Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  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.

  “Going steady was the thing to do in my high school,” one of Herman’s students wrote.

  “The fad in my school was going steady,” another corroborated. “You either went steady or you never went.”

  * * *

  That was basically how it worked at my high school, too. A handful of boys and girls were known to hook up with each other without committing to any one boyfriend or girlfriend; the rest of us whispered about their liaisons with disapproving fascination. But most of my friends passed through cycles of being celibate, then being coupled, and back. They seemed to assume, as I did, that we would each go through a string of partners until by some mysterious mechanism, one of them turned into The One. Then we would stand side by side, in pairs, as the screen faded to black.

  Such a simple trajectory seemed natural when I was fifteen; now my faith in it strikes me as naïve. But the first adults who noticed that teens were beginning to date this way found their behavior strange and scandalous. Columns offering personal and romantic advice were becoming a common feature of American newspapers during the 1940s and ’50s, and the new class of nationally syndicated experts seemed to agree: Going steady was a terrible idea.

  Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer was the most strident. Writing under the pen name Dorothy Dix, Gilmer became one of the highest-paid female journalists in the United States. At the peak of her popularity, she had millions of regular readers around the world. And as early as 1939, Dix was warning young women against the “insane folly of ‘keeping company.’” “The custom has all of the worst features of marriage and none of its advantages,” she wrote.

  Doris Blake agreed. Blake was another pseudonym, for a woman named Antoinette Donnelly; her column was syndicated in forty-five daily papers nationwide. In 1942, Blake published a lament for the good old days of high school and college dances, where young men cut in on girls and girls filled up their dance cards.

  “It’s simply a pernicious habit grown out of we-don’t-know-what that has fostered this ridiculous custom of a couple of 16, 17, or 18 year olds pairing off to the exclusion of everyone else on the dance floor,” Blake fumed.

  The advice from the Baltimore Afro-American was more measured. The largest black-owned paper in the country, the Afro featured a weekly column called “Date Data” signed simply by “the Chaperone.” It offered thoughtful advice to steadies experiencing a wide range of problems. But at the end of the day, the Chaperone agreed that young people would be better off dating around.

  When one girl wrote in, despairing because her boyfriend had joined the army, the Chaperone reproached her: “Just remember that you are not married to him, and he has a life to live.”

  When a fourteen-year-old pleaded for advice on how to save a steady relationship with a boy she knew “talked sweet” to others, the Chaperone was blunt. “Seems as though he’s already given you up. However, don’t feel too badly about it. When you’re as young as you are, it’s healthy to be interested in lots of boyfriends/girlfriends, rather than settling down to one steady.”

  * * *

  What were the skeptics so worried about? For one thing, going steady seemed to deprive young people of the pleasures of courting and being courted. In the era of rating and dating, you had to make plans to see a partner. In the 1920s, if a Fusser had wanted to take out a Flapper, convention said he had to call her. If a College Man wanted to see a Coed, he had to propose some activity—a walk around campus, a joyride, or a trip to the movies. Going steady changed this. For the first time in history, it was possible for daters to take one another for granted.

  In 1951, the education branch at RCA-Victor made a short film that was used in high school classrooms to teach students about the danger of falling into exclusive relationships. It featured two forlorn steadies, Jeff and Marie. They look like children but already they are feeling bored and trapped. In the opening scene, Marie’s mother asks her whether Jeff will take her to the school dance that night, and she wrings her hands in anguish.

  “Oh Mother, that’s the trouble. Jeff doesn’t ask me, he just shows up!”

  We then cut to Jeff. He turns out to be equally distressed.

  “We haven’t agreed on anything,” he sighs to his wiser, older brother. “We haven’t even talked about going steady. We just sort of … go steady.”

  He pauses. “How did I get into this?”

  If you were foolish enough to rush into a steady relationship, the fishbowl quality of high school could make it difficult to get out. Peers conspired to enforce the Steady Code. In Seventeenth Summer, a clique of boys called “The Checkers” spends evenings loitering in front of the town’s most popular date spot. “They watch to see who is having a Coke with whom and to report any violations on the part of the girls who are supposed to be going steady,” Angie, the narrator, explains.

  One popular textbook for college “marriage and family” courses claimed that young people who wanted to see more than one
person had to resort to “late dating”—sneaking out for a second dinner or Coke or beer after their steadies had brought them home. Was this cheating? Is it possible to betray someone to whom you have sworn to be true for a semester or a summer? It certainly seemed to be possible to feel guilty about it.

  If going steady made for less fun before marriage, the authorities worried that it could also harm your marriage prospects. Dorothy Dix warned that it was a lose-lose. A girl could squander her best years on a boy who ultimately left her in the lurch. Even worse, a couple could end up drifting down the aisle out of habit.

  Dix was too delicate to point out another likely possibility: that Steadies would find themselves in need of a shotgun wedding. The Catholic Church was not. On Ash Wednesday 1957, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Samuel Alphonsus Stritch, publicly denounced the practice as a trap that would lure children into sex: “Too much familiarity between the adolescent girl and the adolescent boy is dangerous and sinful,” he said.

  That year, Catholic schools across the country began expelling students who were discovered to be “seeing one other student to the exclusion of all others,” and a Catholic magazine issued a warning to its readers: “It is impossible for a boy and a girl to be alone together in an intimate and exclusive companionship for any length of time without serious sin.”

  * * *

  Cardinal Stritch was not wrong. In the United States, a long tradition gave courting couples tacit permission to engage in sexual behavior so long as they stopped short of intercourse. One familiar custom in Colonial America was “bundling,” sometimes called “tarrying.” Two young people were allowed to sleep side by side in a bed, partially clothed or enclosed in a sack that shut with a drawstring at the neck. Sometimes a piece of wood called a “bundling board” was placed between them.