Labor of Love (13 page)

She may have been the first to anticipate the breakup cliché:
It's not about you
. Petting, Mead said, was not even about sex. Young people learned to “mimic sexual readiness” in order to compete with one another. Your skin and limbs and hair and laugh served you as so many chips in a game. The prize was not love but popularity. The most important lesson from dating in college was to learn to consume and to present yourself correctly: to groom and dress the right way and propose the right activities; to make the right jokes at the right moments. The exercise had less to do with courtship than with job training.

Colleges themselves were shifting their priorities in this direction. In the early twentieth century, American universities were changing. Under the influence of figures like John Dewey, who advocated “learning by doing,” administrators started allowing and even encouraging students to develop their own organizations. In addition to fraternities, campuses saw the proliferation of activities from student newspapers and theater companies to intercollegiate sports teams. Along with rating and dating, these clubs prepared students to succeed in the corporations they often resembled.

In 1915, the Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby wrote that “it is mere pedagogery to suppose that all effort not directed toward intellectual development is wasted.” Yale, Seidel said, was “graduating ‘good mixers' by the hundred.”

*   *   *

Like rating and dating and fraternity culture, contemporary hooking up sorts students. The Princeton Mom took a frankly elitist approach to dating in
Marry Smart
, telling young women that nowhere but at Princeton would they find “men worthy of them.” All the social scientific data on hooking up suggests that that practice, too, is overwhelmingly white, straight, and upper middle class. It is not nearly as universal as the articles in places like
The Atlantic
and
The New York Times
suggest. Lisa Wade's research has shown that African American students, perhaps wary of a long history of stereotypes that accuse African Americans of being hypersexual and then punish them for it, are far less likely to participate than their white peers. Students who commute to college, or work to support themselves, do not have the time or disposable income to join the party scene. Queer students have their own reasons for avoiding fraternities, and although gay men have a reputation for being more promiscuous than their straight peers, sociologists and school counselors and psychologists have suggested that they do not earn it. In fact, they are generally better at defining and demanding what they want from relationships, which often includes abstaining from sex.

Why does the media pay so much attention to hooking up? At one level, the answer is obvious: As a shopgirl could have told you, sex sells. The people writing the articles and the people reading them are also mostly white, straight, and middle class. These are the people who get to set the terms of what is seen as “mainstream” culture, even when what they are describing is, in fact, exceptional. At another level, reports of hooking up spread the idea that working all the time and using others indifferently is desirable and glamorous.

What kind of education does hooking up provide? And what happens to the people who pursue continuing hookup education after they have graduated? Are we investing in experiences that will qualify us for a dream position someday? Or does every year of hooking up simply put us in the emotional equivalent of more student debt?

An app like Tinder presents a mirage of precisely the kind of endless sexual possibility that young people, dispersed over cities, miss from their undergrad years. The average user opens it ten times a day. It does not, however, seem terribly effective as a matchmaker. As their use of the verb “play” suggests, many treat the app more like a video game. The most valuable service it provides may be the jet of endorphins you get when you are reminded that there are singles who would be willing to swipe you into their “right” pile—that someone, somewhere would consider hooking up with you.

One friend based in Los Angeles confesses that he does most of his Tindering to pass the time in traffic. “There”—he hesitates—“and on the pot.” After eighteen months of playing addictively, he has gone out on a total of three dates. Yet the app helps him keep faith that he will find his Tinderella someday. And maybe this—to be content sitting alone, pants bunched around our ankles; to look for our opening while creating free money for the tech industry—was what hooking up was prepping us for all along.

*   *   *

Margaret Mead looked at American courtship rituals and saw that by mixing courtship and competition, they sent young people deeply confusing messages. Go ahead, girls, said America. Work hard to win as many dates as you can. Go out with them and pet! But God help you if you ever actually
give in
to the urges that petting awakens in your partner. This way of thinking assumed that any warm-blooded boy was always trying to “go farther.” It could not countenance the possibility that the flutter a girl felt in the floor of her stomach when being kissed might make her want to steal the next “base,” too. That is, it gave women no way to understand their own desires, much less express them.

In the 1930s, sex was something a girl had to lose. A nice girl gave as little as she could get away with. Then, as soon as she married, America about-faced. Not only should a young wife have sex, it told her, she should have lots of sex, and she should like it. If you do not like sex as much as your husband, your marriage will not be “well-adjusted.”

Mead recognized that rating and dating was not great preparation for long-term relationships. Neither is hooking up today. If petting left a nice girl no way to feel pleasure, except as a failure of will, hooking up teaches people to feel the same way about their feelings. The fact that “hookup” can refer to almost anything indicates that its defining feature is
not
a particular set of sexual activities. The only thing that all the intimate acts called hookups share is that the participants are not supposed to care about, or harbor any expectations of, the other. To hook up is to make no promises. Hence the weird way we can break off with someone we have been hooking up with for months, without offering an explanation.

In the age when college students are told they must be endlessly adaptable and prepare themselves for an economy where they cannot count on anything, of course this is how they relate—and how many of them continue to act after graduation. As rating and dating taught young people then to be captains of industry and good career girls and housewives, hooking up teaches us the flexibility that the contemporary economy requires.

Today, the average millennial spends no more than three years at any job, and more than 30 percent of the workforce is freelance. Hooking up gives you the steely heart you need to live with these odds. Like a degree in media studies, it prepares you for anything and nothing in particular.

 

CHAPTER 5.
STEADIES

Over the course of nine seasons, the character that Jerry Seinfeld played on
Seinfeld
had sixty-six girlfriends. Something was wrong with every one of them. They were all attractive enough to appear on network television. Yet each had some fatal flaw, which became shorthand for the episodes in which she was featured.

“Two Face.” “The Loud Laugher.” In the show about nothing, no reason was too trivial to end a romantic relationship. In one episode, an exasperated blonde whom Jerry has been seeing demands that he choose between her and mimicking a voice that he imagines yodeling
Helloooo
out of her belly button, and Jerry chooses The Voice. Why not? He never seems to doubt that for a man with a job, New York contains an infinite supply of potential dating partners. Even the fat, bald, and hapless George Costanza regularly finds good-looking women who are willing to sleep with him.

“Of course he does,” a friend groans when I bring it up. “George was to the '90s what the beer-bellied hipster is today. Those guys get laid
constantly
.” Yet it does not seem as if Jerry or George is motivated by a strong desire for sex per se. Their profligacy has more to do with a need for story. It is what the show needs in order to keep going.

It takes a particular kind of dating to drive a sitcom. A date can introduce novelty into a format that is essentially repetitive. But the number of characters and plotlines must not multiply beyond what viewers can keep track of, and no relationship should become so serious as to eclipse the original premise. It was fine that Jerry and Elaine had dated before
Seinfeld
started. And it was fine that they sometimes fell back into bed together. But if they had ever really gotten together, the show would have changed beyond recognition.

Irksome postmen and surly deli managers can linger in the backgrounds of our lives for years. But usually, someone you are dating will either assume a larger and larger role or drop out of the picture. And so on
Seinfeld
, one dater after another came and went. Same thing on
Friends
. The characters were less frankly misanthropic than Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, but they, too, tended to put off making romantic commitments.
Would they or wouldn't they?
became a key strategy the show used to sustain our interest over the seasons. Would Chandler and Monica tie the knot? Would Ross and Rachel? How about Pam and Jim on
The Office
?

As long as NBC kept us wondering, millions of Americans kept tuning in. Yet Jerry Seinfeld and Jennifer Aniston did not invent the style of romance they practiced. Young people who started dating around the beginning of World War II did. We now call it “serial monogamy.” They called it “going steady.” Their slang may sound quaint today, but many singles still follow the patterns that they pioneered.

*   *   *

The writing started to show up on the walls of high school gymnasiums around 1940. Rather than rating and dating, young people were pairing off. High school and even middle school students were going out to dances and movies and pharmacy counters, where they bought Cokes and root beer floats. They parked and petted like college students of the Roaring Twenties, but always with the same person. They professed themselves to be “going out” with that person, even if they mostly stayed in.

The “steady” part of the expression came from the Era of Calling. Back then, “keeping steady company” implied a serious commitment. A boy and girl who consistently spent time alone together were expected to marry soon. Steadies revived some aspects of calling. Couples often visited each other at their family homes, where they chatted and ate snacks or listened to a record or watched television. Steadies might refer to themselves as “Tom's girl” or “Bob's girl.” Male steadies gave “their” girls tokens in order to let them display the bond they shared. A girl who had been “pinned” wore her beau's varsity pin on her blouse or sweater. She might wind tape or yarn around his class ring, so that it fit her finger.

Some couples exchanged “pre-engagement” rings. In practice, however, few of them were seriously considering marriage. For one thing, most of them were far too young. By the mid-1950s, one in ten middle school students would go steady at least once before he or she turned eleven. Rather than a step toward marriage, going steady became an important coming-of-age ritual in itself.

In 1942, a young Midwesterner named Maureen Daly captured how exhilarating going steady could feel, and how dramatically it could change you. The Daly family had emigrated from Northern Ireland to the Midwest when Maureen was a young child. By the time she graduated from high school in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Maureen had already published several short stories that were establishing her as an authority on people her age. The media were just starting to call them “teenagers.”

When her debut novel,
Seventeenth Summer
, came out, Daly was still an undergraduate at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. The publicity around the book stressed that it was based on Daly's personal experiences. The photo that appeared with reviews shows a serious-looking young woman with a heart-shaped face and concentrated features; her dark hair is side-parted into a soft schoolgirl bob, but her eyes look sharp and quick. It is easy to imagine her in the place of her narrator, Angeline Morrow.

Seventeenth Summer
tells the story of a three-month relationship from Angie's perspective. At the beginning of June, Angie has just graduated from high school. When Jack Duluth, the son of the local baker, asks her out on a date to a popular soda fountain, she feels anxious.

“It was almost like making my debut or something,” she remarks. “I had never been out to Pete's on a date before, and in our town that is a crucial test.”

Afterward, she is sure that she has flunked. “I had acted all wrong … It made me squirm inside to think of it.”

Not only is Angie awkward, she also is naïve. When she notices the rows of cars parked outside Pete's, she feels puzzled.

“There don't seem to be nearly as many people inside as there are cars parked out here,” she says. Jack assumes she must be joking: The cars are clearly full of couples. Yet within three days, Angie is urging Jack to lead her out of a country club dance onto the darkened golf course for her first kiss.

“In the loveliness of the next moment,” Angie remembers, “I think I grew up.”

Soon, professors at several institutions were confirming that their students favored going steady, too. In 1948, researchers at Bucknell University asked 484 undergraduates about their love lives; 105 said that at that time, they were seeing one partner exclusively.

By 1955, the sociologist Robert Herman declared that Willard Waller's “campus rating complex” had become obsolete; a new “going steady complex” had replaced it. When Herman surveyed nearly two hundred students at the University of Wisconsin, they told him that going steady was the most common way that they and their peers dated. Seventy-seven percent of them said they themselves had gone steady. And more than half of the ones who had, had done so more than once.