winkle who fell into matrimonial sleep 15 years ago and awoke to find courtship had regressed back to the Victorian era. Dowd said that she knew the coquettish rules for dating long before she had heard of ''The Rules,'' a 1995 bestseller on how to play hard to get in order to land a husband. I... had heard of ''The Rules'' by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, but I assumed it was part of the backlash against feminism and would go...