I deeply suspect that social life, in the realm of romance, always resembled economics, if not always a free market. I don't mean to be glib, or assert that there have been no changes in how people date. I haven't been on the market in over a decade, and very few of my friends are out there, so I really wouldn't know. But, and there is no kind way to say this, I don't actually believe David Brooks knows either.Once upon a time -- in what we might think of as the "Happy Days" era -- courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts -- dating, going steady, delaying sex -- was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn't fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.
People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
Do people mostly meet through texting today? Are schools, friends and work largely irrelevant? Is it true that there are no social scripts for young people? Or is Brooks merely unfamiliar with them? Did people not meet at jazz clubs back in the 50s, at the Drifters show, or at the beach? And taking Brooks' point, has the actual essence of dating changed that much? Are young people better or worse of for it?
I read Brooks's column and thought of the 80 and 90 year old slaves interviewed by the WPA. There is a lot in those oral histories that is, as they say, old and true. But there's a lot that's old and false. A constant refrain is the notion that the "moving pictures" were ruining young people, and the next generation wasn't worth anything. To be clear, that would be the same generation that gave us Martin Luther King, and effectively finished the Civil War.
This is a theme residing in the conservative soul--a professed, thinly-reasoned skepticism of the fucked-up now, contrasted against a blind, unquestioning acceptance of the hypermoral past. This is a human idea--most people, like those slaves, believe some point in the past was better. And indeed, in some case the past was demonstrably better. But the writer who would argue such has to prove it. He can't just accept his innate hunch. He has to bumrush and beat down his theories of the world, And should they emerge unbroken, that writer might have something to tell us. It's got to be more than justifying your prejudice. It's got to be more than those meddling kids.
Hey! - MF DOOM
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Brooks is the NYT's resident Grumpy Old Man. Take his opinons with a large grain of salt when he writes about anything more recent than the telegraph.
Also remember that he doesn't have any knowledge of history either. Don't bother to read him at all unless you enjoy many large grains of salt!
More like gallstone-sized grains of salt. Yecch, thinking about this old fig establishment lickspittle involving himself in my pursuit of poontang.
Seconded, Gingergene. I saw this and realized Brooks never asked around about the new norms which have popped up in the vacuum he decries. In fact there's relevant literature on the subject.
Maybe it's more complicated, but I'd argue that the long term results are better. Yes, divorce rates are incredibly high right now. But what would they have been sixty or seventy years ago if social structures and a lack of job opportunities for women hadn't made divorce impossible or impracticle at the time? How many stories have we heard about couples who hated each others guts, but stayed together anyway? I'm not saying that divorce is a great thing, but mythologizing the past is ridiculous.At that point in time there was usually a fairly short courtship period with little truly private contact between the individuals alone. How can you even begin to decide whether or not two people are going to be compatible with each other for decades to come under those circumstances. And that doesn't even begin to cover the mess of arranged or coerced marriages. These days at least it's possible To live with your partner for some years before you make the commitment of marriage. A trial run, so to speak, with few legal entanglements. Also, if and when people do split up, one side isn't necessarily left destitute and at the whims of their remaining family. The current system may be more complicated and require the abilty to navigate more ambiguous situations, but I'll take it over the old system any day of the week.
Seconded. This is pure nostalgia for days-gone-by with no regard for the significant burdens some people bore in order to maintain those traditions. It's not much different than waxing poetic about ante-bellum southern aristocracy while ignoring its underlying support system.
Yeah. TNC wrote something a while ago that was pretty similar to something I'd been thinking, which is that conservatism's reverence for the 50s and loathing of the 60s and 70s ignores the critical fact that it's the conditions of the 50s that lead to the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s that they so despise. I guess the winger narrative is that those cultural revolutions were somehow imposed on the public from without, but it's pretty clear that they developed organically from discontent with the conservative post-war era and early cold-war paranoia. So you can't just *go back* to the 50s because the 50s were an unsustainable aberration in the first place.
But things were once so much better for guys like Brooks ... Isn't that what counts most?
Is it me, or is all of this 1950s crap setting the stage for Brooks to push for Romney?
He didn't push for Romney in 2008.
I think this quote from Brook's op-ed deserves more thought. In so many ways it plays directly into the debate over what happened in Maine. He's right in so many ways for my grandparents generation --not so much for the happy days generation-- that came of age during the great depression community norms guided individual relationships. I'm not saying he's entirely right but there may be something to the idea that today individual relationships determine --or soon will determine-- community norms.
I think the idea is worth another look.
How? The problem with Brooks' idea is that it's pure speculation, unsupported by any evidence apart from his nostalgia. So where do we start should we want to give the idea it "another look." How can we know whether or not anything he's saying is even vaguely related to anything real?
Tom Brokaw praised "The Greatest Generation" by, among other things, citing the stability of their marriages. His evidence was that he didn't know of any divorces among his parents circle of friends and relatives.
Actual research reveals that the divorce rate reached record levels in the years immediately following WWII, something that attracted a lot of press attention at the time. Brokaw may not have known that, but using his memory as evidence for the opposite view hardly makes it reliable.
I suspect that Brooks has fallen into the same trap.
I completely agree. I believe that Brooks' courtship "guidelines" or "guardrails" or whatever you want to call them have to do with his particular experience growing up, and cannot be extrapolated to society at large.
My mom is 83 years old and she loved to tell me, when I was a wild high school girl in the 1970s, about how when she was my age girls didn't know anything about sex and girls always wore slips so that no one could see their legs if they stood with their skirts backlit and girls never found themselves alone in a room with a boy and on and on and ON. And when I would question the veracity of the picture she painted, she would say, "Well, there was always ONE girl in school who was something of a roundheels, but she was the exception."
And then I grew up and started watching pre-Code films and, oh, READING SOCIAL HISTORY and I knew that my sweet Mom was not talking about all the girls in the 1930s, she was talking about the ones at her small school in Belmont MA. She had never bothered to say she was speaking about her own experience and I'm not convinced she even realized what she was doing. Most people DO think their experience IS the normative, society-wide experience.
So David Brooks is, in my opinion, just like my 83-year-old Mom--talking through his hat about his own experience to make people feel bad about theirs.
So David Brooks is, in my opinion, just like my 83-year-old Mom
Never has a truer thing been said.
"I believe that Brooks' courtship "guidelines" or "guardrails" or whatever you want to call them have to do with his particular experience growing up."
Since he was born to and raised by a couple of hippies in Greenwich Village, I doubt this is an accurate assessment of his perspective. There may be other valid critiques of Brooks's argument, but I don't think this one holds up against the actuality of his own experience.
"Babyface" with B. Stanwyck is probably my favorite pre-code film.
I didn't say that he was right entirely but there is something to the notion that as our technology progresses we find ourselves much lees bound by community notions of what we "should" do. I'm not saying that the past was in any way a more moral time than the present, but I am saying that the over-arching for lack of a better word "force of custom" has much less import today than it did for my grandparents.
That isn't to say that the past was any better than the present, but attitudes were certainly different even if the customs were honored mainly in the breach. Now it could be and it's possible to make the argument that wtih respect to the rest of the world that America has always been a highly individualistic place. I would venture a guess though that within our own history we have become much more individualy focused as time has gone on, and as our wealth and technology has advanced so too has our opposition to paying lip service to customary ways of doing business.
The changing nature of how society and its menmbers decide which customs to follow is, I think, a valid observation by Brooks. The idea that the past was somehow more moral is not. I thought the point that Brooks made was how in an earlier time decisions conserning what was proper behavior, --even when they weren't followed-- came from an accepted authority be it a minister, a civic leader, or suchlike, wheras now we don't really have an accepted "authority" to guide us in determining appropriate behavior was on the whole a valid criticism. Our behaviors or urges haven't changed but I think our attitudes have and more importantly the sources of information upon which our opinions are formed most certainly have changed in the past 75 years.
One confounding factor is that improvements in technology tend to come hand in hand with increasing wealth, making it hard to clearly separate their effects; e.g.: were dating habits really profoundly affected by the physical substitution of transom cabs by automobiles or is that just a tiny aspect dwarfed by the ubiquitization of affordable transportation?
Josh,
I don't know but that would be a fascinating study. :)
As an example from my parents generation that illustrates what I meant I don't think we could find my Generations counterpart to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or even to Thriller. I caught the tail end of it when "Black or White" premired on T.V. and all the kids at school talked about it the next day, but there is something to be said for the fading of mass-consumer culture where everyone looks the same dresess the same listens to the same music and wears the same jeans.
This is a good thing the greater the range of accepted opinion the greater the opportunity for tolerance. However, I think the shift has happened even if it doesn't mean that society is less moral than it was before it does mean our sources of information are greater.
Why does history begin in 1950 for Brooks?
If he took a peek at, say, a Jane Austen novel, he might see that romance not just resembling economics, but intertwining inseparably with it.
He'd also see some strategic non-commitment, some keeping folks on the back burner just in case, and some communicating through written messages in order to avoid the face-to-face. (Why Brookes thinks that phones and texting only destroy obstacles, when they're also very clearly technologies for preserving distance, is unclear.)
Brookes would also discover some pretty righteously ambiguous relationships. In fact, a lot of etiquette, despite Brookes, is precisely about preserving ambiguity, about keeping from having to definitively accept or reject someone before a decision is clear.
Kids like David Brookes. How are you going to teach them anything?
I think it's indisputable that people today have more choices of people to date and marry. Both men and women more likely to attend college and move away from their hometowns, it's easier to maintain a long distance relationship because of travel and communication conveniences, and barriers to dating a person of a different race, religion or culture are much less significant than they were in the past. I think the key question is whether more choices leads to greater happiness or better results. I think in some significant ways it does, but in others it doesn't. I look at the marriages of my 80+ year old grandparents and their friends- most of them married people they went to high school with, and met in their childhood or early teens. I'd say their marriages are, on average, at least as happy as those of my friends in their 20s and 30s, who got married much later in life after a lot more stress. It's like Barry Schwartz argued in the Paradox of Choice- sometimes having more options just makes things harder without actually improving the end result. That said, personally, I'm delighted that I wasn't stuck with any of the guys from my high school- on balance, I do believe most people are better off now.
We also need to remember that urban and rural dating/marriage mores are way different. I'm accustomed to the big-city norms, in which people routinely wait until their late 20s or 30s to marry, maybe five or six more years to have kids. But I'm currently living in a small city in the Breadbasket, where . . . well, there's no polite way to say this, so I'll just be blunt: Most of the women have their first kids between the ages of 20 and 24 and keep going till they've got three or four; the exceptions start even younger. The pretty ones, the religious ones and the lucky ones get married first. (The smart ones and the unconventional ones, I suspect, skip town before they get sucked in.)
It's a crap dating scene for a 40-year-old divorced guy who has no kids but would like to. By the time the women are old enough for me to want to date ("half my age plus 7" works here -- anyone younger than that looks like a girl to me, not a woman), they've already got all the kids they'd ever want. And people age fast here: the ones in their 30s look like they're in their 40s, and the ones in their 40s have grandchildren.
"He can't just accept his innate hunch. He has to bumrush and beat down his theories of the world, And should they emerge unbroken, that writer might have something to tell us. It's got to be more than justifying your prejudice. It's got to be more than those meddling kids."
Accepting his innate hunches and justifying his prejudices is Brooks's entire MO. Rather than bumrush his theories of the world, he pretends they're either fundamental truth or the widely held views of the American people. Draw your own conclusions about whether he's got anything to tell us.
"It's not much different than waxing poetic about ante-bellum southern aristocracy while ignoring its underlying support system."
I think that's perfect. I enjoy when TNC writes about nostalgia, and how he essentially rejects it for the most part. I would love to see more written about our society's tendency to think that the country and our society is constantly getting worse.
Sullivan had an interesting graph a few weeks ago showing how a large, large majority of people in this country assume that crime is worse every year than the year prior. When in fact, the numbers didn't support that at all. And in many cases, supported the exact opposite.
Why do we do it? I admit to catching myself doing it as well when it comes to things like sports and music. I know I'm probably wrong, but I still do it.
I think there are two separate issues at play here. One is ahistorical: humans often find change difficult. We get used to a certain set of realities (or in the case of your feelings about music, we hear certain styles or tropes over and over again), and then we're asked to reevaluate, on a regular basis, our worldview. It's difficult to make decisions when we're having to take in new information, so we often rely on old information, which is more familiar and comfortable.
The second reason is, I think, related to our need for stability -- but also tied to our particular time period (broadly speaking the information age?). You mentioned the Sully example of crime. Media reports on crime have increased over the years, even if incidents of crime have not. So, we see more crime -- even when we don't. And just as it's often easier for us to make decisions based on familiar, well-worn information, it's easier for us to "see" crime when it's been shown on TV than it is for us to "see" those statistics about the variability of crime rates. In other words, the emotional impact of a visual image of crime can be much greater than information that may contradict or complicate that image.
Wrapping back to Brooks, I think this is where he misses the point: technology (whether our 24/7 cable/internet media or cellphones/internet/texting) can exaggerate some of our tendencies (whether our tendency to rely on visceral images instead of dry statistics or a desire to "comparison shop" for mates), but I'm not sure technology creates new instincts.
I don't know. Perhaps it's a human response to change. Really the only constant in life is change and most people I know are not overly fond, in general, of change. Or at least change that is not their idea. We're somewhat creatures of habit. And as society changes and moves around us we start to think that that "things were better when..." even if maybe they weren't actually. The grass is always greener on the other side, and in this case the other side is the past.
People are very attached to the etiquette they've learned, to the extent that they think of it as a measure of the quality of person. The problem is that etiquette is a superstructure to the economic and social structure it develops in. Brooks is probably right to point out that changes in technology are changing the way people meet and relate, but its only looking at part of the story to bewail the loss of all the good old ways. I recently reread David Graeber's essay on the origins of manners and was thinking about this a lot. Some people here might enjoy reading it.
People at various time throughout history have had to be OK with arranged marriages, narrowly-proscribed choices of acceptable partners, and rigid and unequal divisions of gender roles, and they've managed to be happy by adhering to these impeccable standards of etiquette that by today's standards, look either absurdly repressed or admirable - depending on the individual.
All the speeches about "taking back this country" tie in with this point in some way.
My grandmother lives in a retirement community. Much to my immense chagrin, she informed me that there is a "Walk of Shame" in the community every morning as residents return to their own rooms. I've never seen my grandmother text anyone.
Just like in college... that's funny.
I love it. My grandmom used to talk about the "cliques" in the retirement home. Said it was just like going back to high school.
I read a great piece in The New Yorker last year about cave paintings in France and current scholarship on their meaning/function. The most remarkable part of the story for me was this (emphasis added):
Imagine a time when human art and culture, at least in one area, remained pretty much unchanged for 25,000 years -- and without writing, no one really had any idea of how long it had been the same. Everything really was the way it always had been, forever.
And now I'm trying to imagine David Brooks, wearing animal skins, wandering into a cave carrying a little animal-fat torch, blowing natural pigment onto his hand to "sign" the wall underneath his op-ed about how everything was a lot better before the womenfolk starting making eyes at the Neanderthal neighbors.
First, as somebody who is a single professional 20 something in New York, I think Ta-Nehisi is right that most people aren't meeting through texting for the most part. Most people still do meet through friends, work, or school. Among my (20 something New Yorker friends) in New York, we typically say that only about 10% of guys ever approach a woman they don't know in a bar or bookstore or something for romantic purposes. Of those, the majority typically fail miserably. I suppose a greater percentage of women get approached in this way, but it is a small percentage of men doing this. People who write into New York Magazine to discuss their sexual exploits are not a representative sample of young America (thankfully).
Second, this reminds me of Brink Lindsay's observation that conservatives want to live in the 1950s and liberals want to work there. If you like the increased dynamism that the contemporary economy brings, don't act surprised when that dynamism spills over into social relationships. The loss of "guard rails" is due to the fact that people nowadays are looking for potential mates with a wider variety of career paths, life goals, and circumstances.
Speaking as a woman and a liberal, Brink Lindsey is wrong. There is no way I'd want to work in the 50's, where my career options would be secretary, teacher, or shop clerk, all with added harassment and making of coffee. Only a white man (and not all of them) would want a 50's workplace.
But I don't think that our choices are an exact copy of the past or the current present. The world is always changing; the question is what it changes into next. I, personally, don't vote for changing it back to the 1950's, however mythologized.
Thats all definitely true. I think Lindsay was alluding to the greater job stability, stronger labor unions, lower disparity of wealth, abundance of decently paying low skill labor (for men) as things that liberals get nostalgic for. You can definitely see that notion in "Roger and Me."
Pop quiz. Who said this? "What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying."
A). My grandmother
B). David Brooks
C). Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
D). Plato
Is it "E) All of the above"?
Watching Mad Men, it's interesting to note how many of the old rules regarding marriage and courtship have changed or completely disappeared. Yes, "the sixties" radically transformed our culture, for better and for worse.
But I love the way reactionaries (people who want to return to an imaginary past) like Brooks tend blame everything on "the feminists". Kinsey, Hefner (The Sexual Revolution), No Fault Divorce, and many other factors have had a huge impact on our society. "The Feminist Mystique" was certainly part of this process, but men bear at least as much responsibility for this as women do.
It's also interesting that the men in Mad Men are themselves portrayed as profoundly unhappy with the world that they created. Isn't that Don's big inner battle? He has everything and deep down wants none of it.
As a whole, however, I'd like our national dialogue to get away from talking about how happy we are or are not. It's a losing game for progressives and conservatives alike, highly subjective, and lame. Maybe we could have a more realistic index of the feeling of "Eh" or "Ho-hum" or "Just trying to figure things out".
Do you have any evidence that Brooks has blamed anything on "feminists"?
"Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn't fit the post-feminist era"
Yes, it depends on what corner of the world you were living in, lived in. Also, when society has a number of joneses that keep the wheels oiled, then going cold turkey is not going to be all that pleasant.
Finally, it should be noted that the period between the mid 50s and 60s in the US was an unprecedentedly wealthy period in American history. We have experienced nothing like it before or since. It was, as a result a time in which the nation had an extraordinarily optimistic mood and walls of poverty and institutionalized bigotry were beginning as a result to crumble.
All the while, our nation and the Soviets entered into the second decade in which they held the world hostage to an international military ping pong match that sent it into diaspora, while we were initiating a thermonuclear threat that could destroy the earth and its inhabitants a thousand times over.
Today, all these pressures are visible to the naked eye; they show up in the aberrant behavior of our and the wide world's citizenry and the rise of the notion in our unconsciousness if not consciousness that history has one strict lesson when it comes to empire: they all fall down, and that even nature, which we once took for granted, has its limits in sustaining us in a fashion to which we have become accustomed.
I have to say I`ll take the 00's heightened awareness of domestic violence, marital rape, sexual abuse, and acquaintance rape if it means forgoing the 50's attitudes towards dating.
I will say that as someone who went to middle school during a time with Instant Messenger, etc. what the heightened technology does allow young people to do is become more obsessive about certain people they like, theres just more time and opportunity for contact and reading messages, looking at pictures over and over again. You can spend hours on AIM and not know where the time went. But this all comes down to how the parents are monitoring the kids time with and access to these technologies.
I wonder how what you described above corresponds with the invention of the telephone line. Letter writing and sitting rooms gave way to the phone which gave way to IMing and texting. Just a different vehicle for a common end.
Yeah its a little different though you go from the phone in the living room with the cord thats stretched to hell from kids taking it to the basement to talk to the computer where the parents cant really see normally whats being said or hear it at all.
I've been thinking about this kind of thing lately. It used to be that everyone in the house knew when there was a phone call, and that a bo-oyy called you. I was just on the edge of this, growing up. As a no-landline person now, the only phone calls I ever participate in are between myself and the person I called/who called me. And if my phone isn't in the same room as I am, I'm not going to know it rang, so no more 2 am calls scaring the crap out of me.
So true. I have a fifteen year old daughter and this has been on my mind a lot lately, too. It has occurred to me that I have no idea who she is talking to. Back in the olden days, I rushed to the phone before my mother could answer it, or god forbid, my father, so no one would hear the boy voice on the line.
I was wondering when this column would show up here. This is textbook Brooks: broad generalizations about a mythical, superior past with no actual support cited, and willful ignorance of history, if not basic human nature. As if attractive people have only started keeping multiple partners and potential partners on back burners now that they can do it with texting.
Maybe courtship now resembles economics, but that's very different than it being actually determined by economics. Now that many women work and are self-supporting financially, that aspect of the game - that women need to find a man to support them - has changed. I, for one, think that's a good thing.
Longing for the nostalgic. It's the same ol', same ol'. News flash: every generation thinks the generation following them is inferior in many ways.
But we are still people. Acting and reacting.
I know my "freak dancing" was a bit over the top, but people knew damn well what they were doing when dancing the "twist." It might look wholesome now, but back then they were thinking the same thing I was while on the dance floor. We both danced the way we danced to push the envelope a little further than those that came before us. Same with the way we dressed, same with the way we talked.
I bet this author's parent's thought his generation had a weird way of going about relationships. And around we go...
"We both danced the way we danced to push the envelope a little further than those that came before us."
I don't know if you push the envelope any further than the way I dance. I really get in there and grind. HARD. Guys and girls. It doesn't matter. But I'm sure those darn kids will figure out a way...
Just kidding. I don't dance.
I'd urge everyone who hasn't read it yet to check out last week's New York magazine story on how technology has changed dating. I read it and definitely found myself either recognizing my own behavior, or the behavior of people I know, in the piece.
Here it is:
"A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers Sexual Habits and Anxieties"
Didn't somebody once say something like "every generation thinks that it invented teenage rebellion and oral sex?"
When I was in college I heard a wonderful sermon at a progressive, smart Catholic Church.
It explained an Old Testament concept of "moving further away from God" with each generation, in terms of the spoken Word (capital "Word" here). If early prophets like Abraham and Moses were given God's special teachings, time only moved each new generation further and further away from the originality of that Word, stretching thin a tenuous connection to God/purity/truth/the divine. There was nothing to be gained in time passing -- only loss. This is very Old Testament -- the New Testament of course looks to the future.
That sermon made a lightbulb go off for me, since I grew up in Florida surrounded by curmudgeonly (and religious) old people. I thought: "OH. I understand Republicans better now."
Does this really add up to any more than, "It was a lot more fun to be 20 years old and have all my energy and no responsibilities than it is to be [whatever older age DB is now], tiring out physically and now having a real job and real debts? (And this means Those Days Were Better)?"
If he actually feels this way, I'm feeling sorry for him. Being an adult may not be as much "fun" (and may tempt us to go Tsk Tsk at those "newly immoral" younger people) but actually the disadvantages of getting older are far outweighed by the advantages. Or they're supposed to be.
Every time someone talks about the fifties as some kind of ideal era, I say, "Maybe if you were a white male". I had friends who got pregnant who were kicked out of school, while the father was still able to attend, and bright female friends who were not able to attend college because that was for the boy in the family.
I was just replying elsewhere to someone who bemoaned the removal of God from the public schools, which similarly perplexes me, because there was no reference to God in the public schools I attended. No prayers--just the "under God" that was added to the pledge of allegiance. It didn't require God in the public schools to keep most of us in line--it was in the culture of the time, and it isn't now.
-it was in the culture of the time, and it isn't now.
Isn't that part of Brooks's point? These are his same assumptions: There used to be a notion of "in line." That has changed. The notion of "in line" was in part determined by the culture of the time. We now live in a different cultural time. I think Brooks is trying to figure out what has changed culturally in order to end up with the changing ideas about being "in line," in this case romantically. It seems that even people who don't share his emphasis on the technology angle still share those assumptions.
I read that column and it completely irked me; I honestly don't think he knows what he is talking about. It has this air of some didsembodied cultural anthropologist commenting on how strange and foreign these "dating people" are with their new-fangled techonology. Oh please. Go far back enough in many different cultures, and you will see that marriage was done solely for economic reasons (still are in some places). The expectations of "romance" is a fairly modern phenomenon actually.
I had this to say on a another website regarding that Brooks column:
It's true that cellphones and texting makes hooking up quite easy these days. However, this idea that the 'romance' and courtship has been taken out of relationships because of the cellphone is really over stated here. I must not be the only person who has saved text messages, yes saved them, from people I have dated, when that relationship became especially meaningful to me. People did the same thing with voicemails (still do) and e-mails (still do). Perhaps even Twitter.
There is this really great site, where a woman put up a photographic series of embroidered text messages, which she did herself, all documenting a year-long relationship. It was poignant and heartfelt and I could totally relate to this impulse to save text messages in the most emotional way possible. If it you care about that person a text like "good night" could still be special, even in a small way.
Here is the blurb about that project, by Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish: "Running through the photographs gives one a sense of the relationship's rise and fall in a abstract but deeply intimate way. The act of stitching the conversations changes easily discarded text messages into poetic keepsakes."
Below is that site with those embroidered text messages.
http://gingeranyhow.com/textmessages.html
I remember that site and it was beautiful, but mostly I just wanted to say that I have absolutely saved text messages from SOs before. My inbox used to overflow, actually, because I'd have like 25 saved at all times.
After browsing through the comment thread here, I must say that, while I agree that Brooks probably does not have his pulse on the modern dating scene, I find a lot of his comments and certainly his overall point to ring pretty true, if for much more complex reasons than he gives.
I am a 26-year-old, reluctantly single, Los Angeles resident who is frankly bewildered by much of what I find in the contemporary dating scene. This isn't nostalgia, since I've never experienced anything other than this, but I do find myself wishing things were a little simpler, a little more innocent.
I don't like Brooks' comparison of dating to economics (because that's always been the case), and I think his fixation on the technological aspects is putting the cart before the horse. Rather, what I see is that all this technology and instant everything and aggressive connectedness is causing people my age to be incapable of living or acting without irony. We're so fucking jaded and meta that we're not capable of just relating to each other or being in the moment together anymore. You can read this as a lack of signposts or guardrails, you can read it as a decline of morals, you can read it as women leaving their traditional roles (for better or worse), but what I can't seem to do is figure out a way around it.
Since I was a kid, all the older guys have told me: "If you want girls to like you, you can't just say you like them. You've gotta duck and weave, act like kind of a dick, make them think you don't care about them, then they can't resist you." I always thought that was insane, but during my horny teenage years I found it to be true a shocking amount of the time. I don't know if this is a related problem to what Brooks (and I, above) are talking about, and I don't know if maybe it's always been that way. All I know is that I would really like to meet a pretty girl, say to her: "I think you're really pretty, I'd like to spend some time getting to know you", and then take her somewhere and spend some time with her without her pulling out her Iphone to text or tweet or email or whatever, and without her thinking I'm a fucking weirdo for being direct.
Maybe that's an insane pipe dream. Maybe it never existed. Maybe there are incredible benefits to all this technology and all this freedom that make the trade worth it. But I don't know what they are. Label me nostalgic for an era I never lived in.
I don't know about all of this, I'm 32 years old, currently single, not always so, lifelong Angeleno. I will say that if you go on a date with anyone and they pull out there cell to tweet, text or whatever something is wrong with them, Angeleno or not.
I can only say this from my perspective: I know younger people than me that are in long term relationships like my sister who is 26, with her boyfriend for 5 years now, both Angelenos. I also know people like myself, and older too, that have been in the dating scene for a good portion of their thirties as well.
Perhaps you are hanging out with too many ironic too-cool-for-school people. Maybe you aren't. I'm not sure if this is about how tough it is to connect in L.A. (i don't know really, but people from other places keep telling me it is tough here, but I don't know anything else obviously), or maybe just discovering what it means to date in your 20s. Or both?
I wasn't nostalgic for an earlier time in my twenties or now in my early thirties, because while I know more choices usueally create more anxiety in most social instances, I feel my life is enriched by more liberty than it would be without it. I would rather figure things out for myself than having to appeal to some outside authority on dating; I feel the uncertainty is worth it, as an outcome of foregoing those straitjacketing norms regarding who I should date and in what acceptabe way I should date them.
Will Wilkinson had some really spot-on things to say about liberty and dating and more choices in post-modern America.
"...Rapid social change inevitably makes it harder to coordinate expectations. If it is a change worth having, then the pains of adjustment are worth it. Period. That doesn’t mean those pains are unimportant. Guys do suffer uncertainty about whether or not to open doors or pick up checks. It really can be frustrating for the sensitive guy to find out he’d be more generally attractive if he learned to be a bit more of a dick.
But annoyances and disappointments suffered in the process of realizing fundamental conditions of a decent society don’t call into question the desirability of those conditions. All this vexation is a very, very small price to pay for equality...
For men, it is a very, very small price to pay for the opportunity to share a life with a peer, a full partner, rather than with a woman limited by convention and straitened opportunity to a more circumscribed and subordinate role in life. Sexual equality has created the possibility of greater exactness and complementarity in matching women to men. That is, in my book, a huge gain to men. But equality does raise expectations for love and marriage. The prospect of finding a true partner, rather than someone to satisfactorily perform the generic role of husband or wife, leaves many of us single and searching for a good long time. But this isn’t about delaying adulthood, it’s about meeting higher standards for what marriage and family should be."
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/08/28/the-menaissance-and-its-dickscontents/
(granted, his comments are not so narrow as to focuse on techonology on dating, but I still think they apply)
OG,
I'm 25 and I remember there being a HUGE difference between my first year of school and my second, between when just the rich kids had cell phones and when everyone got them..
It used to be (and we're talking 2001/2002) that you'd get talking to some guy in class, and then you'd have some time to kill so you'd go and hang out, get coffee or whatever. The year after that, once everyone got out of class, they all had their phones out and were suddenly talking and texting someone else or they'd be going to the computer lab to check their Myspace/Facebook pages. In one way, I like that they exist so you can kind of background check someone, but also I think people write each other off more easily by judging a picture of you online as opposed to getting to know you in person.
Maybe it's a different culture out there? But when I hang out with my younger sister, she's texting other people the whole time and it drives me crazy because I feel like she (and seemingly everyone else) wants to be somewhere else. I can't imagine ever doing that on a date, but evidently it's normal.
I'm more old-school in a lot of ways, so I don't really do the singles/club scene so much. I don't want to compete with the aggressive see-and-be-seen types. I'd rather drink coffee all night and listen to music or something and take it slow but it seems harder and harder to do the let's-be-friends-and-see-where-this-goes and I wonder if I'm being unrealistic there.
It hasn't been all bad though. I've got a good crew (guys & girls) of people I hang out with, we have stuff in common and there's no drama, so it's good even if there is that feeling that everyone either gets married or leaves town because we're all barely getting by and it keeps getting harder.
So I hope you run into someone awesome out there. There ARE girls who are looking for just what you have. Of course, people say this to me the other way around, and it gets a bit hard to believe them.
I'm 24 (and female, on the East Coast, so a different vantage point than yours), and I have to make a couple of comments here.
"Rather, what I see is that all this technology and instant everything and aggressive connectedness is causing people my age to be incapable of living or acting without irony."
This kind of highlights the points that people were making above about people having different individual experiences. The circles that I run in are about as techie as they come (we're a bunch of famous-tech-school nerds - most of us work in software, and most of the rest work in science or engineering somehow). And yet, my experience, and particularly my dating experience and that of the people I've observed around me, is nothing like what you're describing. And you do get the more-ironic-than-thou types, but I've found them to be a relatively small minority.
My experience isn't more valid than your experience, but my point is that both of our experiences exist, and within the same generation, with the same technology available.
"All I know is that I would really like to meet a pretty girl, say to her: 'I think you're really pretty, I'd like to spend some time getting to know you', and then take her somewhere and spend some time with her without her pulling out her Iphone to text or tweet or email or whatever, and without her thinking I'm a fucking weirdo for being direct."
Okay...think of this from her perspective. As a woman, though I'm no longer dating (I'm engaged and we're monogamous), I'll give you what mine would have been when I was. I would have found a stranger telling me that I was pretty and wanting to take me somewhere, to be very creepy. I don't know you (and I'm assuming, here, that we weren't introduced by a trusted friend). How do I know that you're not a stalker? How do I know that you're not going to try to rape or otherwise sexually assault me as soon as we're alone? Why should I trust you in any way? You've made it clear that your whole basis for your interest is my attractiveness - why would I want to hang out ALONE with someone who is sexually attracted to me but doesn't (yet) have any regard for me as a person (or at least, has presented no evidence that he does)?
I think the simplest reply to this is that there is middle path between heart-on-your-sleeve "Gosh, I really like you" and outright dickishness.
I'm about your age and I used to lean a lot toward the former myself. I've found that the best way to counter this is just: relax. Being that earnest and upfront puts a lot of pressure on you and on the other person right off the bat, even if you mean it relatively innocently.
When you do meet someone, just let the conversation meander and take its natural course and "distancing irony" and all that other stuff won't even come up.
The concept of marriage as economic transaction is extremely old, and extremely accurate. The main reason why conservatives are forever uncomfortable with the sexual interactions of young folks is because we are moving persistently away from that, towards a freer concept of love (though, certainly not free love. at least not yet.)
Many of the comments reminded me of this great quote from Kant by way of Lukacs' "History and Class Consciousness":
"Sexual community", says Kant, "is the reciprocal use made by one person of the sexual organs and faculties of another . . . marriage ... is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for' the duration of their lives."
Ah, romance.
When I read this kind of column from Brooks (or I read someone else's criticism of it, which is much more likely) I can't help but think that the primary motive for it isn't some deep concern for society, but rather a deep concern for the writer's own unhappiness or discomfort with [modern social phenomenon]. Brooks wants to go back in time sixty years because he thinks he would've been better off. But he can't get back to '59, so instead he has to dress up this desire as 'I'm really worried that young people are missing out on something really special with all their texting and free love and social networking!'
The past was better and worse, and the future will be better and worse.
I cringe a little thinking that you might consider David Brooks a paragon of conservatism, but this passage of yours below rings true and reminds me of something:
"There is a lot in those oral histories that is, as they say, old and true. But there's a lot that's old and false. A constant refrain is the notion that the "moving pictures" were ruining young people, and the next generation wasn't worth anything. To be clear, that would be the same generation that gave us Martin Luther King, and effectively finished the Civil War."
Earlier this year, Peggy Noonan (once speechwriter for Reagan) compared Captain "Sully" (the hero pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson) to the Octomom, and lamented that she was more representative of today's generation, and Sully hailed from a less-benighted age. I linked to her column on my blog, and one of my commenters made a great point: When Sully was a young buck in the Air Force Academy, back in the early 1970's, many people were pretty certain his generation a bunch of druggies, etc.
I actually think texting, Facebook, etc. have probably done a lot for romance. People these days are a lot less tied to their localities than they were way back when. If it weren't for exchanging numbers or finding someone on Facebook, you might never see that interesting someone again and never find out if they were maybe right for you. And if you do exchange numbers, or become friends on Facebook, then most likely your first halting communications--whether via IM, private message, SMS, or even phone call--will go much further toward learning about that person and who they are before you even go on a first date than some of the courting strategies of old. You're more or less forced to spend a lot of time--which you can do more easily than ever before--just flirting, exploring each others' minds, interests, senses of humor, histories.
To be fair, I do speak from bias, as I just recently met someone I thought was interesting but never ever ran into on campus before or since. He found me on Facebook and our second date was yesterday. I currently know far more about him, and feel far more comfortable with him, than I ever have at the analogous point with any relationship prospect before in my life--precisely because our main means of communication so far has been through Facebook message.
I don't actually believe David Brooks knows either
... or ever knew for that matter. Seriously, taking dating advice from David Brooks is like taking public speaking advice from the Miss Carolina who's geography talk was making the rounds on YouTube a few years back.
"Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn't fit the post-feminist era."
*head to desk* Seriously? Now we're blaming the supposed downfall of the romantic relationship on feminism? How about the fact that my boyfriend and I met in our PhD programs and that we're BOTH happier that we're educated and thoughtful and ambitious. AND I love getting texts from him. According to David Brooks, I, and most of my fellow students, am in a horrible bastardization of a romantic relationship and will be miserably deprived of the simple "Happy Days" life of poodle skirts and casseroles I should have had. Why do conservatives even bother writing about these things? It's so overly general it ends up being false.
Whenever you back a position with the "back in my day" argument you lose. It's a rule we have here in our office. My Dad is a classic at doing this, he always leads with the apology, a 'hey, not to criticize, but back in my day there's no way parents would let kids do that...' I also have a brother-in-law who thinks all music prior to or after the 80's sucks. I am guilty myself at times, like when we place some awful tasting steamed veggie thing that is good for them on the kids plates and they look at me imploringly, as if by doing so I will relent and let them have Cheetos instead. I invoke the "when I was a kid I had to eat everything on my plate" argument and both win and lose the debate.
But I am also conscious of that pitfall and try to avoid it as much as possible. I know back in the day seemed better because we were young, and good looking and in shape, fuck, we were gods, we danced and laughed and cared not what the world thought of us and the universe was endless and ours for the taking. I am no longer any of those, well damn it, I am still good looking : D The universe is narrower and I know now not mine for the taking, but instead a labyrinth like obstacle course that rewards and punishes without prejudice or favoritism.
And so the past shines gloriously but I am also wiser now and make less mistakes than I did in my youth. I am able to weave my way through the labyrinth, even if I occasionally make a wrong turn and I try to collect its rewards and accept its punishments with a modicum of dignity and grace. Wiser now, I look to my children and I simultaneously seethe with jealousy and burst with joy as they unashamedly embrace their youth and I will not tarnish that for them by insisting their time is not legitimate whereas mine was. That they somehow lack the morals and grounding and respect and whatever that I allegedly had at their age but know truthfully I was no different. No their time is now and it is theirs alone, life will catch up with them soon enough, there is no point in shortening it for them. I use their joy to help me embrace the day, to fuel the carpe diem that I need to work, to deal with taxes and mortgages and war and death and all those things of life we wish we didn't need to know about.
So screw David Brooks and his 'I use to walk barefoot, uphill, both ways, in the snow, to school and by God it was good' nostalgia. If he cannot see the glories and vibrance of this age and its youth then he should just shutter the apartment and feed his cats, all the while grumbling at the television.
"If he cannot see the glories and vibrance of this age and its youth then he should just shutter the apartment and feed his cats, all the while grumbling at the television."
Exactly. Or, if he insists on writing, he should just admit that these regular whines of his are indeed his, and admit that they're not about some empirical analysis of the quality of eras. So much of social conservatism is all about middle-aged white guys grumbling and grousing, but they dress it up as something deeper.
Brooks might be right that texting is corrosive toward poetry, but he's wrong to think that today's youth are robots in cyberspace. They may be learning the lessons of love differently, and perhaps less poetically, but they aren't beyond enlightenment. Just ask the kids at a local high school out here in california, where a 16-year old girl "sexted" booby pictures to her boyfriend, who then (surprise) forwarded the photos to his friends, and so on until the entire school had seen them. Even her parents found out, who were obviously furious. The next day, the girl committed suicide.
Does Brooks think these kids are detached from that brutality? And would he assume this type of thing never happened in the past? Are we to believe a letter, a telegram, a phone call via switch operator, never resulted in the same? He speaks as if, in previous generations, the guardrails of society enabled true love to flourish without risk or injury to anyone's emotional or physical well-being, and that the judgments societies cast on people were somehow less brutal, and therefore people were less detached. Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" comes to my mind now:
Enough said.
Whenever I read Brooks(who I actually sometimes enjoy reading, in an ironically nostalgic sort of way)I am reminded of an old Gil Scott-Heron song called "B-Movie" in which he's rhapsodic about the American desire not to look forward towrard "tomorrow" but to, as he calls it, "face backward." That we have this desire to look backward, "...even if that's only as far as last week..." I think it was true when Gil Scott-Heron said it 20 some years ago, and I think its even more true today.
I think that you hear it in our public discourse all the time: "I want my country back" types of sentiments, the perverse obsession with Ronald Reagan, even the pop culture of "Mad Men" and the like suggest a society to me that is so insecure about its present that it can only find joy in the past.
Kind of a depressing state that we are in, if you asked me...
For the record, my spouse and I conducted nearly all of our courtship through e-mail (he went home to care for a dying parent soon after we met). He's a quiet sort, and I think that typing all those missives to each other helped to solidify our feelings and forced us to express our values and desires in a relationship in clear terms. Proximity and "going steady" probably would not have gotten us there. And we aren't the letter writing-type. So I would argue that these kinds of technology can actually ENABLE true partnerships. For us, it's been 10 years now.
Am I the only one who thinks Brooks is being tongue-in-cheek when he writes, "Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails"? That is, he really is maintaining that in the past there was more social structure around romantic interactions, but the "Happy Days" reference, as well as "once upon a time," are clearly ways of gently mocking his own nostalgia. Nor does he say that it would have been better to keep those social structures - his thesis is that there simply hasn't been much of a replacement at all. Here's where it's too much armchair sociology, to be sure - I won't defend him from that charge. But some of the comments above operate on the presumption that there will always be the same social structures and realities about sex and romance, and worrying about such things is just "back in my day" bloviation. But given that the "back in my day" gambit is often wrong and always misses something, why should we think that social and cultural changes will always preserve the same realities about sex and romance?? Isn't it obvious that they do not? I'm not talking about cell phones, I'm talking about women being at some times nothing more than male property, and at other times having received a vastly fuller measure of equality. It would be ridiculous to think of that as just epiphenomenal change on a stable reality - it's a real change with real consequences. Why couldn't a social and culture change happen which, even if it is on balance a good thing, has the consequence that certain valuable social structures get lost? My point is just that you can't rule that out by fiat, or just by pointing out that "back in my day" arguments are bad. It's a live possibility that certain social structures can disappear without something to replace them in securing certain kinds of goods.
It seemed to me there was an awful lot of selective memory in the article, as if men with "little black books" never "played the field."
If he wants to compare NY magazines sex blogs to something in the past, it should be Playboy's letters columns, not Happy Days. Now maybe you text to see who the best prospect for the night is, whereas 30 years ago you just hung out 'til closing time in singles bars.
You'll always be able to find a wholesome apple from yesterday to compare to today's depraved orange. But it doesn't make the comparison meaningful.