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.