Dating

Although traditions of courtship have existed in cultures across the world since the beginning of recorded history, the ritual of dating is in many ways a distinctly American, distinctly twentieth-century invention. In the most general sense the term refers to the practice of two people exploring mutually held romantic and erotic interests through one or more casual meetings that typically involve joint participation in some form of leisure or recreational activity. Common examples include dining out, seeing a movie, attending a live performance, or, in certain special cases, engaging jointly in some rare or extreme experience, the very rarity or extremity of which is intended to mark the occasion as exceptionally memorable or meaningful. Rides in hot air balloons, skydiving excursions, and impromptu trips to tropical beach resorts figure prominently in what has become a relatively cliché-ridden popular consensus regarding what constitutes a super-romantic date.

In modern parlance the term dating is often also used to refer to an extended period or established condition of exclusive romantic and sexual commitment between two people. Although there are no hard and fast rules governing the appropriate duration of such a period or condition, dating of this sort is widely understood to be an exercise in prolonged personal exploration through which two people assess whether or not they are truly well-suited to one another in an emotional and sexual sense. In other words, dating in this sense often serves as a means of practicing emotional and sexual fidelity and as an opportunity to test the durability of love and erotic attraction over an extended length of time. In the context of heterosexual relationships especially, people who are dating in this sense often regard the experience as being preliminary to formal engagement and marriage. Of course dating often serves a similar function in the lives of many lesbians and gay men as well. But the fact that same-sex relationships are currently ineligible for federally sanctioned, formal recognition in the United States means that the term dating is sometimes used by those involved in same-sex relationships to describe romantic attachments of any duration simply because there is no formally contractual or socially legitimated condition into which such relationships can eventually graduate.

Given its considerable flexibility, the term dating has more or less superseded in common usage all other words and phrases in English that denote the act of engaging in recurring romantic appointments with another person. This is probably because many of the available alternatives carry subtle but significant connotations that render them inaccurate or inappropriate in one sense or another. The term courting, for example, registers as old-fashioned or archaic, whereas the term seeing registers as slightly tentative or euphemistic. By contrast, the phrase going out with carries a slightly juvenile connation, possibly because it so closely resembles going with, a phrase that has enjoyed considerable popularity among American primary and secondary school students for some time. Since the 1990s American youth culture has either produced or adopted a whole range of related expressions, including hooking up with and getting together with. But insofar as these expressions are imbued with a sense of vulgarity, and to the extent that they tend to describe furtive sexual liaisons rather than planned romantic encounters, they are in many respects more closely related to the dizzying array of slang terms that exist for sexual intercourse than for dating as such.

DATING AND CLASS

Because dating in the modern sense tends to involve expense of one sort or another, the casual, elective, and public nature of the practice also marks it, in some regard, as a decidedly middle-class ritual. Unlike the extremely wealthy who have tended to approach courtship and marriage instrumentally as a means of protecting or strategically augmenting existing family fortunes, and unlike the extremely poor who have enjoyed only limited access to the money and leisure time required to fully engage in the ritual, members of the middle class have wholeheartedly embraced dating precisely because it accords so well on so many levels with the popular American ideals of meritocracy and laissez-faire philosophy.

For example, insofar as dating in the modern sense can be understood as a ritual practice in which particular individuals vie against one another for the purpose of winning the romantic and sexual attention of women or men of quality, dating is a competitive activity—one that mirrors the free market economy in a structural sense. At the same time, it is also a markedly bourgeois tradition insofar as those who have the means to engage in dating tend to view the ritual as being primarily about ostensibly apolitical matters such as taste and feeling rather than the servicing of particular social and economic interests. Nevertheless, and despite popular resistance to the notion that dating primarily serves as a mechanism for sorting society into pairs whose individual members serve one another's social and economic interests in various ways, there is a general consensus that the ritual itself can be both highly rewarding and utterly exhausting in emotional, physical, and financial terms.

THE EVOLUTION OF DATING

In many ways the history of dating is merely one chapter in a much larger history of the rise of capitalism in the United States. Indeed, in some respects what most distinguishes dating from earlier forms of American courtship is the extent to which this modern ritual depends upon and is enacted through participation in various forms of consumption. As noted above, dating in the United States in the early twenty-first century almost always involves purchasing something: dinner at a restaurant; admission to a movie, concert, play, or other special event; a particularly flattering outfit; or popular romantic accoutrements including flowers, candy, wine, or other small gifts. Although gestures of courtesy have probably always played some role in rituals of courtship in the United States and elsewhere, going out for the purpose of consuming conspicuously has not always defined romantic engagements in the way that it does now.

During the nineteenth century, courtship in the United States tended to take place in the context of a largely home-centered and female-controlled system known as calling. In this system, historian Beth Bailey explains:

Women designated a day or days at home to receive callers; on other days they paid or returned calls. The caller would present her card to the maid (common even in moderate-income homes until the World War I era) who answered the door, and would be admitted or turned away with some excuse. The caller who regularly was not received quickly learned the limits of her family's social status, and the lady at home thus, in some measure, protected herself and her family from the social confusion and pressures engendered by the mobility and expansiveness of late nineteenth-century America.

                                 (Bailey 1988, p. 15)

For whatever its functional similarity to the modern ritual of dating, calling also differed from it in some very important ways. First and most significantly, calling was, in one sense, considerably more private than modern dating. Despite the fact that calls were often complicated exercises in etiquette and social nicety, they were, nevertheless, private affairs in the sense that they occurred within the confines of domestic rather than commercial space and in terms of familial graciousness and hospitality. At the same time and precisely because calls took place within the home, they also entailed considerably more involvement on the part of parents acting as chaperones than is typically the case where modern dating is concerned. So in this sense calling was also a more—or at least differently—public experience than modern dating.

Calling remained the primary mode of formal courtship in the United States throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dating began to emerge as both a practice and a colloquial expression. Many factors contributed to the demise of the old system of calling and the rise of dating as the primary form of courtship in the United States, but two factors contributed most: widespread urbanization and the advent of the automobile. Twentieth-century urbanization resulted simultaneously in a dramatic increase in the number of unmarried women and men living within arm's reach of one another in American cities and a dramatic decrease in the size of their respective living quarters. This in turn prompted American city dwellers of all ages, but particularly the young and single, to develop new ways of using public space for essentially private purposes, including courtship and the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Indeed, as historian George Chauncey (1994) has noted in a slightly different context, privacy could often only be found in public in many densely populated American cities during the early twentieth century. For most working-class and many middle-class women and men, restaurants, cafes, theaters, public parks, and even public sidewalks necessarily served as alternative living space in overcrowded cities. Under such circumstances, it was almost inevitable that aspects of intimate life such as courtship would begin to spill out of the Victorian parlors where they had once occurred and into the streets. The most extreme example of this dialectical and somewhat counterintuitive relation between public space and the experience of privacy is undoubtedly the culture of cruising and public sex that emerged among homosexual men during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in most American cities. In many ways, though, the now familiar and wholly normative ritual of heterosexual dating was also an outgrowth of these same developments in the structure of American urban life.

Of course this is not to suggest that dating should be understood only as a solution of last resort to the romantic problems inherent to urban overpopulation. For even if American cities had not become so densely populated that cramped apartments no longer provided sufficient space for romance, it seems highly unlikely that urban youth culture, including the culture of courtship among the unmarried, would have remained indoor activities for very long. During the early twentieth century, especially, urban spaces teemed with alluring commercial venues offering inexpensive services and various forms of cheap amusement. To many city dwellers, including younger unmarried city dwellers, these attractions of modern urban life were simply too irresistible to ignore. Unlike calling, dating provided an excellent reason to go out and experience everything the city had to offer.

Among men the shift toward dating in the modern sense was regarded with some ambivalence, at least initially. While many middle-class men were happy to be able to avoid the hours of highly stylized social ritual that had played such an important function in the system of calling, they were also often surprised and overwhelmed by the added expense that dating entailed. Of course even in the 1920s American men were quick to explore and exploit the many benefits that came along with courting in public and being out of their parents' line of sight. Chief among these pricey benefits was the opportunity to press the limits of premarital sexual experimentation. For their part, many working-class men were simply happy to have the opportunity to compete for a woman's affection at all. Under the calling system many would simply never have made it through the front door. In dating, however, men of working-class or men who came from less than desirable families had an improved chance of meeting a desirable women and earning her love and devotion before confronting anxious and judgmental parents, many of whom continued to exert pressure on their daughters to marry up to whatever extent they could.

Whereas men benefited in some ways in the shift from calling to dating, it was arguably women—particularly working-class women—who benefited the most. As historian Kathy Peiss (1986) has shown, working women in cities such as New York used the highly gendered protocols associated with dating in order to expand their ability to participate in America's burgeoning consumer culture. Rather than wasting their own paltry wages on dinners out and admission tickets, many working women chose to spend their limited financial resources on cosmetics, fashionable clothes, delicate lingerie, and other items that might make them more attractive to men. In so doing they were effectively investing their money in the hopes that an attractive new skirt or coveted pair of nylons would yield a profit, both figurative and literal. As many working women correctly calculated, the value of a night out on the town with a particularly well-heeled and generous date could be considerably higher in terms of both fun and dollars than simply staying in or paying one's own way.

The other major development that contributed to the emergence of dating was the arrival of the automobile. As a cause for dating's victory over calling, the automobile's significance has probably been somewhat exaggerated. For in point of fact the shift from calling to dating was already well under way by the time Henry Ford's manufacturing revolution managed to park a car in every American driveway. Nevertheless, automobiles did play an increasingly important role in the practice of American courtship as the twentieth century progressed.

Precisely because the automobile splits a certain kind of conceptual difference between the privacy of the home and the publicness of the street, it very quickly became a refuge of sorts for young people seeking a place to go where they might enjoy some modicum of privacy in public. Ironically, the place that many found to be most convenient in this regard was actually the backseat of a car. In rural and suburban areas, especially, the fact that cars were also legitimate modes of conveyance had the added benefit of expanding the size of the territory in which Americans might seek romantic partners. But where this history of dating is concerned, the importance of automobiles in motion actually pales in some respects when compared to the importance of automobiles at rest, or when parked, as couples would often seek out secluded areas in their automobiles for the purpose of furtive lovemaking.

FURTHER VARIATIONS

As American youth gained increased independence from their parents and as nineteenth-century traditions of formal courtship and socially mandated chaperonage began to erode, new variations on dating emerged. In many cases these variations preserved particular aspects of nineteenth-century courtship, which had been useful to someone in one sense or another. For example, by the mid-twentieth century nervous parents had grown especially fond of the institution of double dating because it satisfied their children's desire for social independence, while simultaneously preserving some aspects of chaperonage. As Beth Bailey points out, "Petting and necking would still go on, but weren't as likely to get out of hand with another couple sitting in the front seat" (Bailey 1988, p. 84).

Similarly, blind dating—a practice in which individuals allowed family members or friends to set them up on dates with people whom they had never met—preserved some aspects of traditional matchmaking, while simultaneously jettisoning the idea that it was appropriate for the facilitating third party to be involved in the affair beyond making initial introductions. In any case, whether it was done in groups or in pairs, by acquaintances or virtual strangers, the ritual of dating continued to be governed throughout most of the twentieth century by a number of largely unspoken social and cultural conventions, the most notable and consistent of which was the generally accepted belief that it was both normal and appropriate for men to both initiate dates and pay for them.

Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, it was this highly gendered convention regarding the propriety of who should ask and who should pay within the context of modern courtship that ultimately transformed the terms date and dating into extremely useful euphemisms within the professional argot of prostitutes and other sex workers in the United States. In the early 2000s the word date is routinely used to describe a paid sexual assignation in the language of American sexual commerce; similarly, the term dating is often used to describe an ongoing business relationship between a sex worker and a particular client. Indeed, precisely because it is still so widely accepted that men should demonstrate their social and economic privilege by paying for dates with women, and precisely because it is implicitly accepted that a date may end up leading to a sexual encounter, the choice that many sex workers make to refer to themselves as escorts and to their work as professional dating is both understandable and rather ingenious. Among other things, it exploits both the logic and language of social and cultural traditionalism where the gendered etiquette of courtship is concerned for the express purpose of blurring further the already rather blurry line that separates dating—that most venerable of all American traditions—from prostitution.

Of course as American traditions go, prostitution and other forms of sex work are as old as the hills—far older, in fact, than dating itself. Still, it is in many ways telling that most modern Americans consider dating and prostitution to be two radically different things despite the fact that both institutions in their most recognizably traditional forms essentially involve men compensating women, whether in cash or kind, for their otherwise categorically undervalued affective and sexual labor.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DATING

The practice of dating has been further transformed in the twenty-first century as a result of significant shifts in the social and economic order of American culture. For example, feminism and the sexual revolution have altered the gender dynamics of dating in some important ways. Among other developments, the highly gendered conventions of dating described above—conventions that dictate that men should bear the primary responsibility for initiating and funding dates—are increasingly giving way to a more egalitarian worldview in which women are equally entitled to ask men out on dates and equally obligated to pay when they do. Similarly, casual sex has increasingly come to be seen as a legitimate part of casual dating.

In some respects these developments represent welcome if belated concessions to the demands of some second-wave feminists who argued that antiquated traditions of masculine chivalry were actually sugarcoated reassertions of men's privilege and prerogative in a patriarchal society. From another perspective, however, both can also be seen as manifestations of what historian and cultural theorist Barbara Ehrenreich (1983) has characterized as American men's "flight from commitment" during the second half of the twentieth century. After all, to the extent that American women are still generally overworked and underpaid relative to men, equality (where the obligation to fund the culture of romance is concerned) actually constitutes a new and unequal burden for women who previously benefited in financial terms from men's traditionalist sense that they had a duty to pay. Similarly, while the liberalization of attitudes toward premarital sex has had the desirable effect of allowing many American women to claim their rights to sexual pleasure and bodily self-determination, it has also in some respects underwritten men's increasing refusal to compensate women for sexual access in the form of material gifts, or to insure against the potential costs of unplanned pregnancy in the form of established personal and financial commitments.

Of course this is not to say that increased cost sharing, where the expense of romance is concerned, or sexual liberalization are unwelcome developments from a feminist perspective; but it is to suggest that gender equality in a truly meaningful sense entails far more than either allowing or encouraging women to conduct themselves on precisely the same terms that men do. Rather, in a society where men are often effectively overcompensated in advance in the form of a family wage, women's ability to survive is always contingent to some degree on their ability to recover their share of unequally distributed resources through de facto mechanisms of economic redistribution such as marriage and dating.

Beyond these significant but largely undertheorized shifts in gendered and sexual decorum, the nature of dating has also been transformed by the arrival of the personal computer and other major advances in information technology including, most notably, the Internet. During the 1990s, for example, online dating services gained huge followings among members of the professional elite who, strained by the growing demands of their careers, increasingly claimed to have little time or energy to invest in casual romantic encounters that were unlikely to pay off in the form of a meaningful long-term relationship. Additionally, many Americans began to express trepidation about the prospect of becoming involved romantically with someone who might eventually prove to be incompatible on some significant but unforeseen level.

Online dating companies took excellent advantage of these feelings of cynicism about, and intolerance toward the inconveniences of, modern dating by marketing their services in a few specific ways. It's Just Lunch, a company founded in Chicago in 1991, claims to lessen the pressures of modern dating by reintroducing a sense of low-stakes informality to the process and, notably, by minimizing the costs in terms of time and money that are typically associated with casual dating. Other popular online dating services such as eHarmony and match.com market their services by claiming to streamline the dating experience by matching singles using an almost scientific process. Economies of scale, they argue, improve the chances that customers will be able to locate someone who is perfectly compatible.

Additionally, many companies also claim that their services greatly improve the likelihood that dating will yield success in the form of a meaningful long-term relationship. Indeed, at the time this entry went to press match.com actually offered prospective clients a six-month guarantee promising that paying customers would find someone special in six months or would not have to pay for the service. Clearly, dating in the twenty-first century is not only an exercise in the consumption of commodities; it is, in fact, a highly commoditized process itself—one that paying clients increasingly expect will carry a customer-friendly guarantee in much the same way that groceries are expected to be guaranteed for purity and freshness or consumer electronics are expected to be warranted against manufacturing defects.

For all the many virtual solutions that have arisen in response to the problems of dating in the twenty-first century, there have also been a number of more material innovations in the way that courtship is conducted in the United States. For example, speed dating emerged in the late 1990s as an alternative to the more traditional slow form of the ritual. In effect, speed dating is a kind of structured game in which individuals are given the opportunity to introduce themselves to multiple people in a single evening. Typically, speed daters talk to one other participant in the game for anywhere between five and ten minutes. Then, when the event moderator gives a signal, participants switch dates in round-robin fashion until everyone involved has had the chance to meet everyone else. At the end of the evening participants indicate which dates interested them most. If two speed daters identify one another, then they are left to move their newly inaugurated relationship forward using more conventional means.

Organizers of speed dating events are often quick to argue that this variation on the familiar courtship ritual serves the particular romantic needs of busy middle-class professionals whose harried pace of life makes it absolutely imperative that they get the most out of every hour dedicated to the project of finding that special someone. Still, the fact that speed dating resembles nothing so much as musical chairs suggests that dating in the modern sense may actually be seen by many as a recreational end in itself rather than a means for finding a permanent mate. This may also explain, in part, why dating has become something of a spectator sport in the United States. Building on a tradition that began in 1965 with ABC's The Dating Game, reality-based television game shows such as Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? (2000), The Bachelor (2002), The Bachelorette (2003), and Joe Millionaire (2003), have flooded airwaves during the first decade of the twenty-first century, winning enormous viewing audiences. In 2006 the Lifetime network's Gay, Straight or Taken? (2006) managed to collapse the entire panoply of issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and courtship in the United States into a single episodic game show demonstrating, perhaps more persuasively than anything, that dating has entered a very new, very strange phase in its almost century-old history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailey, Beth L. 1988. From the Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in Twentieth-century America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. 1997. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1983. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure and Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Rotundo, Anthony E. 1993. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books.

                                        Colin R. Johnson