I have had zero positive experiences.
I go to the bathroom and I pull out my phone,
and he has texted me,
“I hope you’re enjoying your peecess.”
It may seem like there couldn’t be a worse
time to be alive and single.
And then texted me asking me if he could come
home with me.
Just a slew of, like, poor dates, and, like,
mediocre dates, and s***ty dates.
But the truth is that for as long as it’s
been around, dating has always sucked.
It’s the late 1800s.
These are the presidents.
This is how people dress.
This is the music they listen to.
And this is how single people get together.
I see you’ve already chosen your corner.
Better known as “calling,” it’s the
predominant mode of courtship among the middle class.
The basic setup of calling was that a woman
would have hours when she was receiving callers
at home.
This is Moira Weigel.
I’m a junior fellow at Harvard University
and the author of a book called Labor of Love:
The Invention of Dating.
The basic script is that a man shows up at
your house,
asks whether you will see him,
and then you sit together in a parlor and
sort of spend time together,
with either direct or sort of from-the-next-room
family supervision.
Sounds super hot.
At the time, 75% of Americans lived in small
towns or on farms.
If you think meeting someone at a bar is tough,
try finding a spouse in a town where you'd
only encounter
a handful of potential partners in your lifetime.
And while it may seem like the way we date
is dictated by things like love and affection,
it was actually driven by something far less
romantic:
In America in the 1880s, 1890s, you have these
floods of migration both from the countryside
to the city
and from other countries to the United States.
As the country industrializes, urban populations
explode.
The population of New York increases seven
times between 1850 and 1900,
and Philadelphia’s goes up 12 times.
You only have people going out into public
spaces and meeting and mixing in this way
that we call dating
once you have lots of young people moving
to cities
and especially women entering the paid workforce.
Many women step outside their homes to work
for the first time,
and that gives them exposure to potential
suitors in a way they never had before.
Courtship shifted from something that happened
in private, tea and supervised small talk
in your home,
to activities that happened in public:
going to restaurants, movies, and amusement parks.
From that point on, in order to meet somebody,
you had to spend money,
and dating became entangled with the economy.
After World War II, the American economy flourished.
Between 1940 and 1960, the GDP soared from
$200 billion to $500 billion.
The economic boom after World War II in the
United States means that young people have
much more disposable income than they’ve
ever had.
By 1956, there were 13 million teens with
an average income of $10.55 per week.
That’s the same amount of disposable income
an entire family had 15 years prior.
And they wanted to spend it.
Unlike previous generations that were expected
to help support their families,
this new generation had time for leisure and
recreation.
This consumer-driven period was about affluence,
and the dating scene closely reflected that
economic prosperity:
shiny new cars, rock ’n’ roll, drive-in
movie theaters — and don’t forget about
going steady.
There was no looking back after that ...
a disposable income and access to technology
democratized dating for decades to come.
We’re riding on the internet, cyberspace
set free, hello, virtual reality.
Access to the internet meant access to more
people.
From 1995 to 2005, the number of internet
users worldwide increased from 16 million
to almost 1 billion.
As with every previous era of dating history,
there's sort of this new economic sphere,
and romance and flirtation becomes part of
how it gets commercialized.
So chat rooms about sex or the opportunity
to flirt with people online is a big part
of what's appealing about AOL.
By 1999, there were already 2,500 dating websites.
But the big moment came around 2010, when
mobile phones started changing the way people
connect.
Because in the ’90s, I think there's still
this sense that the internet is sort of, you
know, it’s cyberspace.
It's this other universe that lives in your
desktop and that you go to sometimes and chat
with a stranger.
Once everyone is carrying a computer on their
person at almost all times and our physical
and digital lives are interwoven, that really
changes the dynamics.
It’s no surprise that dating piggybacked
on this explosive growth.
Dating apps, dating apps, dating apps.
According to a recent survey, 77% of Americans
own a smartphone and 15% of American adults
use dating apps.
Grindr launched in 2009, Tinder in 2012, and
now there are hundreds of dating apps to choose from.
So meeting new people has never been easier.
But does that make us any happier?
Dating is kind of a necessary evil.
The thing about online dating is that you
don’t trust anyone.
You get to pin your top hate or like, and
this guy “hates abstinence.”
Every new technology, every new kind of social
practice, inspires anxiety
about how folks are meeting and pairing up.
So dating still kind of sucks.
But that’s nothing new.
My name's Tian, I'm gonna be 25.
I'm looking for someone who...
comes from a long line of European nobility.
Absolutely, that is critical for me.
Someone whose family has land holdings
across, ideally, the south of France.
And will take me vacationing in their summer castle.
I'm interested in going to bed early, to wake up even earlier.
