Dating History: A Selection from Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love (2017)

“I belong to a generation that grew up hearing that we girls could do anything. Yet in many ways we grew up dispossessed of our own desires. In school, our textbooks told us that feminism was something that had already happened: if we worked hard, we could now aspire to the same things that our male classmates did. Dating trained us in how to be if we wanted to be wanted.

Since we were children, we had heard that romantic love would be the most important thing that ever happened to us. Love was like a final grade: Whatever else we accomplished would be meaningless without it. We knew that we were supposed to find love by dating. But beyond that there were no clear rules. Nobody even seemed to know what dating was.

As grown-ups, most of my friends agreed that dating felt like experimental theater. You and a partner showed up every night with different, conflicting scripts. You did your best. Those of us who were women looking for men were flooded with information about how we should go about it. Books and movies, TV shows and magazines, blog posts and advertisements all told us how to act.

Pink covers and curly scripts, and the fact that these instructions came stuck between perfume samples, clearly announced that they were trivial. Come on, the pink and curlicues and perfume said. Dating is not serious. But what could be more serious than the activity you are told is your one way to fulfillment—and the main way your society will reproduce itself?

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like a conspiracy. Here is how to be if you want to be loved, the advice said, which is to say, if you want to be worth anything. Now don’t ask any questions.

Female desire is not a trivial subject. Neither is happiness. As I recognized how many of my assumptions about what I should want and how I should act had come from dating, I realized that I wanted to find out where dating itself came from. To do this, it would not be enough to survey the present. The welter of beliefs that friends and I held had accumulated over decades, if not centuries. So I set out to investigate the past.

My first Google search yielded some bad news. Dating was dead. On January 11, 2013, The New York Times confirmed it. ‘The End of Courtship?’ a headline asked. Citing conversations with twenty- and thirty-something women from several East Coast cities, the paper of record announced that ‘hookups’ and ‘hang-outs’ had replaced the ritual of the date. . . .

‘Nobody dates anymore!’ parents who have children in high school or college often protest when I tell them that I am writing a book about dating. Meanwhile, countless singles across America sign up for online matchmaking services every day.

At restaurants across the country, pairs of strangers meet every night, each earnestly hoping that the other might be The One, or at least someone to make a life with. . . . Have reports of the death of dating been greatly exaggerated?

All human societies, and many animal ones, have always had courtship rituals. They have not all had dating. The male blue-footed booby does a mean mating dance, but he does not date. Neither did Americans until around 1900. Since then, experts have constantly declared that dating was dead or dying. The reason is simple. The ways people date change with the economy. You could even say dating is the form that courtship takes in a society where it takes place in a free market.

The story of dating began when women left their homes and the homes of others where they had toiled as slaves and maids and moved to cities where they took jobs that let them mix with men. Previously, there had been no way for young people to meet unsupervised, and anyone you did run into in your village was likely to be someone you already knew.

Think what a big deal it is when one new single shows up in a Jane Austen novel. Then think how many men a salesgirl who worked at Lord & Taylor in the 1910s would meet every day. You start to appreciate the sense of romantic possibility that going to work in big cities inspired.

The ways people work have always shaped the ways they date. ‘I’ll pick you up at six’ made sense at a time when most people had jobs with fixed hours. Today, a text asking ‘u up’ may be asking basically the same thing. But dating is not only influenced by work. Dating is work. Some of that work is physical. Take all the things that glossy magazines suggest a straight woman must do to be baseline datable. Shop for attractive clothes, exercise to fit into them, eat well, and stay well groomed—nails polished, everywhere waxed, face made up, hair styled, etc. Work at a job to earn the money to pay for it. All daters are advised to make and monitor online dating profiles and maintain winning social media presences. Their efforts do not end there. . . .

There is no better life than a life spent laboring at love—exerting effort not because we have to, but because we believe that what we are bringing into being is valuable and we want it to exist. Yet because our culture tends to misunderstand the nature of labor and of love, we undervalue both.

If marriage is the long-term contract that many daters still hope to land, dating itself often feels like the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship. You cannot be sure where things are heading, but you try to gain experience. If you look sharp, you might get a free lunch.

A free lunch is getting harder to come by in business or pleasure. When I ask people how they would define what ‘a date’ is, they usually say that it involves a person inviting another person out to eat or drink something, or to consume some other kind of entertainment. Then they note wistfully how rare this has become. Articles that lament the death of dating frequently cite the absence of such excursions as evidence of the decline of romance. Yet at the dawn of dating, the idea of a man taking a woman somewhere and paying for something for her was shocking.

Previously, looking for love had not involved going out in public or spending money. So around 1900, when the police started to notice that young people were meeting up on city streets and going out together, they became concerned. Many early daters—the female ones, anyway—were arrested for it. In the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick. . . .

In the 1960s, the second-wave feminist movement canonized the appeal that Betty Friedan made in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan told housewives to flee the suburbs and take on paid work. So today it is easy to forget that by 1900, nearly half of American women were already working. . . .

The postwar dream of a detached house, a happy housewife, and a full-time working husband was feasible only for a brief window of history. Even then, it was feasible only for a limited segment of the population. Since wages stagnated in the late 1970s, working-class families of the Ozzie and Harriet type have collapsed under the strain. Cohabiting relationships without marriage and single-parent households have long since become a norm.

The cultural conservatives who call for a revival of ‘The Family’ . . . ignore the fact that the choices many people make about marriage are not just cultural or moral. They also are influenced by money. Studies show that many members of the working classes feel that they simply cannot afford to marry. Either they cannot afford a wedding, or they cannot afford other markers of adulthood that feel like prerequisites for marriage . . . .

More and more evidence suggests that today marriage has become a privilege of the middle class. In the United States, the middle class is shrinking quickly. Since the 2008 financial crisis, even college-educated people have faced falling wages, waning job security, and a lack of benefits. Increasingly, we have no choice but to resort to part-time and contract work. The dream of ‘settling down’ forever—or of anything being steady forever—is fast fading.

Young people today are told that if we want to stand a chance, we must be mobile. We must be ready to move across the country in order to take a job, or to move in with family members after we lose one. We should chase promotions and freelance gigs where we can. . . .

Today, Americans seem to have an almost hysterical ambivalence about marriage. On the one hand, we spend obscene sums on weddings and binge-watch episodes of wedding-related shows like Say Yes to the Dress. We accept laws that incentivize people to marry by offering tax breaks and tying access to health care, other benefits, and visitation rights to the institution; we celebrate the triumph of gay couples who have gained the same privileges. More than 80 percent of never-married Americans still say that they want to marry. Yet many of us live in ways that seem incompatible with the institution. We work too long, we move too often, we may remain ambivalent about monogamy or children. Serial monogamy is a way of putting marriage off. . . .

We stay in relationships out of convenience, long after our infatuation has passed. Now that marriage is no longer the obligatory conclusion of a serious relationship, we can feel comfortable merging lives with people we may not want to be with for life. We introduce them to our families; we go on vacations together. We learn everything about their friends and jobs and still remain unsure. We drift in and out of relationships. You claim you might not want to spend your lives together. But you wake up and realize you already have.”—Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2017)