The Golden Age of Dating Doesn’t Exist

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“I wish I knew some young men!” the writer Eliza Orne White declared in The Atlantic’s July 1888 issue. “I am fully aware how heterodox this sentiment is considered, but I repeat it boldly, and even underline it—I should like to know some interesting men!”

White, a fiction author, was writing in the voice of her 20-year-old protagonist May, but her story had plenty to do with the romantic truths of the day. A 19th-century woman couldn’t just make a Tinder account and message a strapping stonemason two towns over. If she wanted a suitor, she had to choose one from a limited supply of options and then charm him—just enough to encourage interest but not so much that she’d seem like she was trying. When I spoke with Beth Bailey, the author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, she told me that this had long been the classic tale of American courtship: Because women couldn’t conventionally initiate or steer a relationship themselves, all they could hope for was to subtly influence men to act in a certain way. (Even if they weren’t straight, they probably had few options besides marrying a man.) Poor May had to pretend she enjoyed reading Robert Browning’s poetry to catch the attention of her crush, who was leading a club on the poet’s oeuvre; after going through all that trouble, she was deemed a “flirt” by the haughty ladies of the neighborhood.

When you’re struggling in love, it’s easy to feel like you were simply born at the wrong time. Today, media outlets have amply covered “dating-app fatigue”; some polls have found that the majority of online daters say they experience “burnout” from all that swiping. But courtship has always been hard. Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, told me that for much of early American history, your relatives likely arranged or at least surveilled your budding relationships. Before the Industrial Revolution, the point of marriage was often to unite families so they could share agricultural work, so your dating life was, in fact, their business. That meant little freedom for your own personal canoodling.

Once young people started living and working in cities, it became more common for them to pair up on their own. But that presented its own challenges. As marriage became, more and more, an arrangement of love rather than of logistics, the pressure to find the perfect mate was cranked up and up. “Marriage was not designed as a mechanism for providing friendship, erotic experience, romantic love, personal fulfillment, continuous lay psychotherapy, or recreation,” the sociologist Mervyn Cadwallader argued in a 1966 Atlantic article titled “Marriage as a Wretched Institution.” (Please, Cadwallader, tell us how you really feel.) Perhaps a mere practical contract was enough when people could lean on their family and their neighbors. But in a fractured, urbanized nation, the stakes were higher. “Cut off from the support and satisfactions that flow from community,” Cadwallader wrote, “the confused and searching young American can do little but place all of his bets on creating a community in microcosm, his own marriage.”

For decades, it was hard to know where to even start looking for such a bond. Once more women began attending college in the early 20th century, one clear answer emerged: Young couples more commonly met in school. (Perhaps if May had had that opportunity, she wouldn’t have been so afraid of becoming one of the dreaded “maiden ladies”—single women—in her town, left wandering around with a “resigned expression” and meddling in the affairs of eligible bachelorettes like herself.) But academia wasn’t possible for everyone, nor did it grant all who took part a soulmate. And as the world kept changing, courtship, and its inevitable frustrations, shifted yet again.

In her book, Why There Are No Good Men Left, the historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that as women were encouraged more and more to develop their own career, many of them sought to settle down at a later age. But it was harder, by then, to find a partner. “The large pool of eligible young men to which they had access in college—with backgrounds and ambitions similar to their own—has disappeared,” Sage Stossel wrote in a 2002 review of the book. Where were people meant to meet anymore?

In the years that followed, dating apps provided a solution to that problem and created another: the issue of too many options. It’s fair that people feel exhausted by the labor of scrolling and swiping on repeat; I do too. But, of course, we’re also lucky to have a way to access new possibilities—and the agency to pursue them at all.

Love is trying not just because of historical circumstance but also because of human nature. People are complex; finding someone who brings out the best in you couldn’t possibly be simple. In that sense, as much as times have changed, they’ve also stayed quite the same. We keep searching and hoping and failing, pleading and misreading, getting obsessed and getting hurt and getting the ick—and, eventually, starting all over again. Until, if we’re very lucky, we don’t have to.