The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder

"Yes. She starts in Victorian times with the popularity of lonely hearts ads, which were then imported by the United States, along with calling. And I guess dating, as a convention, was later exported to the UK from the US. Apps have really globalised the American concept of dating, except with a lot less effort put in than might have been done in the past. Hodgson is much more LGBTQ inclusive than most books of the genre, which I admire because I suspect it involved quite a bit of research. She integrates queer history in a seamless way; it’s not just globbed on as you sometimes get in other books. Mediated dating has always been, by necessity, pioneered by the queer community, from the time of lonely hearts listings. LGBTQ users were the biggest community on Match.com before it got mainstream acceptance and then of course Grindr preceded Tinder as a location-based app. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, as I mentioned, Hodgson starts with lonely hearts adverts, which were very popular right up until there was a murder in 1828, in which a man killed a 20-year-old woman he’d met through the ads. That put a stop to it for all but the most desperate. Among the upper classes, balls were the main way to meet people the traditional way, although you couldn’t just walk up and talk to somebody, you had to be formally introduced. She shares some fascinating tidbits on ‘fanology’, which is how you indicated interest with the position of your fan—maybe swiping comes from that! She writes about the conventions of calling cards and Valentines, and that for Victorians—I never knew this— the pearl was a symbol for the clitoris. People with a predilection for kink found one another through advice columns in magazines, sharing tips for bondage techniques under the guise of talking about corsetry. Hodgson follows dating trends all the way up to apps. While marriage rates are down, Hodgson is quite positive about the health of dating. Having experienced it more recently, I am less convinced, and I think the statistics bear this out. A study out of Stanford showed that 80% of singles surveyed had not been on a single date or hooked up in the previous year, which is quite astonishing. And that was before the pandemic! So you wonder what happens when we come out of Covid, having gotten so used to living our lives on screens. Despite my disappointment with the current landscape, I am cautiously optimistic. There’s a growing awareness of the downsides of smartphone usage more broadly, so I think it’s possible that Big Tech eventually goes the way of Big Tobacco, with smartphones becoming unsexy, like cigarettes. If we’ve learned anything from social distancing measures, it’s how much human beings need touch. In the same way that one can be hopeful that we reconsider social care, health care, the environment, and everything else the pandemic has caused us to question, my hope is that people will look inwards and say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to spend my one wild and precious life swiping.’ As it becomes safe to go out again, we can take a page from Ovid and gather the courage to strike up conversations IRL. Love, he wrote, “is no assignment for cowards.”"