candidate in comparative literature at Yale, embarked on her charmingly digressive, nonacademic history of American dating after being strung along by a caddish boyfriend torn between her and an ex-girlfriend. Theirs is the “last generation,” Witt writes, “that lived some part of life without the Internet, who were trying to adjust our reality to our technology.” The two authors are (or in Weigel’s case, was, when she wrote her book) single, straight women in their early 30s. Nor are they part of the rising generation of gender-fluid individuals for whom the ever-lengthening list of sexual identities and affinities spells liberation from the heteronormative assumptions of parents and peers. They’re not old fogies of the sort who always sound the alarm whenever styles of courtship change. Though it is probably too soon to say exactly how, Witt and Weigel offer a useful perspective. The sheer quantity of relationships available through the internet is transforming the quality of those relationships. We are in the early stages of a dating revolution. “I had not sought so much choice for myself,” she writes, “and when I found myself with total sexual freedom, I was unhappy.” If you look sharp, you might get a free lunch.” In Future Sex, another new examination of contemporary sexual mores, Emily Witt is even more plaintive. You cannot be sure where things are heading, but you try to gain experience. At its worst, as Moira Weigel observes in her recent book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, dating is like a “precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship. Like any other freelance operator, you have to develop and protect your brand. But vetting and being vetted by so many strangers still takes time and concerted attention. Tinder’s creators modeled their app on playing cards so it would seem more like a game than services like OkCupid, which put more emphasis on creating a detailed profile. If you’re one of the many who have used an online dating service (among those “single and looking,” more than a third have), you know how quickly dating devolves into work. Yet the round-robin of sex and intermittent attachment doesn’t look like much fun. Dating used to be a time-limited means to an end today, it’s often an end in itself. In 2000, Jeffrey Arnett, a developmental psychologist at Clark University, coined the term emerging adulthood to describe the long phase of experimentation that precedes settling down. A less obvious reason is that the median age for both sexes when they first wed is now six years older than it was for their counterparts in the 1960s. The obvious reason for declining marriage rates is the general erosion of traditional social conventions. By 2012, the situation had basically reversed: 78 percent of men and 67 percent of women were unmarried at that age.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. Five decades ago, 72 percent of men and 87 percent of women had gotten married by the time they were 25. Over the course of the 20th century, such encounters became more casual, but even tire kickers were expected to make a purchase sooner rather than later. The potential spouses assessed each other in the privacy of her home, her parents assessed his eligibility, and either they got engaged or he went on his way. Before the early 1900s, when people started “dating,” they “called.” That is, men called on women, and everyone more or less agreed on the point of the visit. The purpose of dating is not much clearer than its definition. And now, thanks to mobile apps, dating can involve a succession of rendezvous over drinks to check out a dizzying parade of “matches” made with the swipe of a finger. Dating can be used to describe exclusive and nonexclusive relationships, both short-term and long-term. Many college students and 20‑somethings don’t start dating until after they’ve had sex. Sixth-graders claim to be dating when, after extensive negotiations conducted by third parties, two of them go out for ice cream. The term has outlasted more than a century’s worth of evolving courtship rituals, and we still don’t know what it means. For an activity undertaken over such a long period of time, dating is remarkably difficult to characterize. That’s about 15 years, or roughly a fifth of their lives. Americans are now considered prime candidates for dating from age 14 or younger to close to 30 or older.
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