Norms of Courtship, Part 1

At some point during my grad school dating life - I'm not exactly sure when - a switch was made: texting replaced calling as the primary mode of arranging dates, flirting, etc. I can't put my finger on how I started to feel this way, but all of sudden when I would call a woman for a date, I felt decidedly old-fashioned (which isn't always how one wants to feel while trying to get a date). It also took me a while to understand that a text response to a voicemail isn't necessarily a dodge (which previously it had always been). Rules were changing, and I've frankly been slow to catch up.

It made me think of the scene in Swingers where Jon Favreau leaves a series of increasingly embarrassing messages on a potential dates answering machine (warning: this scene is totally painful to watch):

Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau later said that the reason this spoke to people in 1996 was that Gen X was the first generation to have to deal with the perils of leaving a voice message. It was total treachery: you couldn't win, you could only avoid a loss. 

For my part, I felt I had just started to really understand the art of leaving just the right message (though certainly I had not mastered it). Now the rules have been changed up on me. On the one hand, writing a text doesn't have the challenges of spontaneity, but it has a whole set of norms and rules associated with it that I have yet to discover (and that one worries about discovering the hard way...). 

This was already in mind when I read Tracy Clark-Flory's "Who Needs Casual Sex?!" at Salon over the weekend. Clark-Flory talks about transitioning from the hookup culture back towards something that looks more like traditional courtship, with a gentleman bringing her flowers serving as the symbol for the shift (with him turning down first-date sex as the clincher). 

There's been a lot written over the last couple of years about the hookup culture and changing romantic expectations, whether it's good for women, driven by men or women, good for my generation's future relationships, etc, etc. What seems undeniable, though, is that the rules of appropriate dating behavior are shifting and ambiguous at best, and perhaps even disappearing. 

I certainly don't intend to use this post as a call for a return to the highly formalized courtship practices of our male-dominated past, 

but I do think there is a relationship between our departure from rule-bound courtship and the rise of internet dating. I think we want some degree of constraint, some rules, and some reliable expectations. It's hard to go into a date without any idea if you're playing by the same sets of rules. We all know it would be easier if there were some norms or rules that could help us through. 

And it seems norms have started to emerge on dating websites. 

There are certain expectations about how long before you meet, what sorts of activities are appropriate when you first meet in person, etc. They're certainly variable, but the variability is a little more predictable: if someone marks on their profile that they're looking for casual sex, the expectations change, the rules change. 

I don't know why a more or less stable pattern of norms has emerged around internet dating (or maybe they haven't and I'm just wrong - always a possibility) but not around more "traditional" avenues. Part of me thinks that it was simply an easy supply to meet a growing demand. As I said, I think my generation wants more structure in this area of our lives, and that was an easier need to fill in fora that were already built around behavioral expectations: fill out a profile, and here are the rules guiding profiles; here are what kinds of pictures are allowed for the profile, you must answer x-number of questions, etc. Given that internet dating already had structure to it, we could more easily build new expectations around it. 

That said, I think it goes to far sometimes. To tease next week's Part 2: internet dating has created answers to too many questions. Is it a good thing that one can go into a first date already knowing if their date kisses on the first date? Knowing how many dates they usually wait before having sex? Knowing their answers to perhaps hundreds of (sometimes intensely) personal questions? Tune in next Wednesday for an off day post where I bloviate on those questions.