Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  It was the promise of affluence that had made the spread of going steady possible. But an undercurrent of anxiety came with it. There was something slightly panicked about the eagerness of teenagers to throw themselves at one another. The Norman Rockwell years of soda fountains and high school dances were also an era when a huge proportion of Americans believed that their world was about to end soon.

  In the 1950s, the prominent psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote that a silent stress disorder was afflicting the entire country. He called it “nuclear numbing.” In 1950, 53 percent of Americans believed that there was a “good” or “fair” chance that their community would be bombed during the next world war. By 1956, two-thirds of those polled believed that in the event of another war, the Russians would use an H-bomb against the United States. By consuming clothes and loves, Americans of all ages attempted to compensate for the feelings of insecurity and incipient disaster that the Atomic Age created. Families afraid of being nuked walled their houses with consumer goods as if they were bomb shelters. Their children watched and learned.

  Teens, who could now afford movie tickets, Cokes, and hamburgers, did not want to die alone on doomsday. Even if you would not go steady for good, it felt good to have a Steady for now, especially if now might turn out to be the closest thing to forever. Anyone would want someone to do it with at their side right before the bomb dropped.

  * * *

  Today, we are in fact living at the end of the world order that the Golden Age of Going Steady created, if not the world itself. Our endtimes feel less dramatic than the nuclear blasts that the Steadies feared. Average temperatures are climbing. Ice caps are melting. The rich grow richer, while everyone else grows poorer around them, all down with the long slide into what economists call “secular stagnation.” In an age when so much feels precarious, serial monogamists cling to their partners for comfort. But in our version of the apocalypse, it seems less clear what going steady is for. No bomb fell, and everyone did it anyway. Whatever is coming now, how is it that we hope the people we love might protect us?

  The postwar dream of a detached house, a happy housewife, and a full-time working husband was feasible only for a brief window of history. Even then, it was feasible only for a limited segment of the population. Since wages stagnated in the late 1970s, working-class families of the Ozzie and Harriet type have collapsed under the strain. Cohabiting relationships without marriage and single-parent households have long since become a norm.

  The cultural conservatives who call for a revival of “The Family”—as if there has ever been any one kind of family—ignore the fact that the choices many people make about marriage are not just cultural or moral. They also are influenced by money. Studies show that many members of the working classes feel that they simply cannot afford to marry. Either they cannot afford a wedding, or they cannot afford other markers of adulthood that feel like prerequisites for marriage (paying off student loans, buying a house, etc.). Many of those who give marriage a go learn the hard way that living hounded by financial worries with no end in sight is not the greatest aphrodisiac.

  More and more evidence suggests that today marriage has become a privilege of the middle class. In the United States, the middle class is shrinking quickly. Since the 2008 financial crisis, even college-educated people have faced falling wages, waning job security, and a lack of benefits. Increasingly, we have no choice but to resort to part-time and contract work. The dream of “settling down” forever—or of anything being steady forever—is fast fading. For more and more people, the future feels impossible to predict.

  Young people today are told that if we want to stand a chance, we must be mobile. We must be ready to move across the country in order to take a job, or to move in with family members after we lose one. We should chase promotions and freelance gigs where we can. Professional pressures often force people to make tough choices regarding their relationships. With the possibility of a break looming constantly on the horizon, it can be difficult to feel sure enough about someone to commit. And when both members of almost any couple have to work, the prospect of the commitment always comes with the question of what professional opportunities you would be willing to give up later.

  In a world of uncertain prospects, having a partner can be a source of joy and support not unlike that of having a Steady. To be part of a couple can provide a sense of security and companionship. Even if we know it is probably not for good, to have someone who cares for us, for now, feels stabilizing. It creates a small oasis.

  Despite the many gains that women have made since the 1950s, the double standards that punish us for acting on our sexual desires still exist. If you are a woman who has been raised to believe in such standards, serial monogamy may seem like an attractive compromise. An urban legend says that if a woman hopes to marry, as the vast majority of all young Americans still do, she must not let her “number”—her lifetime tally of partners—get too high.

  As a teenage virgin, I remember reading in a well-worn magazine in some hair salon that the outer limit had been statistically proved to be five. The 2011 Anna Faris rom-com What’s Your Number? put it at twenty. If you become sexually active around seventeen, as the average American woman does, and do not marry until nearly thirty, as she also does, you either have to spend long dry spells celibate or go steady if you want to stay in bounds.

  What’s Your Number? had a happy ending. After a misguided quest to reconnect with each of the twenty men she believes she has slept with, in order to convince one of them to marry her, the goofy party girl played by Anna Faris ends up falling in love. By the end, she seems to be headed into Happily Ever After with Mr. Twenty-One. But in the final scene, she and her new beau receive a surprise answering machine message from one of the men she had been counting. To fans, the voice of “Jay from Club Med Turkoise” immediately gives him away as the comedian Aziz Ansari.

  “Hey, um,” Jay says. “I got a weird message from your assistant, and I just wanted to let you know … we never had sex. You did this awkward striptease, involving maracas, and then gave me a shitty hand job. It was something you like to do called dry style. You vomited in my suitcase, and then you passed out in the shower.”

  Anna Faris’s character is elated. The One is her Number Twenty, after all!

  What’s Your Number? got to have it both ways. Mostly, it poked fun at a piece of advice whose rigidity is clearly absurd. But it also hinted that an anachronistic-sounding rule might hold true after all. It was like a Wizard of Oz about female sexual liberation. Like Dorothy, its heroine wakes up in a narrow, tidy bed she thought she had lost forever. Her misadventures with the men hovering around were just a dream!

  Still, many people do take their numbers seriously. In 2014, researchers at the National Marriage Project reported that the more sexual partners a woman had before marriage, the more likely her marriage was to fail. Academic sociologists have pointed out myriad problems with the institute’s data, but the press widely reported it as fact.

  “Women who don’t sleep around before their wedding have happier marriages—but men can play the field without worry, study finds,” the headline in the British newspaper the Daily Mail declared. I had to read a few paragraphs to realize that the editors did not intend this as a parody.

  Despite the benefits of serial monogamy, members of many couples end up feeling entrapped, bored, or taken for granted. Like Jeff and Marie, the Steadies of the RCA social hygiene video, you can become desperate to get out of something you are not sure how you got into. Some speak of the casual drift into premarital cohabitation that has become the norm among my peers, the way Dorothy Dix wrote about going steady back in 1939: The custom has all the worst features of marriage and none of its advantages.

  Moreover, they say, the risks and long-term costs of such an arrangement will be borne disproportionately by women. Like girls who were expected to resist any urge they felt to give in and “go all the way” with their boyfriends, women who are serially
monogamous today often hear that they must be careful. Experts say that It is our responsibility to manage how a relationship proceeds.

  Today, most authorities accept that women may want premarital sex. Not all men are presumed to be aggressors whose lust a good girl must parry. More often, popular culture seems to suspect them of being George Costanza–like man-children. At the same time, there is a consensus that men have all their lives ahead of them to fumble relationship after relationship. But women are assumed to have a limited window of time in which to find a partner before their attractiveness and their fertility wane. According to this logic, the risk you take by drifting into serial monogamy has less to do with compromising your virtue than letting your value fall.

  Every day, the mother of a friend who has been living happily with a nice boyfriend for two years sends her a text message: No ring on the finger, you must not linger! I know her mother, and she is not joking. My friend has just turned twenty-six. This kind of threat assumes that, to reverse Jane Austen’s famous phrase, a single woman in possession of good sense, must be in want of a husband. It can go the other way, too. A man wants to marry his girlfriend; she wants to continue exploring. I have known more than one gay couple that split for similar reasons. If one partner wants more and the other does not, heartbreak follows. The greatest liability may be this: Many times, nobody can be sure.

  There are plenty of reasons a person might not be interested in marrying. The Steadies may already have seen them. Popular culture during the Steady Era idealized family life. But it was an open secret that many husbands and housewives were desperately unhappy. Across the country, Freudian psychiatrists told patients that their discontent was a sickness. Churches swelled their numbers by assuring parishioners that they could pray away their boredom and fretfulness. But many children must have seen that their parents were suffering. In 1960, when the editors of Redbook magazine issued a call for letters from readers on the subject of “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,” they received twenty-four thousand replies. Advice experts thought that Steadies were blindly ruining their marriage prospects. They might have simply been putting marriage off.

  Today, Americans seem to have an almost hysterical ambivalence about marriage. On the one hand, we spend obscene sums on weddings and binge-watch episodes of wedding-related shows like Say Yes to the Dress. We accept laws that incentivize people to marry by offering tax breaks and tying access to health care, other benefits, and visitation rights to the institution; we celebrate the triumph of gay couples who have gained the same privileges. More than 80 percent of never-married Americans still say that they want to marry. Yet many of us live in ways that seem incompatible with the institution. We work too long, we move too often, we may remain ambivalent about monogamy or children. Serial monogamy is a way of putting marriage off. Does it also call into question its place as a central value in our culture?

  With the apocalypse forestalled, the contemporary equivalent of going steady can easily turn into a recipe for indecision. We stay in relationships out of convenience, long after our infatuation has passed. Now that marriage is no longer the obligatory conclusion of a serious relationship, we can feel comfortable merging lives with people we may not want to be with for life. We introduce them to our families; we go on vacations together. We learn everything about their friends and jobs and still remain unsure. We drift in and out of relationships.

  You claim you might not want to spend your lives together. But you wake up and realize you already have.

  CHAPTER 6. FREEDOM

  Linda LeClair was an unlikely sex symbol. The Barnard sophomore had grown up going to Sunday school in Hudson, New Hampshire. At twenty, she wore her lank dirty-blond hair tucked behind her ears. For press photos, she favored cardigans and pastel-colored shift dresses that fell at her knees. She had been living with her boyfriend, Peter Behr, in an apartment on Riverside Drive for around two years.

  He was a junior at Columbia; they had met in a seminar. It is difficult to imagine that either of them anticipated the uproar that they would cause when they agreed to give an interview to a New York Times reporter in March 1968. The trends piece that appeared, quoting them, made Linda into a national celebrity—and scapegoat—overnight.

  “An Arrangement: Living Together for Convenience, Security, Sex,” the headline read. The article called Peter only by his first name, and it called Linda “Susan.” But she had identified herself as a sophomore at Barnard, and the college quickly tracked her down. Almost as soon as they did, calls and letters started inundating the office of the president, Martha Peterson. Some men wrote in saying that LeClair was living proof that women were ruined by higher education. Prominent Barnard alumnae, including Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, an heiress to the New York Times fortune, threatened to cut off donations to the school if she was not expelled immediately.

  Officially, LeClair was in trouble for lying on her housing forms. According to Barnard regulations, students could live off campus only with family or an employer. She had claimed to be working as an au pair on the Upper West Side and provided the address of a married friend who agreed to cover for her. But the hate mail that poured in made it clear that she had violated a more serious, unspoken rule.

  As disciplinary proceedings against LeClair began and the national media picked up the story, letters arrived at Barnard from all over the country. They called LeClair a “whore” and an “alleycat”; they called Barnard “Barnyard.” In his widely syndicated column, the conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. denounced this undergraduate student as an “unemployed concubine” who was “gluttonous for sex and publicity.”

  When Life magazine put her on their April cover, LeClair said the opposite. All the attention was exhausting. “I find it hard to think of myself as a person any more.” She shook her head. “I have ceased to exist. I am Linda LeClair, the issue.”

  What exactly was the issue? It could not be only that a young woman was having premarital sex; statistics had long shown that most young women did. Nor was LeClair a “whore” by any stretch. She had been in a monogamous relationship for years. What rankled was that she felt no need to hide it. Again and again the hate mail Barnard received used the verb “flaunt.” LeClair and Behr were “openly flaunting their disregard for moral codes.” They were “flaunting their dereliction.”

  LeClair and Behr rallied fellow students to support Linda. They had a mimeograph machine in their apartment, and they printed hundreds of pamphlets and questionnaires. Three hundred Barnard students anonymously admitted that they had lied on their own housing forms; sixty sent the college signed letters attesting that they had done so.

  LeClair and her defenders argued that the Barnard regulations constituted a form of sex discrimination, since Columbia placed no equivalent restrictions on male students. And they argued that all students, male or female, had a right to date however they wished.

  “Is the purpose of Barnard College to teach students or to control their private lives?” LeClair asked an interviewer at Time magazine. “I believe that it is the former. Barnard has no right to control personal behavior.” President Peterson soon pressured her into dropping out, and Peter Behr left Columbia in solidarity. But they had made their point, and those who shared their point of view would win in the long run. They already were winning. By the late 1960s, the belief that everyone has a right to love without outside interference was becoming widespread.

  * * *

  We are all heirs to the sexual revolution. Whatever our sexual preferences, we now live and date in the world that revolution created, and we do so freer from fears of ostracism, persecution, or unwanted pregnancy than we would be if it had not taken place. But the expression came to refer to such a wide range of phenomena that it can be difficult to know what exactly we mean when we say it.

  It is also easy to forget that the 1960s marked its second coming. The term “sexual revolution” was first used to describe the antics of the Flappers and Fussers of the Roaring Twent
ies. Two young and then unknown New Yorker writers, James Thurber and E. B. White, coined it in 1929, in a book that they wrote together and Thurber illustrated. Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do parodied the kinds of advice manuals that had become popular over the previous decade, which used Freudian vocabulary to explain to readers their own sex lives and psychological “adjustment.”

  In the chapter titled “The Sexual Revolution,” the authors described the changes taking place in the language of rights. Specifically, they said that the revolution began when young women discovered that they had “the right to be sexual.” When the archetypal New Woman went to college, and then took a paying job, they said, she began to discover that she could do many things that only men had done before. The New Woman rented her own apartment. She smoked and drank and bobbed her hair. Sometimes she even wanted sex.

  On January 24, 1964, Time magazine announced that “The Second Sexual Revolution” had arrived. The cover story observed that “champagne parties for teenagers, padded brassières for twelve-year-olds, and ‘going steady’ at ever younger ages” had resulted in an “orgy of open-mindedness.”

  There have always been rebels and libertines. Plenty of statistics show that turn-of-the-century shopgirls and dykes, Greeks and fairies, could be just as promiscuous as the hippies who succeeded them. The difference was that the first group had often described their own activities as unnatural, or at least exceptional. Their sex was sexy because it felt illicit.

  By contrast, the soldiers of the second sexual revolution declared that no desire could be unnatural. If prior generations had winked that rules were made to be broken, more and more young people seemed to believe that no rules should exist. They agreed with the Flappers that everyone had a “right to be sexual.” However, they did not stress the equality that this right gave them. Instead, they argued that having sex was a way to express another inalienable right: freedom.