Last week, Vanity Fair broke some bad news : We are living in romantic end-times. The author of the piece, Nancy Jo Sales, followed a pattern that you will recognize from umpteen other viral pieces on the Sad State of Modern Courtship. It goes like this: In the bars of downtown Manhattan, or some other overpriced urban center, young people are using their cell phones to find sex without love!
Douchebags who crunch numbers for the financial services sector by day, are making quant-y boasts about the women they see by night! Well-pedigreed young women are receiving obscene text messages from men they have never even met!
I have spent the past two years researching a book on the history of dating, which has meant two years reading countless versions of exactly this kind of article. And writer after writer has made a living out of chronicling them with a mix of prurience and outrage. If there is one thing I have learned from combing through over a century of material about dating, it is this: People have been proclaiming that dating is about to die ever since it was invented.
What intrigues me about these pieces is: Why does anyone still read them? Every decade or so there seems to be an outbreak of hysteria about some new trend or technology that threatens to destroy dating. When I was in middle school in the s, it was cybersex. At first, most of the studies of hookup culture focused on students in high school and college. But since , a spate of reporters have turned their attention to mobile apps that facilitate sexual encounters on demandโallowing users to behave like drunken kids at a frat party well into their nominal adulthood.
I have no doubt that the emergence of human civilization changed human courtship patterns. But the idea that these patterns remained stable from four million years ago until the invention of the World Wide Web strikes me as highly dubious. Even dating, which is only one form that human courtship has takenโand a recent one, at thatโchanged many times between when it first emerged around and when millions of Americans started to go online in the s.
