The purpose of dating is not much clearer than its definition. 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 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. 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. Five decades ago, 72 percent of men and 87 percent of women had gotten married by the time they were 25. By 2012, the situation had basically reversed: 78 percent of men and 67 percent of women were unmarried at that age. [...]
We are in the early stages of a dating revolution. The sheer quantity of relationships available through the internet is transforming the quality of those relationships. Though it is probably too soon to say exactly how, Witt and Weigel offer a useful perspective. They’re not old fogies of the sort who always sound the alarm whenever styles of courtship change. 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. The two authors are (or in Weigel’s case, was, when she wrote her book) single, straight women in their early 30s. 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.” [...]
As Weigel tells it, dating is an unintended by-product of consumerism. Nineteenth-century industrialization ushered in the era of cheap goods, and producers needed to sell more of them. Young women moved to cities to work and met more eligible men in a day than they could previously have met in years. Men started taking women out to places of entertainment that offered young people refuge from their sharp-eyed elders—amusement parks, restaurants, movie theaters, bars. “The first entrepreneurs to create dating platforms,” Weigel calls their proprietors. Romance began to be decoupled from commitment. Trying something on before you bought it became the new rule.
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