Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Changing Marriage and Dating Customs

This will not be a full overview of the topic. For those who are interested in a longer treatment, I had a whole series of connected posts last fall Dating Apps and the New Polygamies

Rob Henderson has a couple of wheelhouse topics, one of which is modern dating and marriage patterns, and how they don't seem to be working very well.  He has a good distillation of his thinking in the Free Press Stop Swiping: Start Settling. It is mostly a connected discussion of the polling he finds important, but the numbers-dense atmosphere is going to be a plus, not a minus for this group.

I do notice two things which I believe keep getting overlooked.  First, we don't know with certainty what these young people mean by the words liberal, conservative, feminist, etc. We can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we understand more than we do when words change on us over time. And since we are getting close to the fifty-year mark on the distance from my dating career - and our memory of what we thought then is colored by what we think now more than we realise - I should be very wary of believing I've got this wrapped. They ain't me.

But secondly, there is this continuing idea that because things are different from what they were in "our grandparents' day" that there was some continuity before that, stretching back to the beginning of time. Or at least, to the American founding or something. Practically forever. 

Dating apps replaced "I hate the bar scene," which replaced meeting at school or early in a time of independence, when you had an apartment and a first real job. The economy and culture in America changed a lot after WWII. Movement of people had always been an American trait, but it really took off then. But because young people had always lived in families and that was considered normal, they themselves married pretty quickly and started families, even though they were less supervised in their courtship than previously. Automobile=unsupervised young people.

There were still people living in the same town as their grandparents, living under their parents' roof until marriage, but the percentage dwindled year by year. Individual realities did not fit what our picture of them is. When I look at all four of my grandparents and their siblings, they were all expected to be on their own after about age 20, including the women. They married or moved to an apartment and got work, sometimes in another state. This would have been a full century ago, not recent. I don't think I know much of anything about the courtships of any of them.

Before that was decades of people either moving here from other countries - and courtship rituals of new arrivals had to have been a serious dislocation - or moving westward, singly or in families. Either way, their children would be in new towns without established institutions and everyone juggled and likely fought over keeping up old norms.

If you want to find a time in American history when marriage and courtship customs were stable for a hundred years you won't find one. Individual groups that stayed in towns (not cities) in the East might show some stability, especially if they were wealthy or had some deep ethnic solidarity. But the country as a whole, never. Because we can still find customs that were handed down a few generations we get a false impression of continuity.

It is similar, now that I think of it, to people's impression of what church and worship used to be like. Most people don't really think it through and are mostly talking about what their grandparents experienced. Even at that, they don't know that as well as they think.  When you look into histories of actual congregations, you look at real documents: confirmation and Sunday School curricula, programs from celebrations listing the hymns sung and titles of speaker topics, midweek schedules of meetings and what they discussed. It is an odd thing to look at such things and notice you have only heard of three of the five hymns, and only know one of them well.  Because that one is still trotted out nostalgically, we think we have continuity.*

It remains true that something is very much different in the last twenty and even ten years, and it does not seem to be working out well for the young people going through it. I don't want to give the opposite impression, that this is just a bump in the road and we have always had these imagined crises, and everyone should just calm down because the young people always seem to work these things out.  That thinking from 1960-2000 may be part of what got us into this mess. The young people don't always work things out on their own - how could they? But we should at least have the knowledge that this is always changing, even if stumbling into solutions only works some of the time.

*In Swedish congregations it is "Children of the Heavenly Father." I thought my grandmother and mother had fallen down on the job because I did not grow up with it, when I started encountering it among the Lutherans, and then the Covenanters - not even in English, never mind learning a phonetic Tryggare kan ingen vara. Yet I have gradually learned that not all Swedes grew up with it either. My great aunt Selma Nordstrom knew it, but it had not been part of her childhood. The old Swedes at my current church (all gone now, I think. I guess I'm one of the old Swedes now, and I'm not even that Swedish) also noted that it had only started becoming important in the 60s. So much for nostalgia and continuity.

6 comments:

  1. Good point. Several of my examples from older generations married very young by our standards; but lacking a period of life in which they’d have had the independence of a personal apartment or work/study away from family, those marriages make a kind of sense. They were at that time the way of establishing a kind of independence, building a family of your own instead of the one you had been born into. It was your first and maybe only chance to make a decision about that.

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  2. In Henderson's link, he talks about modern would-be couples selecting against political affiliations. This seems exactly like "marrying outside the church." Different values..

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  3. Half of our young adult relatives are marrying this year. In a span of about 16 months, 6 out of 12 will have have wed. Of the other 6, 3 have boyfriends/girlfriends.

    Of all of those couples, I think only one might have met through dating apps. All the others met through:

    School/college: 2 (1 marriage, 1 bf/gf)
    Friends: 1
    Work: 4
    Hobbies/social gatherings: 1

    So the score in this small sample at least 8 for "In Real Life," to at most 1 for "dating apps."

    I think about half of the total pool have used dating apps at some point, but based on this, I do wonder how effective the apps actually are. After all, the apps have every incentive to present themselves as an effective way to meet your spouse.

    Surveys may overrepresent the number of "online daters." For example, in this Pew Report, they survey people who have ever used an online app. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/from-looking-for-love-to-swiping-the-field-online-dating-in-the-u-s/

    Note that while 30% of the survey respondents had ever used an app, only 9% had used a dating site or app in the past year.

    It would be interesting to know if other life factors make a difference in outcomes. For example, the young adults in our extended family are not living at home. They do, however, visit their parents and share meals with them fairly frequently. There are 5 US states and 2 countries in the sample, so they aren't in the same small town. All are college educated, all have traveled abroad, all play board games, and are not particularly religious.

    So I'm inclined to believe that the Great Marriage Freak Out of the conservative punditry might be...exaggerated? Only seen in the pundits' own social circles? Those social circles probably have many graduate students and postdocs, with student debt and no time to join a local bowling group. Or it's a Bad Sign for dating success if you respond to surveys studying social trends, because it means you're stuck at home on a Friday night?

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  4. Son #2 met his wife through a dating app. They were both 37 at the time. The oldest met his wife in highschool. JA met Jocie because Nome is isolated with only 4000 people, so everyone who has any availability eventually comes into your view. I have no idea how Chris met Maria in Norway. Kyle is still trying, and has had dates from dating apps. Few promising.

    I think you are right that the conservative intelligentsia may be overconcerned because of the sample they see. Graduate school and a mobile job market likely impact this. But the numbers nationwide are down, down, down for marriage, and what there is is later. It's not all hype.

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  5. My mother's nursing school program would not allow married students. She married my father a few days after graduating. She met him at a church function--he was supposed to supply the wheels for an outing; forgot; and she made sure to reproach him and wound up forgiving him instead.

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