Goodbye, dating; hello, relationships

It's the day after Valentine's Day and a time for some reflection on the unofficial holiday devoted to romance. More than one recent article has indicated that romance, as Shakespeare, the Romantic poets and our parents or grandparents knew it, is dead. An article in Sunday's News & Observer included this comment: "He points to the work of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, who theorizes that we've moved from a marriage system to a relationship system." Whitehead, who has researched and written extensively on family issues, has exposed the elephant in the room.

Forty years ago, when I was pursuing the single life, sexual relationships were based on "dating." We followed a ritual that had been developed centuries before to replace the arranged marriages that began in ancient times. The suitor, meaning the male, humbly approached the female and asked for the pleasure of her company. The ritual was woven from preconceptions of etiquette, familial interests, class biases (the son of cotton-mill workers would be frighteningly reluctant to ask out the daughter of the town physician, for example), and protection of young girls, who were viewed as fragile and largely defenseless. Although this ritual changed over the centuries, it was essentially based in Victorian and pre-Victorian mores.

There seems to be little left of that grand ritual today. As this New York Times article notes, college-age students rarely "date" anymore. On campuses, such as UNC-Chapel Hill, where women outnumber men, women make themselves readily available without all of the anxiety of asking out and being asked out. We've gone from a dating culture to a hooking-up culture. Romance has been replaced by "relationships," which are often short-lived and serial.

When my younger daughter was in college 15 years ago, I was shocked to discover that the formal parlors where young men had waited nervously for their dates to meet them on the ground floor of women's dormitories had been eliminated entirely. The huge room with comfortable sofas, formal draperies and a grand piano was nothing more than an empty space where male and female students passed each other, barely noticing. That entire culture, and the expectations it involved, had been swept away into the ash heap of history. Formal dating had been replaced by group rendezvous or casual hook-ups. The ritual dance had been eliminated; the eventual goal, a sexual encounter, had been expedited.

Some would argue that the elimination of the pantomimes and the counterfeit obsequiousness is a good thing, but I'm not so sure. Despite all the disappointments and anxieties of the old system, it worked pretty well for a long time. There is a certain pitiable desperation described in the NY Times article of well-turned-out young women cruising bars looking for a hook-up that might, somehow, turn into something long-term.

Not that I wouldn't have enjoyed such a culture when I was 20 years old. When I was in college, men outnumbered women by about five-to-one until the university concluded that favoring male applicants over females, which it had done for generations, was illegal. Men were the desperate ones, angling for a date, sometimes resorting to bringing in a date from a "girls' school" or back home. But the culture of the times dictated that even in that desperation, men must follow the ritual — the uncertainty of anxiously and humbly beseeching the woman's favor and attending to her interests.

It was not a perfect system, and it was salted with anxiety for both men and women. But its formal rites provided protections that are missing in today's informalities.