Extra Ordinary Ideas

Mates and Mates

The AFFsters in DC are entertaining themselves this evening with a “Valentine’s Panel” on modern dating rituals, with emphasis on the recent poularity of online dating services. Experienced dater and friend Will Wilkinson will be a panelist along with three women who I hope are more naturally attuned to the sources of popular movements than he is.

I can’t be there, of course, but the reminder email, which juxtaposed “traditional” rituals with the “modern” practice of online dating, furrowed my brow. So, I toss the following, ill-formed thoughts onto the virtual table.

It seems to me that online dating represents, not the death of old-fashioned courtship, but rather it’s rebirth.  Prior to the 1960s, men and women weren’t colleagues, and didn’t socialize together outside the context of “dates.”  As a result, dates occurred between relative strangers. A man asked a girl out because she was good looking and came from a decent family without knowing her well as a person.
 
Now, men and women routinely study and work together as colleagues, and socialize together as well.  This both raises the costs and lowers the benefits of dating.  You can get to know an attractive person better, even fall in love, without ever going out on a “date.”  Further, dating endangers existing cohesive friendship groups.  Men and women are “friends” in this context until they are a “couple.”  The dating ritual is skipped in favor of a very informal, sometimes protracted courtship.  The advent of the “hook up” is a response to this trend.  Mixed-gender social groups and hook-ups collectively satisfy the same needs that casual dating and parking did for previous generations.
 
Online dating thus appears to be a throwback to earlier times.  People go on dates who barely know each other beyond a picture and a few basic facts.  Surely one reason it is not more popular is that members of our generation are discomfited by ritualized meetings with strangers. And that, at least, would seem to support the idea that the modern, friendship-first route is a better one.

Where the preferred route has failed and forceable expansion of one’s social circle appears necessary, then devices such as online dating and speed dating meet a need. But these would be back-up options, not preferred strategies.

On the other hand, perhaps these new, formalized processes are also a backlash against the stressful ambiguity common in mixed gender social circles. Is she single? Does she really like me? It may take months to learn the answers to such questions in the usual modern way.

So much social change has occurred in the last 30 years that dating practices are necessarily in transition. It’d be foolish to try to project the outcomes of two divergent trends I’ll awkwardly name New Formalism (online dating and speed dating) and Modern Courtship, but they are hardly similar in their approach.

ADDENDUM: Visit Eve Tushnet and Sarah Butler for some darker reflections on modern “hookup” culture. I guess I don’t have any additional thoughts to add.

Posted by Marie Gryphon on February 18, 2004