Book Review- Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by Moira Weigel.
A history of dating.
Labor of Love by Moira Weigel
People have been dating forever, right? Wrong. In Labor of Love (LoL for short), Weigel thinks to ask questions that never occurred to me during my months of Tinder frustration. Where did all these odd traditions come from? How did we get to this point in dating? Why do we act this way?
Historical economic influences on dating behavior
In LoL, we investigate dating as a cultural phenomena at the mercy of market forces. This approach is an academic historical one, and uses primary sources to frame the arguments the author makes for dating as a socioeconomic process. The book reads closer to a history textbook, and thus falls short on applying its lessons to the modern day. I personally think this is fine- not every book needs to be a stirring call to action, sometimes it’s ok to just learn!
Weigel starts at the same place most of us do: feeling that dating is a cultural artifact of a bygone era. Instead of grinning and bearing it like the rest of us, she puts on her research hat. Oh how happy I am that she did. Whoever the anonymous soul was that jilted Moira enough to make her question the very cultural institution of dating, thank you!
Turns out, dating isn’t all that old. Starting in the 19th century, LoL tags and traces the origins of many behaviors we still exhibit today. It’s rare that I read historical analysis that feels cut and dry, but Weigel presents her points in an ordered and compelling story of the way a shifting economic landscape changed our society’s mating rituals.
Dating is labor, and labor shapes markets
Going hand in hand with the arguments that economic forces shape the way we meet, court, and pair off is Weigel’s frequent assertion that dating is labor. We spend time and effort to seek out prospects and make ourselves attractive to them. We spend as much time looking for partners as some people spend working a second job (which unsurprisingly makes it harder to find time to find love). LoL is sure to remind us often that dating and relationships are hard work, and that most of that work has been shunted onto women.
What’s more, Weigel considers the economic forces that the institution of dating directs. The industry of online dating is nearing four billion dollars in annual revenue, not to mention the adjacent markets of online dating consulting and virtual assistants.
People making money off of dating isn’t a new development. Weigel demonstrates through old newspaper articles and statistics that dating developed alongside a need to have “public privacy” as more and more single adults moved into cities during the industrial revolution. Business sprang up to meet this need- ice cream parlors, soda shoppes, movie theaters, bars and restaurants. With a solely online footprint of $4 billion, what must daters spend in person?
I think there’s interesting thought here that runs parallel to the move away from physical offices. How would a transition to remote dating effect industries that rely on a steady stream of awkward first dates in need of public privacy?
Prostitution, sex work, and shifting social norms
The most divisive part of LoL is Weigel’s treatment of sex work in comparison to dating. She highlights mountains of evidence detailing the transactional nature of dating throughout history. It’s here that she gets into the reflexivity of society’s reaction to dating:
So around 1900, when the police started to notice that young people were meeting up on city streets and going out together, they became concerned. Many early daters - the female ones, anyway - were arrested for it. In the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.
I was especially amused by her account of “Charity Girls” who would take gifts in exchange for sex, a practice called “treating”. Weigel relates multiple primary sources that raise moral panic over the collapse of the brothel industry and destitution of “working girls” at the hands of women who’ll do “it” for dinner. The Charity Girls themselves were reliant on the extra support as employment for women at the time justified pitiful salaries under the justification that a women’s income should only be an augmentation to a man’s, which was supposed to support a family. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time where public discourse abounded over whether it was moral for women to be having sex quid-pro-quo, rather than for cold hard cash.
Weigel often sets the values of middle and urban America at odds in this way, using newspaper opinion articles to show the culture war in action. In one section she describes the practice of “calling” as a competing courtship ritual from the suburbs in the 20th century. Suburban parents feared dating as a moral corruption because it took the power of choosing a spouse completely out of their hands. It’s interesting to think of different cultural dating traditions in competition, rather than existing in their own little vacuum.
The sections on social upheaval, in particular, captured me. There’s a trope in more radical political spaces that men with good politics still somehow end up being abusers (cognitive dissonance world champions). Weigel proposes an interesting mechanism whereby the desire to dissolve extant social structures leaves people without a script to follow. In the absence of a script, she says, we default to “traditional gender roles.” This is just a hypothesis she’s positing, but she points to decent evidence in the 500% Increase in domestic abuse calls in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the summer of ‘67, otherwise known as The Summer of Love. The neighborhood’s population swelled by a similar margin, so take the number with a grain of salt.
Ultimately, Weigel presents the history of dating as a history of societal atomization, a necessary adaptation to a rapidly changing world that mandated first urbanization, and later the necessity for every adult to earn an income.
Problems with LoL
Limited datasets and focus- mostly straight, middle class, white, and American. It would have been nice to get more perspective from different cultures and nations.
Anecdotal evidence- there wasn’t always great data being collected in the past, so we get a lot of conjecture formed from newspaper articles and other primary sources. I personally don’t mind this but the more empirically minded will.
Weigel’s claims around uneven distribution of relationship labor in favor of men pass an intuitive gut check, but lack contemporary evidence beyond some attacks on Ms. Magazine (30 years old now) and anecdote.
The level of citation is rather anemic, it would have been interesting to see the other scholarly works it exists in conversation with.
Recommendation: Read it!
I read Labor of Love concurrently with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Picketty and Debt: The First 5000 years by David Graeber. The first thing I notice that vigorously sets Labor of Love apart from those two books is that Weigel gets to her point so much faster. I’ve become used to authors who love the sound of their own voice where you get page after unnecessary page enforcing and revisiting points that have already been argued. Weigel is a breath of fresh air in this regard. She makes her argument with a concise and clean precision that keeps Labor of Love short, enjoyable, and to the point.
I wrote this review because I frequently find myself brining up interesting factoids I learned from LoL. It’s an enjoyable and informative read that doesn’t hit you over the head with its arguments, and is satisfied with doing what it says on the tin: reporting the history of dating.
Before reading LoL I hadn’t thought of dating in relation to what it gives society and what societies get out of it. For this piece alone, LoL is worth reading. The brilliant writing and in-depth historical analysis are cherries on top of the already very enticing sundae, just don’t eat it in front of a date 😜