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  For everyone who has taught me about love, especially Mal and Ben

  INTRODUCTION: DATES

  The con was up. Or about to be. That was what it felt like in my midtwenties. I was not sure who I had been fooling, or why, or how exactly I was going to slip up and get caught. The self-help books and my Irish Catholic mother said it was the drumbeat of imminent spinsterhood I heard approaching. I did not want a lonesome, loveless future; who does? But the dread I felt was not about that.

  I was starting to realize I did not know how to want.

  The first sign came one swampy New York evening early in the summer I was twenty-six. I was walking around Chelsea with a man I had been seeing, and like actors in a romantic comedy we ended up on the High Line. Surrounded by tourists and millionaires, we watched the sun sink into Hoboken, New Jersey.

  He was older, handsome, and (I thought) maybe a genius. Also selfish in a way that was that much more destructive for being unintentional. For weeks he had been trying to break off our thing in order to commit to another, longer-standing thing with an ex-ex he had started to call his girlfriend again, and then changing his mind. He wanted to keep us both apprised of his thought process.

  He was saying something about the ideologically suspect qualities of long-term romantic love, when a question I had been avoiding caught up with me. Its footsteps quickened.

  What should I want?

  At the time, I felt miserably torn between my awareness of what a cliché the Maybe Genius and I were and my equally acute awareness that knowing clichés were clichés could not protect me. He was breaking my heart. But like many women, I had been well trained to focus on what other people might want—if not to make them happy, then at least to make myself desirable. So even my feelings came with shoulds in front of them. Should had become a reflex.

  “What should I want?” I asked the Maybe Genius later, as he walked me back toward the subway. I was trying not to sound too anything, and it must have worked, because he laughed.

  “Doesn’t everyone just want to be happy?”

  I winced. It was not just that he was brushing me off, probably so he could go spend the rest of the night with his ex-ex-girlfriend. It was that it was such a banal answer. Did he not have any better information than I did? He was so confident that he had a right to want, even when he wanted to be indecisive. I wanted to want, but what?

  Why was I always asking some man?

  I had learned to do it by dating. I say “I.” I could mean any one of many women I know. I belong to a generation that grew up hearing that we girls could do anything. Yet in many ways we grew up dispossessed of our own desires. In school, our textbooks told us that feminism was something that had already happened: if we worked hard, we could now aspire to the same things that our male classmates did. Dating trained us in how to be if we wanted to be wanted.

  Since we were children, we had heard that romantic love would be the most important thing that ever happened to us. Love was like a final grade: Whatever else we accomplished would be meaningless without it. We knew that we were supposed to find love by dating. But beyond that there were no clear rules. Nobody even seemed to know what dating was.

  As grown-ups, most of my friends agreed that dating felt like experimental theater. You and a partner showed up every night with different, conflicting scripts. You did your best. Those of us who were women looking for men were flooded with information about how we should go about it. Books and movies, TV shows and magazines, blog posts and advertisements all told us how to act.

  Pink covers and curly scripts, and the fact that these instructions came stuck between perfume samples, clearly announced that they were trivial. Come on, the pink and curlicues and perfume said. Dating is not serious. But what could be more serious than the activity you are told is your one way to fulfillment—and the main way your society will reproduce itself?

  The more I thought about it, the more it felt like a conspiracy.

  Here is how to be if you want to be loved, the advice said, which is to say, if you want to be worth anything.

  Now don’t ask any questions.

  Female desire is not a trivial subject. Neither is happiness. As I recognized how many of my assumptions about what I should want and how I should act had come from dating, I realized that I wanted to find out where dating itself came from. To do this, it would not be enough to survey the present. The welter of beliefs that friends and I held had accumulated over decades, if not centuries. So I set out to investigate the past.

  My first Google search yielded some bad news.

  * * *

  Dating was dead.

  On January 11, 2013, The New York Times confirmed it. “The End of Courtship?” a headline asked. Citing conversations with twenty- and thirty-something women from several East Coast cities, the paper of record announced that “hookups” and “hang-outs” had replaced the ritual of the date.

  “The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary!” one source exclaimed.

  The author posed a series of questions that he seemed to imagine any single girl longed to hear. Then he shot them down.

  “Dinner at a romantic new bistro? Forget it.”

  “A fancy dinner? You’re lucky to get a drink.”

  “Nobody dates anymore!” parents who have children in high school or college often protest when I tell them that I am writing a book about dating. Meanwhile, countless singles across America sign up for online matchmaking services every day.

  At restaurants across the country, pairs of strangers meet every night, each earnestly hoping that the other might be The One, or at least someone to make a life with. Brimming with information they have gleaned about each other, two people sit down. They start, a little stiffly, asking questions.

  Are they doing it right?

  One person laughs too loud.

  “First online dates.” My friend rolls her eyes. “You can always tell.” She has been working as a waitress since losing a job in PR and says she sees dozens of such daters every week. She can tell an OkCupid from a Match.com meet-up. She says that subtle differences distinguish JDaters from those who met on Hinge.

  If dating is dead, the owners of the apps and restaurants must say, long live dating!

  Have reports of the death of dating been greatly exaggerated?

  * * *

  All human societies, and many animal ones, have always had courtship rituals. They have not all had dating. The male blue-footed booby does a mean mating dance, but he does not date. Neither did Americans until around 1900. Since then, experts have constantly declared that dating was dead or dying. The reason is simple. The ways people date change with the economy. You could even say dating is the form that courtship takes in a society where it takes place in a free market.

  The story of dating began when women left their homes and the homes of others where they had toiled as slaves and maids and moved to cities where t
hey took jobs that let them mix with men. Previously, there had been no way for young people to meet unsupervised, and anyone you did run into in your village was likely to be someone you already knew.

  Think what a big deal it is when one new single shows up in a Jane Austen novel. Then think how many men a salesgirl who worked at Lord & Taylor in the 1910s would meet every day. You start to appreciate the sense of romantic possibility that going to work in big cities inspired.

  The ways people work have always shaped the ways they date. I’ll pick you up at six made sense at a time when most people had jobs with fixed hours. Today, a text asking u up may be asking basically the same thing. But dating is not only influenced by work. Dating is work. Some of that work is physical. Take all the things that glossy magazines suggest a straight woman must do to be baseline datable. Shop for attractive clothes, exercise to fit into them, eat well, and stay well groomed—nails polished, everywhere waxed, face made up, hair styled, etc. Work at a job to earn the money to pay for it. All daters are advised to make and monitor online dating profiles and maintain winning social media presences. Their efforts do not end there.

  The work of dating is not only physical. It is emotional. My old roommate Travis used to refer to his first-date routine as “The Travis Show.” He would punctuate this with an ironic flutter of jazz hands. But it does take work to perform the version of yourself who might charm a stranger. The hardest part can be making that work seem effortless.

  The fact that dating is work is not necessarily a bad thing. Labor is how we shape the world around us. Desire is the chance each of us gets at birth to bind ourselves with others and make our shared world new. Most writing about dating only addresses certain people: straight white middle-class kids or college graduates who live in cities. Because I want to investigate dating culture, which is produced for and marketed to such people, I will talk a lot about them, too. But I will also try to show how their stories intersect with others.

  Attraction and affection can leap across lines set by identity. Over the past century, dating has given people exhilarating new freedoms. Daters have gone out and fought for their rights to look for love that is interracial, straight, gay, both, neither, monogamous, or polyamorous, without risking criminal prosecution. It has become possible to imagine doing so without fear.

  There is no better life than a life spent laboring at love—exerting effort not because we have to, but because we believe that what we are bringing into being is valuable and we want it to exist. Yet because our culture tends to misunderstand the nature of labor and of love, we undervalue both.

  If marriage is the long-term contract that many daters still hope to land, dating itself often feels like the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship. You cannot be sure where things are heading, but you try to gain experience. If you look sharp, you might get a free lunch.

  CHAPTER 1. TRICKS

  A free lunch is getting harder to come by in business or pleasure. When I ask people how they would define what “a date” is, they usually say that it involves a person inviting another person out to eat or drink something, or to consume some other kind of entertainment. Then they note wistfully how rare this has become. Articles that lament the death of dating frequently cite the absence of such excursions as evidence of the decline of romance. Yet at the dawn of dating, the idea of a man taking a woman somewhere and paying for something for her was shocking.

  Previously, looking for love had not involved going out in public or spending money. So around 1900, when the police started to notice that young people were meeting up on city streets and going out together, they became concerned. Many early daters—the female ones, anyway—were arrested for it. In the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.

  The word “date” first appeared in print in the sense that we now use it in 1896. A writer named George Ade dropped it in a weekly column that he wrote for The Chicago Record. The column was called “Stories of the Streets and Town.” It promised to give his middle-class readers a glimpse into how the working classes lived.

  The protagonist of the column is a young clerk named Artie. When Artie suspects that his girlfriend has been seeing other people, and is losing interest in him, he confronts her. “I s’pose the other boy’s fillin’ all my dates?”

  In an installment published three years later, he gawks at another girl’s popularity. “Her Date Book had to be kept on the Double Entry System.”

  The girls a boy like Artie would have dated were a brand-new type. In Chicago, people called them “women adrift.”

  Starting in the 1880s, more and more women who had grown up on farms or in small towns began leaving their homes to go look for work in cities. When they arrived, they crashed with distant relatives or found cheap rooms in boardinghouses. Changes in the economy were creating more and more opportunities for them. They could make garments and other light goods in factories. They could become salesgirls in department stores or day servants in the homes of rich families. They could learn shorthand and become office secretaries. Or they could work in the laundries, restaurants, and cabarets.

  African American women were even more likely than white women to be looking for work outside their homes. After the Civil War, a huge population of former slaves tried to find jobs. Discrimination kept many black men from earning living wages, and black women in cities often ended up stuck in positions that nobody else wanted. In 1900, 44 percent of them worked in domestic service. Most were desperate to leave it. While in a white household, they remained vulnerable to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Many tried to transition to “day work.” Others even opted for heavy labor.

  In the 1890s, a stock market crash set off the worst economic crisis that the United States had ever experienced. This sped up the flood of single women into cities. At the same time, a huge wave of immigrants arriving from Italy and Eastern Europe crammed into tenements alongside the Irish who already lived there. The female members of these families joined the job hunt.

  In the 1960s, the second-wave feminist movement canonized the appeal that Betty Friedan made in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan told housewives to flee the suburbs and take on paid work. So today it is easy to forget that by 1900, more than half of American women were already working outside their homes. Many of them were unmarried. At work, or on the way to and from work, they crossed paths with men. It is hardly surprising that some of these singles were interested in flirting and pursuing relationships with one another. And it made sense for them to do so in public places. Where else did they have?

  * * *

  The son of a rabbi, Samuel Chotzinoff came with his family from Vitebsk, Russia, to New York when he was seventeen years old. They lived in a housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Chotzinoff grew up to be a well-known music critic, and in his memoirs he described their home in the Stanton Street Settlement.

  “The average apartment consisted of three rooms: a kitchen, a parlor, and a doorless and windowless bedroom between.

  “The etiquette of courting was strict,” he added.

  If a young man came to call on his older sister, the two of them would have to crowd in the kitchen. If his parents were out, they made Samuel stay in to spy on his sister and any suitors who turned up.

  “Privacy in the home was practically unknown,” the grown-up Chotzinoff recalled. “Privacy could be had only in public.”

  Of course, traditional parents would have preferred to set up their children through family members or matchmakers. In the Old Country, your family and community had controlled courtship. Many ethnic and religious groups funded political and theatrical clubs in the hopes that their children would meet there. But even strict parents tended to trust their children not to do anything too untoward outside. Many courting couples were allowed to go walking and attend concerts, balls, and plays together. W
hen young Samuel headed out to the park near his home, he saw young men and women everywhere. They strolled hand in hand and squeezed next to each other on benches. They tucked themselves between trees to steal kisses and caresses. English, Russian, and Yiddish drifted through the air.

  The girls mostly worked in laundries and textile factories. The boys worked in industrial sweatshops. As soon as they punched out, they met up. As twilight wore on, the streets became like one large party, into the darkening corners of which couples slipped. Someone might see you, but nobody was likely to. The risk you took became part of your bond. It was a secret that you shared.

  For people who could afford it, there were a growing number of other date spots. In cities across the country, saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and amusement parks were springing up to cater to new arrivals.

  The more daters went out, the more destinations they had to choose from. There were penny arcades packed with games. As films grew in length and quality, the owners of such establishments added projectors and started charging five cents admission. By 1908, there were ten thousand “nickelodeons” across America.

  * * *

  Earning money gave young women a new degree of freedom to decide where they would go with whom. Still, their wages did not amount to much. Despite the record numbers of women entering the workforce, the belief remained widespread they were working not to support themselves but only to supplement the earnings of fathers or husbands. Employers used this misconception as an excuse to pay women far less than they paid men. In 1900, the average female worker earned less than half of what a man would earn in the same position. This meant that women adrift hardly made enough to eat, much less to spend on leisure.

  “If I had to buy all my meals I’d never get along,” a young woman living in a boardinghouse in Hell’s Kitchen told a social worker in 1915. The social worker, Esther Packard, was preparing a series of reports on the lives of women and children in the neighborhood.