Even as we are distracted by the pandemic panic, some things continue unabated. Romance, for example. We may not be getting up close and personal during this time of self-isolation, but people are still writing about it. It is one of our universal preoccupations. I have noticed something new, though, about more recent dating pieces — they are all accompanied by a hum of existential anxiety. Is online dating too superficial? Is it OK to approach someone in a bar any more? Has gender politics ruined it all? There was always an element of angst to the dating game, but it really has been turned up to 11.
Zoe Strimpel, one of UnHerd’s writers, tracks this evolution in her fascinating new book, Seeking Love in Modern Britain. She aims to put the contemporary dating scene and all its tribulations in a historical context to try to better understand “the modern British single”.
Contemporary dating has, Strimpel acknowledges, “attracted extreme analysis”, when, in fact, Britain has a long history of mediated dating that stretches far back before the invention of smartphones. It’s typical of modern daters that they can’t see beyond the successes and failures that pepper their own personal sex-dramas, but from Lonely Hearts ads to personal agencies, dating services have enabled “growing numbers of people without the community or other social and personal bonds to meet a partner” since as long ago as the 17th century, with a rapid upsurge in the early 1970s.
Dating is changing once again, largely thanks to smartphones — though at present it has been turned upside down by the coronacrisis. As isolation and lockdown prevent most people from going on physical dates, the dates themselves are migrating online. My roommate, an avid user of Tinder, will have his first virtual date over Skype this week. A surge has also been reported in the number of people (overwhelmingly men) viewing webcam sites, as people swap dates and hookups for pornography.
So as more and more attention is paid to modern dating and its discontents, it is fascinating to read about its sociological antecendents.
The rise of mediated dating has occurred against a backdrop of increasing singledom. As Strimpel notes: “Single people categorised as neither married, divorced nor widowed, accounted for 21% of the population of England and Wales in 1970, and 30% of it in 2000.”
As our lives have increasingly revolved around work, we have become keener to outsource the search for romantic felicity. In the Eighties Strimpel’s “busy Thatcherite professional” was someone with little time to casually peruse the singles market in person. So instead, they outsourced matchmaking to a new generation of entrepreneurs and dating experts who promoted their services with an incongruent mix of booming sales rhetoric and romantic idealism.
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