like many women, I had been well trained to focus on what other people might want—if not to make them happy, then at least to make myself desirable.
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.
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?
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.
“The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master.”
According to Yolanda, “true love” is what you share with a man who finds you as sexy as you find him rich. It makes that exchange—of sex for financial security, consumer pleasure, and social status—easy. Not like work at all. The irony of course is that all of the housewives who appear on Real Housewives thereby become professional housewives. Impersonating themselves, they gain credentials that let them leverage their stay-at-home identities into lucrative careers as consultants and businesswomen. In that capacity, they sell products to enrich the housewife experience, like Skinny Girl Margaritas.
our slang suggests that we still think dating is work for women and recreation for men.
Soon, nobody seemed to remember that these activities ever appeared dubious. Today, authorities like The New York Times refer to them offhand as “traditional.” Americans seem to have gotten over the ambiguities that once made vice squads worry that dinner dates were just another form of sex work. Yet other ambiguities remain. If daters are often unsure about what it is they are trading “on the market,” there is also a lot of uncertainty regarding the point of dating. What is dating for?
By bringing courtship out of the home and into the marketplace, dating became a lucrative business. The practice made it possible to take basic human needs for sex and attention and affection that can never be sated and turn them into engines of potentially endless demand.
Taste was a way for an aristocracy with waning political power to assert its superior cultural capital.
A lifetime of socialization causes many of us to send and receive these kinds of signals about class background without thinking about it. A savvy dater can use them to telegraph status. And if you understand these rules of taste well enough, you can manipulate them in order to date up.
Driven by anxiety, as well as romantic ambition, the Shopgirl drove a kind of arms race. The more effectively she sold fashion and beauty culture to her clients, the more mandatory participation in that culture became. It was just what the economy needed.
The idea that your personality might be part of what made you desirable was a new one. In the nineteenth century, Americans had used concepts like “character” and “virtue” to describe themselves. These terms had moral valences. A person revealed her character through kind acts, true friendships, and deeply held convictions. Nineteenth-century advice literature admonished women that when they received gentleman callers, in order to make their best impression, they should wear something dark, modest, and nondescript. They should not let anything superficial distract attention from the soul within. “Personality” was different. Personality was something that manifested on your surface. The word comes from the Latin persona, meaning mask. Personality was like “painting”—a way a woman could make herself up in order to appeal to men. Turn-of-the-century psychologists had diagnosed patients with abnormal minds as having “personality disorders.” Starting around 1920, however, experts began to grant that healthy individuals had personalities, too. Suddenly, the word was all over the popular press.
In an age where very few Americans make a living making anything, dating trains us for our careers, and vice versa.
Going out lets longtime partners feel briefly mysterious to one another again.
To stay safe, you had to learn to hide in plain sight. As shopgirls did their hair and chose their clothes in order to broadcast their personalities and attract the attentions of eligible customers or colleagues, men who wanted to attract other men developed a secret language. Like shopgirls, they often used their taste to speak it. Werther recalled wearing white kid gloves and a red bow tie to identify himself as a “fairy” to the working-class youths on Fourteenth Street. Other “inverts” were known to favor green. These articles of clothing served as badges of identification. To don them was a way of announcing your sexuality to those in the know, without giving yourself away to straight colleagues or acquaintances. If a man like Werther wore his red tie to a lecture or a laboratory, the men he worked with might raise an eyebrow at his eccentric fashion sense, but they would not think to call the cops about it. And if Werther liked the look of a man in a red tie he saw sitting on a park bench smoking a cigarette, he could safely approach him, asking, Do you have a match?
Adopting a drag persona was a good way for inverts to keep the lives they led “out” a secret from their families. In the 1930s, Mae West was the rage with queens. A man could introduce himself to people he met out at the Hamilton Lodge as Mae West or the “sepia Mae West” (meaning the nonwhite one), and even get quoted in the paper that way, and still return home unrecognized. He could go out and do what he wanted without endangering his “real” life.
“rent parties” offered alternatives to the pricey clubs. These gatherings took place in private homes. White landlords had long charged Harlem residents above-market rates, confident that segregation would keep black tenants from fleeing to cheaper neighborhoods. As prices rose, a new trend developed: If you were struggling to afford your rent, you might throw a party, charging a small admission fee at the door.
As the disco craze seized New York, however, people went out less to mix with people they would not have met otherwise than to affirm their membership in a crowd that they belonged to already. You went out in order to be part of the scene that party photographers captured. Later you could smile and say, I was there.
Of those educated at Bryn Mawr between 1889 and 1908, 53 percent never married; at Wellesley and the University of Michigan, the figures were 43 percent and 47 percent. They may not have minded. Women’s colleges like Mount Holyoke were described as “hotbeds of special sentimental friendships,” where female students “fell in love at first sight”
If you want a hookup to lead to “something,” you are not supposed to admit it. The defining feature of the hookup is thus an emotional attitude. Lisa Wade and Caroline Heldman of Occidental College have described it as “more than simply casual.” After hookups, “students reported a compulsory carelessness.”
Between 1928 and 1932, the number of women marrying between eighteen and thirty-five decreased by nearly 20 percent from the previous five-year period. Students were behaving a lot like today’s millennials. Dating prolifically was the one way to keep up their stock, so competition for dates intensified, even as any given date became less likely to lead to a permanent arrangement.
You had to rate to date, and could rate only by dating. Yet to keep your stock high, you had to seem scarce. In order to be desirable, the main thing a girl had to maintain was a reputation for desirability. “Here as nowhere else, nothing succeeds like success.”
“The boy who longs for a date is not longing for a girl,” Mead wrote in a chapter of Male and Female that she adapted from these lectures. “He is longing to be in a situation, mainly public, where he will be seen by others to have a girl, and the right kind of girl, who dresses well and pays attention.” Mead argued that dating taught young people to treat one another as status symbols. A boy wanted the girl he wanted at any given moment because he believed she would improve his image and thus increase his worth. “He takes her out as he takes out his new car, but more impersonally, because the car is his for good, but the girl is his only for the evening.”
hooking up teaches us the flexibility that the contemporary economy requires. Today, the average millennial spends no more than three years at any job, and more than 30 percent of the workforce is freelance. Hooking up gives you the steely heart you need to live with these odds. Like a degree in media studies, it prepares you for anything and nothing in particular.
By 1955, the sociologist Robert Herman declared that Willard Waller’s “campus rating complex” had become obsolete; a new “going steady complex” had replaced it. When Herman surveyed nearly two hundred students at the University of Wisconsin, they told him that going steady was the most common way that they and their peers dated.
One familiar custom in Colonial America was “bundling,” sometimes called “tarrying.” Two young people were allowed to sleep side by side in a bed, partially clothed or enclosed in a sack that shut with a drawstring at the neck. Sometimes a piece of wood called a “bundling board” was placed between them.
Steadies invented the Breakup. Going steady was a prerequisite for that specific kind of heartache. In the 1920s and ’30s, a College Man might have stopped calling a Coed for dates without offering any explanation. However, she was likely to have other dates lined up. If he privately felt disappointed when she declined his invitation to a dance, he could seize the first chance to cut in on her sorority sister.
Looking over faces of which we once had every inch memorized, we realize that our exes must have stashed the selves we were with them somewhere. “Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives,” the young poet James Merrill wrote, heartbroken, in the 1940s. To pick through memories of old love can feel like wandering through a ruin whose intact image haunts your dreams. Scenes from our past lives drift around the Internet.
In an age when so much feels precarious, serial monogamists cling to their partners for comfort. But in our version of the apocalypse, it seems less clear what going steady is for.
The cultural conservatives who call for a revival of “The Family”—as if there has ever been any one kind of 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 (paying off student loans, buying a house, etc.). Many of those who give marriage a go learn the hard way that living hounded by financial worries with no end in sight is not the greatest aphrodisiac.
there is a consensus that men have all their lives ahead of them to fumble relationship after relationship. But women are assumed to have a limited window of time in which to find a partner before their attractiveness and their fertility wane. According to this logic, the risk you take by drifting into serial monogamy has less to do with compromising your virtue than letting your value fall.
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.
You claim you might not want to spend your lives together. But you wake up and realize you already have.
Cultural icons from Britney Spears to Sheryl Sandberg still tell young women that, for them, the prerequisite to a good life is an insatiable appetite for effort.
If Fun Fearless Feminism failed to address the concerns of so many women, then what explains its success? It was market-friendly. This brand of feminism can be used to sell almost anything.
The free love that promised to liberate individuals from social conventions took a very particular model of male individuality for granted. It was based on a fantasy of manliness that media like Playboy sold. Freedom from having to feel certain ways about sex turned into an imperative not to feel anything about sex. This free love could start to look a lot like freedom from love.
Yuppies wanted to date other yuppies. The thing was, who had time? They may have been the first elite in human history to boast, as a mark of their status, that they could not afford a moment’s leisure. The leisure goods that yuppies did consume, they described as necessary to their work—as conveniences that made nonstop work possible (like eating out) or as part of a lifelong effort
At the dawn of dating, all sorts of people had decried the fact that courtship was moving out of the home and into an anonymous, public world where money changed hands. Policemen worried that making dates was equivalent to turning tricks. Love was supposed to lie outside the economy; women could only give it away. By the 1980s and ’90s, however, respectable people were celebrating the possibility that courtship might be made to behave as rationally as the market was supposed to, via technologies that let you “do comparison shopping of potential dates from the comfort and privacy of your own home.”
Gwinnell’s patients said some version of the same thing again and again. “The relationship is all about what is happening inside of the soul and the mind, and the body doesn’t get in the way.” “We met our souls first.” This was the benefit of cyber-dating, especially for singles who felt insecure in the flesh. The downside was that in the absence of visual cues or social context, it was often difficult to tell your interlocutor from the person you hoped he or she might be. The cyberlove of your life could turn out to be little more than a mirage or a private psychosis. “When internet lovers leave the computer to go to other activities,” Gwinnell reported, “they may feel as though the other person is ‘inside’ them.”
The age of Online Seductions left many computer users less in love with this or that particular partner than with the Internet itself.
But in retrospect, what was risible about cybersex was not that it was perverted. It was that it was so unproductive. It rarely created real-world couples; most participants never met IRL (“in real life”). And it squandered enormous amounts of potentially valuable attention.
Romantics, on the other hand, insist that there is no use fretting about how or when we will find love. It will happen when you least expect it! It follows from this worldview that when you do find your special someone, you will “make time.” A person in love will do anything and everything to be with his or her beloved. It is equally clarifying and distressing to believe the reverse: If your lover is not doing anything and everything to be with you, it must not be true love.
In the end, however, the romantics and the pragmatists are basically offering the same advice. The one tells you to bide your time until the lightning bolt strikes. The other suggests waiting until a moment that seems opportune. Either way, the point is, Stop worrying. Which is another way of saying: Get back to work!
As more and more Americans went from being in-house employees with benefits, to being workers who moved from job to job, the future seemed newly precarious. Feeling precarious makes it difficult to fall in love.
Never mind that as recently as the 1950s most American men had said that they considered marriage and family the cornerstones of personal happiness. Experts of the 1980s seemed to believe that men and women were destined by biology to approach dating with directly opposing goals. A man had forever to play. But if she hoped to catch a worthy partner, a Career Woman had to plan.
In a country that mandates almost no parental leave and provides no support for child care, it is impossible for women who elect to become mothers to participate equally in the economy. The biological clock hysteria, with its image of a time bomb lodged in every woman’s ovaries, made each woman personally responsible for dealing with that handicap. At the same time, the emphasis that the media placed on motherhood told career women that not having biological children was a devastating failure. Many of them bought it.
the only choice that egg freezing gives women seems to be the choice to buy into stereotypes that perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, to be the one who does all the work of courtship and then hides the effort it costs her.
It is easy to understand why individual women might want to freeze their eggs. But freezing is never a solution to a problem. On the contrary, it is a way to prolong the existence of a problem. Any apparent problem that a society allows to go on and on must somehow be productive. The purpose of the biological clock has been to make it seem only natural—indeed, inevitable—that the burdens of reproducing the world fall almost entirely on women.
While rich women were told that they would never be happy if they deprived themselves of the joys of motherhood, poor women were warned not to have children no matter what.
Our culture sends very different messages to richer and poorer women about motherhood. Articles aimed at middle- and upper-middle-class women rhapsodize about the incomparable joy that having children will bring into their lives. Poor women, particularly women of color, are warned that having a baby will trap them in a lifetime of poverty. Both claims may be true.
How many Career Women have grown into exactly the women they planned, only to find that the future they thought they wanted was not what they expected? How could it not be disappointing after so much work? Like the housewife of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, I imagine the Career Woman who returns to work two weeks after giving birth dismayed. The new Feminine Mystique has created a new problem with no name that feels disarmingly familiar. Is this all? Is this what all of that was for?
Both The Rules and The Game present the battle of the sexes as a kind of market competition, where women barter sex for love and men do the opposite. In this exchange, not only is dating work for women and recreation for men. Desire is a liability. If a seller knows you want to buy, he knows he can get more.
The premise of the romantic self-help industry is that the problems we encounter in dating are individual. The history of dating reveals that the opposite is true. We inherit the roles we play in the theater of dating from those who came before us and take stage directions from those who live around us.