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rel: Love Letters - Saving Romance in the Digital Age by Michelle Janning History of Dating, Calling Consuming Romantic Utopia - Eva Illouz
Why I’m reading
This came up as a reference when I was looking for more information on what dating looked like historically.
Introduction Dates
”Doesn’t everyone just want to be happy?”
NOTE
She’s on a date with a “Maybe Genius” and he utters this sequence of words. What’s with this mental fixation on happiness?
On January 11th 2013, NYT proclaimed dating was dead with the headline “The End of Courtship” and that hookups and hangups had replaced dating ritual.
Americans did not date till around 1900, when women left their homes and took jobs that let them mix with men. Previously, there had been no way for young people to meet unsupervised.
Big cities inspired a sense of romantic possibility that was distinctly different to when the one new single shows up in a Jane Austen novel.
Tricks
A modern harbinger of the decline of dating is seen as lack of “adventure” when a couple meet and one pays for the meal.
But this was not how it started (going out, spending money.)
The word “date” first appears in the sense we use it in 1896 when George Ade wrote it in The Chicago Record. The column was called “Stories of the Streets and Town” and promised to give middle-class readers a glimpse of how the working classes lived.
The use is a young clerk suspecting his girlfriend is seeing other people, “I s’pose the other boy’s fillin’ all my dates?”
Women Adrift: In 1880s women left their farms/towns to look for work in the cities, as the economy opened more opportunity for them.
Privacy in the house was impossible, so they were private in public with various destinations like penny arcades, nickelodeons etc.
Calling
Middle class courtship involved “calling” which followed an elaborate set of rules. When a girl reached the age of about 16 she became eligible for suitors.
Her mother would invite men to call on her in one of the afternoons. After that, if she met a man at a social gathering she could ask him over herself.
On some occasions a man would come unannounced to a girl he admired, and present his card at the door to the servant. The girl might say she wasn’t there, or she might invite him to her parlor where they would talk and she would sing and play the piano, chaperoned by her mother and or relatives.
“Doctrine of Separate Spheres:” the ritual made men agents in pursuit, and women into objects of desire.
Prostitution changed dramatically in the late 1800s as women struggling to get on with industrial economy took on sex work. Individual women one operated like artisans, small-business owners but now in the city were bossed by men.
Emma Goldman: “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.”
We live in an era that tells people to do what they love and let their passion take care of their profession. [The Real Housewives Star] is a heroine for an age that believes in getting rich by turning your feelings into assets.
Economics terms are used in dating
- damaged goods
- people conduct “cost benefit analyses” of their relationships
- “position themselves” and “optimize” romantic options.
Sports metaphors are also used like, “cock blocked,” “run interference”, “score”, “wingman.”
Author meets a “sugar baby” who graduated from Princeton who states “almost all romantic relationships are transactional. People are always getting something out of each other.” All her arrangements ended things because “they were developing feelings towards her.”
Likes
As dating moved courtship from the home onto the market, taste became a key way a dater could create their brand.
It’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like
Certain dating sites use similarities in interest for matching.
In the historical past (pre late-18th century) there weren’t many nonessential goods to choose from. The criteria that guided courtship was things like: family, religious background, social class.
The cosmetics industry exploded in the 1920s. Previously only prostitutes and actresses painted. Victorians viewed natural outer beauty as a sign of clean living.
In 1925, for the first time, individual consumption of nonessential goods accounted for the majority of the GDP.
Elinor Glyn called good personality “It” which was defined as a mysterious animal magnetism. “With It, you will all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man.”
Outs
Being out among strangers not only lets you feel anonymous. It also can create moments of serendipity.
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.
TGIF
Stillman wanted to change that. Walking through the West Village one night, he had a eureka moment: He would make a gay bar, but for straight people. It was a brilliant idea. Soon after, he opened the first T.G.I. Friday’s on the Upper East Side, First Avenue and Sixty-third Street. With it, the “singles bar” was born. Simply by providing a place for singles to mix, Stillman started a craze.
By 1967, Life magazine announced that the singles bar had become an “institution.” “All over Manhattan and in a growing number of other cities there are swinging, noisy gin mills which cater exclusively to young single males and females and which function more or less as perpetual college proms.” By the early 1970s, researchers at Stanford University found that between 20 and 25 percent of American couples had met at bars.
In 1971, Stillman sold the T.G.I. Friday’s franchise, and it gradually became what it is now: a chain of family-friendly restaurants
Friday’s
Digging more into it, at the time:
I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before TGI Fridays, four single twenty-five-year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.
School
Modern day college students “hooked up”, but in the early 1900s it was called “petting” or “deliberately touching body parts below the waist” (in contrast to necking).
The influence of the car ride could not be overstated, as it provided privacy and the spirit of reckless abandon with moonlit drives.
Nationally representative studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control have found that in fact there has been a significant decrease in rates of teen sex over the past twenty years.
Young people today may sleep with more partners over a lifetime than their parents did, because we marry later. But the perception that students are becoming more and more promiscuous is unfounded.
Steadies
Over the course of 9 seasons Seinfeld had 66 girlfriends.
Tokens:
Steadies might refer to themselves as “Tom’s girl” or “Bob’s girl.” Male steadies gave “their” girls to- kens in order to let them display the bond they shared. A girl who had been “pinned” wore her beau’s varsity pin on her blouse or sweater. She might wind tape or yarn around his class ring, so that it fit her finger.
Steadies invented the Breakup.
Niche
Romantics tend to associate love with serendipity. They wait for coup de foundre, to be stricken by a lightening bolt of attraction.
Pooling equilibrium – why so many profiles look so boring, and everyone professes to love travel. Less people will be interested in high cost responses.
Assortative mating – a nonrandom mating pattern in which individuals with similar genotypes and/or phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern.
Dating services had been around since the 1960s. The first primitive forms of computer dating debuted during that decade. Like Facebook, Operation Match was designed by three students at Harvard. It allowed curious singles to submit several pieces of information about themselves and what they wanted, have these cross-referenced in a database, and receive a handful of recommended partners.
Video Dating Services:
The first video-dating services started appearing in the 1970s, as the prices of video cameras, cassettes, and players fell. At most companies, when you signed up, you would be paired with a counselor. After you filled out some of the usual questionnaires— with basics like race, age, education level, occupation, and religious beliefs—the counselor interviewed you on camera, hiding herself offscreen. At IntroLens, Cookie Silver called this part “the talk show.” When you had finished, she allowed you to view your tape. You could ask to reshoot and edit, if you wanted. She labeled the finished product with your first name and filed it in a video library. At the best companies, these libraries were large.
ZooArk:
In 1988, an exhibition at the Chicago Zoo called ZooArk even let visitors play a video-dating game on behalf of animals that belonged to endangered species. Using a computer connected to the International Species Information System—the resource that professional zookeepers use to do this—the exhibit let visitors browse prospective mates for one of the zoo’s “bachelors” and two “bachelorettes.” These were a white, black, and Asian rhinoceros.
Protocol
In 1990, only 200,000 households in the United States had Internet connections. By 1993, that number was 5 million. (The upward climb has continued to 43 million in 2000 and 85 million in 2013.)
In April 1996, the “world’s first digital wedding” took place when a thirty-four-year-old man named Bob Norris married twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Smylie in Times Square. The couple had met in a chat room the previous August. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani officiated. Their vows were transmitted in real time on a message strip that the Joe Boxer company had added to its six-thousand-square-foot billboard for this occasion, and from there to the Internet.
Love
Self-help literature usually ignores the fact that the frustrations that cause people to seek self-help are often not just their problems. They are social in origin. They do not lie somewhere deep within us but reflect the many relationships that constitute our world.