the right to choose love. We don’t want the choice to be made for us—and that’s precisely what the unwanted woman does. She chooses the beloved, even if he’s not interested or changes his mind. It’s difficult to acknowledge the beloved’s position as one he can’t control, because he seems to have all the control. He is the one who shuns. If he refuses sex, his sin is even graver. Men are supposed to always want sex; as one male friend put it, “It’s like when the apple falls into your lap. You’re supposed to eat it.” Of course, if he accepts sex despite his lack of interest in a relationship, he’stoying with a vulnerable woman.
What complicates the situation even more is that we live in a historical moment with few reliable markers of relationship formation and commitment. We can insist, for instance, thatJaney’s ex is wrong for leading her on with all his attention—a romantic sin. You are not supposed to lead people on and then push them away. This unwritten rule consoles us. If your beloved is acting so sweet with you, he certainly doesn’t intend to deny you the next steps: a date, a relationship, enduring love. Yet so often he will—it’s a story I’ve heard again and again. We have a very hard time shaking off the sense that a certain kind of attention must lead to romance. We take an early expression of interest as an inviolable truth. Nothing our beloved says later, including “I don’t love you,”can have the same power.
Indignation about the person who leads a woman on is, to some extent, a vestige of earlier times, when mating rituals were more fixed. By the nineteenth century,arranged marriages in Western culture began to give way to the idea that marriage should bebased on mutual love and free will, independent of parental supervision. But relationship building still relied on commonly understood signs of intent. Men sent flattering letters and sought private visits with women who caught their interest.Women responded by granting them time, offering encouraging words, and welcoming eye contact. Later in the process,kissing and heavy petting were seen as profound expressions of love and self-revelation, signaling a strong mutual expectation of marriage.
The rise of the dating culture in the twentieth century allowed for sexual intimacy that held no such assurances. Committed relationships evolved through dating, but they didn’t have to. In postwar America, teenagers and young singles frequently “went steady,” pledging loyalty and devoting all their attention to one person. Yet these “play-marriages,” as cultural historian Beth L. Bailey calls them, were fickle. Breakups and new unions were so common that teenage girls at one Connecticut high school in the 1950s wore “obit bracelets,” a chain of disks engraved withthe initials of the boys they’d broken up with.
Yet steady dating still functioned in a set social order. It was the bottom of a hierarchy of types of commitment. Going steady might not pan out, but if you got “pinned” by a fraternity man, you had a higher-order promise in hand. Then came engagement and marriage. The protocol of what journalist and social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead calls the “national courtship system” was so widely accepted that the process of dating, falling in love, and finding a life partner in your twenties seemed natural and inevitable.As late as 1970, nearly 90 percent of women married by the age of twenty-nine.
Today, in the wake of the sexual revolution, the rise of birth control, and women’s increasing economic independence, we are left with a mating system characterized by mind-boggling variety. There is still romantic dating and marriage, but more traditionalrelationships coexist with no-strings-attached sex, living together with no formal commitment, online dating services that provide an unprecedented wealth of new prospects, social media romances that boom and bust without the couple ever meeting in
What complicates the situation even more is that we live in a historical moment with few reliable markers of relationship formation and commitment. We can insist, for instance, thatJaney’s ex is wrong for leading her on with all his attention—a romantic sin. You are not supposed to lead people on and then push them away. This unwritten rule consoles us. If your beloved is acting so sweet with you, he certainly doesn’t intend to deny you the next steps: a date, a relationship, enduring love. Yet so often he will—it’s a story I’ve heard again and again. We have a very hard time shaking off the sense that a certain kind of attention must lead to romance. We take an early expression of interest as an inviolable truth. Nothing our beloved says later, including “I don’t love you,”can have the same power.
Indignation about the person who leads a woman on is, to some extent, a vestige of earlier times, when mating rituals were more fixed. By the nineteenth century,arranged marriages in Western culture began to give way to the idea that marriage should bebased on mutual love and free will, independent of parental supervision. But relationship building still relied on commonly understood signs of intent. Men sent flattering letters and sought private visits with women who caught their interest.Women responded by granting them time, offering encouraging words, and welcoming eye contact. Later in the process,kissing and heavy petting were seen as profound expressions of love and self-revelation, signaling a strong mutual expectation of marriage.
The rise of the dating culture in the twentieth century allowed for sexual intimacy that held no such assurances. Committed relationships evolved through dating, but they didn’t have to. In postwar America, teenagers and young singles frequently “went steady,” pledging loyalty and devoting all their attention to one person. Yet these “play-marriages,” as cultural historian Beth L. Bailey calls them, were fickle. Breakups and new unions were so common that teenage girls at one Connecticut high school in the 1950s wore “obit bracelets,” a chain of disks engraved withthe initials of the boys they’d broken up with.
Yet steady dating still functioned in a set social order. It was the bottom of a hierarchy of types of commitment. Going steady might not pan out, but if you got “pinned” by a fraternity man, you had a higher-order promise in hand. Then came engagement and marriage. The protocol of what journalist and social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead calls the “national courtship system” was so widely accepted that the process of dating, falling in love, and finding a life partner in your twenties seemed natural and inevitable.As late as 1970, nearly 90 percent of women married by the age of twenty-nine.
Today, in the wake of the sexual revolution, the rise of birth control, and women’s increasing economic independence, we are left with a mating system characterized by mind-boggling variety. There is still romantic dating and marriage, but more traditionalrelationships coexist with no-strings-attached sex, living together with no formal commitment, online dating services that provide an unprecedented wealth of new prospects, social media romances that boom and bust without the couple ever meeting in
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