When I read biographies about people who came of age in the first half of the 19th century, I notice something very different about their courtship.

Obviously it was more formal, there was more family involvement, and their date activities were a bit different. But that's not the main difference.

They didn't date exclusively! A young man might have three frequent dating partners, then one day propose marriage to one of them, who herself had three other dating partners.

Apparently this was a real thing. In the 1950s, there was a transition from "competitive dating", where it was expected that everyone would be dating multiple people, to "going steady" in which couples would quickly become exclusive.

This was frowned on at the time because it was thought to lead to greater sexual intimacy. But maybe the causality works the other way around. As young people became more sexually intimate with each other, there became a need for exclusivity.

As a young man thinking of marriage, it seems to me that competitive dating lends itself to making better choices. Competitive dating is also better for the woman who dates a man for 5 years and never gets proposed to.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=going+steady%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=girlfriend&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_courtship_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_steady

I like this question, even if I don't know how to answer it.

Even if it was revolutionary, helping to take away the already tenuous control families and the wider community had over courtship, carving out even more autonomy for young people, making it easier to convince women to consent to petting, steady dating—playing out at a younger age some limited form of marriage—does seem quaint. There is something sweet about the Americanized courtship process in Japan, which takes place in public, with low stakes, on group dates, or chaperoned events, up until a kokuhaku, or confession of love is given by the man, after which, if there is agreement on the part of the woman, private courtship and romantic exclusivity begin, with the expectation of marriage (or, these days, minimally, sex and cohabitation).

But so it was a negative if you consider that it was a step toward the chaotic system that replaced it, and if you consider it as an episode in a sexual revolution that started around the beginning of the last century, heated up in the '60s and '70s, and delivered us eventually, with the help of the programming industries, the present state of things.

I'm not sure I would stand by all of those claims (even if it was one long revolution to reach this point, there are defensible episodes, and maybe more blame can be put on simultaneous revolutions to destroy family, community, and religion), but I've written what came to mind.

There seems to be a lot of ways to arrange courtship and marriage, many of which work, and any of which can fail. Steady girlfriends does introduce this weird limbo state of half-marriage that doesn't have obvious teleology, and is suspect for that reason.

Having got married successfully and having some unsuccessful long term relationships, what seems optimal to me these days is this:

When single, lots of socializing with opposite sex in contexts that aren't just hookup culture. When potential pairings are found, some more intimate but still casual dates where chemistry and shared vision can be established. Once its obvious you want to spend lots of time in a sexual relationship, you switch to more formal exclusive courting where you are for a limited amount of time trying out a more full relationship to see if you can make it work and really get to know each other. At 6 months of courting or so, you make the decision dispassionately: either get married or break up. It's better to have some parental and community involvement in selective breeding, and it's better to avoid sex with people you aren't going to marry, especially for girls, but those sorts of things depend more on background cultural situation than personal virtue. The younger you can pull this off the better, especially for girls, but doing it younger requires more parental and community guidance and support.

This strikes me as a pattern that is quite accessible to the modern world, doesn't require too much regime change to pull off, and basically works. The question of whether going steady was itself part of the sexual revolution is interesting, but I think for practical purposes you just want to have a clear praxis for how to get married successfully. We could go into infinite detail about any part of this. Maybe I should write a book.

>>1606
> We could go into infinite detail about any part of this. Maybe I should write a book.

A great genre for someone (not me) to write in would be "Jane Austen for the 21st century," by which I mean richly detailed explorations of what does and doesn't work in a way people can relate to.

Somewhat related, someone wrote a nonfiction work extracting such lessons from Jane Austen:
https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Austen-Guide-Happily-After/dp/1596987847

>>1606
>Maybe I should write a book.

A book is a lot. But if you wrote 10000 words of blog and essay on the subject, I'd read it. I'm working on getting married, and this is good stuff, helps crystallize a bunch of loose thoughts I've had.

>>1616
I'll do an extended sequence of effortposts on it some time then.

Yeah, I'd like to figure this out as well. A lot of this seems to rely on social fabric that takes about five years to build before you actually need to go looking for a spouse. Ideally you inherit such a fabric from a healthy community, but those are scarce on the ground these days. The people I see happily married, myself included, seem to owe more to luck than to any particularly clever and repeatable strategy.

I also think it's worth noting how prudish and sterile supposedly traditional communities (religious or ethnic) are now, and how much of an aberration that was from the past. They seem to have made a bargain that it's better for a hundred to die as old maids/bachelors than for a single teenage pregnancy to happen, and have therefore pushed serious relationships into college, and marriage beyond college graduation if it happened at all.

Meanwhile the most recent American culture with above-replacement fertility had a norm of dating around/playing the field in high school, followed by the scandalous "going steady" around age 16. This could not happen without the acquiescence, and indeed active participation, of parents in building a set of customs where romantically-charged interactions between the sexes were to happen, in a controlled environment, in the mid-teenage years. It's worth noting how much an aberration modern purity culture is from this.

>>1905
That modern sexual culture has decayed into historically extreme and suicidal prudishness is important and not widely understood. I know exactly what you mean. The sexual revolution is less that everyone is actually having meaningless sex, but more that meaningful sex is so wrapped in preconditions and hyper-regulation that it might as well be taboo. The taboo on parents and "bourgeois cultural norms" having any positive say in the sexual development of their children and therefore any authority over sex in general is another huge source of dysfunction. Likewise the taboo on any expectation of sex within marriage. The counter-reaction of "trad" prudishness reminds me of Christian fundamentalism in the sense of being a comically extreme counter-reaction that's as bad as the thing it mirrors and inverts. Others have noted that purity culture doesn't seem to have any positive vision of how to do sexiness, just a blind suspicion of all sexual feeling, in or outside of marriage.

As for your claim that marriage requires 5 years of social fabric, I don't buy it. For myself, none of the people involved in me meeting my wife were known to me a year or two before, and on her side very few outside of her family. The main thing is to have your heart set right and have enough charisma to be able to generate sexual chemistry with another person. Very few have this these days, and I suspect this "biological" problem to be worse than most of the social problems.

>>1907
Yeah, I focused my criticism on the right since they allegedly at least acknowledge the correct orientation towards family, but entirely agree with your critiques of the mainstream. No small irony that we're living in a world of "What if we threw a sexual revolution and nobody came?"

As for your courtship, yes, I agree that it can be done, but (if I recall rightly) you also had just come into an unexpected period of leisure, and approached it with a strong and counterculturally-directed sense of purpose. This is all very good and I would advise any single friend of mine to do the same, but we cannot expect countercultural energy of an entire civilization of young men. We need a solution that works well for our children as well as for average citizens. For that, positive and functional social defaults are necessary.

I recently came across this passage from "My Catholic Faith" which was a popular primer for teenagers on the Catholic faith in the early 1960s. The sentiments here would be something of a reaction against the cultural-wide trend of "going steady":

--------------

Courtship is a time of preparation for marriage, the time of choosing a life partner; it requires prudence and wisdom. It is only when persons have reached the proper age and are so situated as to be able to bear the responsibilities of the married state, that courtship should engage their attention. Then the man and women may frequent each other’s company, in order to discover whether they would make suitable companions for life.

It is proper for a man to pay his attentions to several women at the same time, and for a women to receive such attentions from several men at the same time.
This is precisely because courtship is the time of choosing, to discover who will make the most suitable partner for life.

Adolescents of high school age cannot expect to years. By “going steady" they
place themselves in a proximate occasion of sin. No Catholic boy or girl is so virtuous as to be free from any danger of sin. Parents who consent their children to go out unchaperoned, as to an open-air theatre and other such places, and those who go, are certainly guilty before God. Courtship or “dating should be carried on without secrecy; young women should beware of men who keep their “love
affairs” a secret.

The length of the period of courtship should be between six months and two years, no longer. Marriage is a serious and sacred responsibility, and should not be rushed into under the influence of a physical attraction or passion. But courtship, when the prospective partners are so often each other’s company, should not be greatly prolonged, to avoid possible serious consequences.

Engagement, or betrothal, is a mutual promise of marriage, implying marriage at
an early date. An engagement should not last longer than a few months. As soon as the promise to marry is made, a definite date for the wedding should be set.

...During both the courtship and the engagement, the couple should respect each
and avoid undue familiarities; this is a pledge of a chaste and happy married life.

------------------------------------

This actually makes a lot of sense. Once a couple becomes physically intimate, they become very intensely bonded to each other. It makes sense to do an thorough search and interrogate rationally whether someone is a good long-term match, before initiating the intense bonding process.

Apparently, dating at BYU as late as the early 2000s still worked this way. Students would be expected to go on dates with dozens of candidates of the opposite sex over the first few years. Women would be expected to say yes to at least one date, even if they weren't all that interested. Accepting a date didn't mean you were romantically interested.

Reflecting back on my own high school and college years in the early oughts, I realize now that "hanging out" with a member of the opposite sex was actually old-school dating. I did few "dates" but lots of "hanging out." And then "going out" or being "girlfriend/boyfriend" was basically a temporary or indefinite marriage. Temporary marriages were popular due to decadent pop culture messaging and because everyone expected to be in a different location (college, grad school, job) in another year or two so making long-term commitments seemed irresponsible.

>>2113
This all seems very wise, and while I can even imagine being persuaded by such arguments when I was a teenager, I can't imagine taking them from some ponderous book that talked about God. Books of wisdom, and theology, seem to be something for mature men, not youths. Youths want to know what's cool, what seems right, etc. The task with all this seems to be arranging the right social environment and more subtle lifestyle propaganda more than delivering the right straight-out written wisdom. Something worth reflecting on there.

>>2113
I increasingly find notions of rational evaluation of compatibility leading to consent amusing, since there are underlying physiological mechanisms like prolonged eye contact that can spur the kind of mirror neuron self-other dissolution which operationalize "becoming one flesh", and which function almost independently of the choice of counterparts.

If one, as Paul says, cannot remain unmarried lest they burn with passion, survey for family average IQ and other desirable traits, test for histological and ethno-genetic impedance (to avoid fertility issues), and then use EMDR to mutually psych each other into intellectually legible compatibility. Various so called disqualifying differences of taste, sensibilities, and other personal characteristics are not actually that important, and do not significantly affect offspring life outcomes.

(One occasionally reads of lords of the past playing matchmaker for their retinue and subjects, and I can only imagine that they had similarly dismissive attitudes towards the necessity of enthusiastic a priori consent between the parties so joined.)