The Mating Game

How Gender Still Shapes How We Date

Ellen Lamont

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520970724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite enormous changes in patterns of dating and courtship in twenty-first-century America, contemporary understandings of romance and intimacy remain firmly rooted in age-old assumptions of gender difference. These tenacious beliefs now vie with cultural messages of gender equality that stress independence, self-development, and egalitarian practices in public and private life.

Through interviews with heterosexual and LGBTQ individuals, Ellen Lamont's The Mating Game explores how people with diverse sexualities and gender identities date, form romantic relationships, and make decisions about future commitments as they negotiate uncertain terrain fraught with competing messages about gender, sexuality, and intimacy.

1

The Puzzling Persistence of Gendered Dating

Karley Sciortino writes a recurring opinion column for Vogue on sex, love, and relationships. Recently she asked, “Can I Be a Self-Sufficient, #Empowered Woman and Still Enjoy It When a Guy Picks Up the Check?” Sciortino’s conclusion? Yes, as she finds herself feeling “like a whore—in a good way,” and “confused” as to why “wanting to blow someone for my dinner is seen as ‘regressive.’ ” As she explains,

Look, I’m a feminist or whatever, but I still like it when a guy picks up the check on a date. . . . In terms of gender equality, we’ve come a long way in recent years. At 32, I often earn a similar income to the men I date, and I like being in relationships that feel equal. And yet, there’s also this old-school part of me that likes it when a guy takes the reins, in ways that extend beyond just his wallet—like, offering me his jacket when it’s cold, or helping me down the stairs when I’m wearing nonsensical shoes, or spanking me when I get too drunk. You know, lovingly misogynistic Don Draper shit.¹

Sciortino’s take on dating is not an outlier. But how do we make sense of her perspective?

A gender revolution is underway. Talk to middle-class young adults in the United States today, and you’ll see how firmly many embrace the new cultural messages of gender equality. Young women are, more than ever, investing in their educations and careers, while putting their love lives on the back burner. When they do partner, they expect to do so with someone supportive of their ambitious professional goals and they plan to continue to support themselves financially. Heterosexual men are encouraged to desire and respect these independent, go-getter women and adjust their relationship goals accordingly. But while many progressive young adults claim a feminist identity, they define it by opportunities in the public sphere and meanwhile fail to examine the inequalities stemming from their most intimate desires. As a result, in spite of significant progress, the gender revolution remains “uneven and stalled.”²

While young adults now have a clear set of professional goals and a vocabulary with which to understand them, the social scripts for dating and courtship have not undergone a similar transformation. Despite enormous changes in how people construct relationships in 21st-century America, contemporary understandings of heterosexual romance, desire, and intimacy remain firmly rooted in assumptions of gender difference.³ Dating norms and scripts continue to presume that men initiate sexual and romantic overtures, and women react. Men are still expected to ask for, plan, and pay for dates, initiate sex, confirm the exclusivity of a relationship, and propose marriage.⁴ These conventions feel both safe and right, and heterosexual men and women actively desire them.

But these seemingly benign rituals may lay a lasting foundation for inequality. Once a couple marries, the gender division becomes more entrenched, with women taking on more of the housework and childcare than men.⁵ This doesn’t only influence the home. Women’s caregiving responsibilities limit their availability for paid labor, leading to lower wages and greater challenges moving up in their careers in the long run.⁶ Women are also more likely to make career sacrifices for their families, such as stepping out of the workplace for extended periods of time or relocating in support of a partner’s career.⁷ Men, on the other hand, are less likely to take time out of the workplace when they become parents, even when they have the option to do so.⁸ Even women who out-earn their partners often end up doing more household labor to compensate for their success in the workplace so as not to threaten their partner’s status in the family.⁹

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people are not immune to this contradiction between an egalitarian ideal and established expectations as they navigate the tension between assimilation and innovation.¹⁰ True, they often seek to form relationships that take critical aim at heteronormativity, and express greater support for egalitarian practices than do heterosexuals.¹¹ Yet having recently won a hard-fought battle for inclusion in one of the most conservative social institutions—the married couple relationship—some find themselves affirming more than challenging prevailing understandings of how relationships should work.¹² As a result, many gay and lesbian individuals still enact domestic inequalities in their relationships.¹³ For everyone then, conventional norms compete with the stated desire for progressive relationship practices.

The Mating Game looks at how people with diverse gender identities and sexualities date, form relationships, and make decisions about commitments as they negotiate an uncertain romantic landscape. As college-educated residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, the young adults (ages 25–40) in this book have the economic resources and progressive social environment that should enable them to construct their lives in opposition to conventional practices. Yet surprisingly, for most of them, their intimate relationships are firmly shaped by entrenched inequalities. In the following chapters, I uncover how gender upheaval has only partly done its work; in fact, old gender tropes are firmly in place, shaping our personal lives, but raising little concern. Indeed, a tepid feminism has taken hold in which many people fail to interrogate how the personal is political. Yet others see the danger, sounding the alarm that reveling in gender difference is a recipe for gender inequality, and they advocate unconventional ways of building relationships. A showdown between traditionalism and egalitarianism is underway.

THE DEATH OF DATING?

Popular media narratives might have us believe that we are in an era of apocalyptic “anything goes” romance. In 2013 the New York Times ran an article proclaiming “the end of courtship.” According to journalist Alex Williams, traditional dating rituals are obsolete, replaced with a casual and individualized approach in which young adults put limited effort, and money, into their dating lives.¹⁴ Dating websites jumped on the bandwagon, declaring new rules in the “ ‘post-dating’ landscape” and encouraging women to look for romance in nontraditional ways and contexts.¹⁵ And supposedly, it’s no longer only men running the show; economically empowered women now set the terms of intimacy. They purportedly aren’t playing by “The Rules” as outlined by the 1995 bestselling self-help book that encouraged women to play hard to get in order to secure commitment from men.¹⁶ Reluctant to even use the word “date,” young adults now “talk” or “hook up.”¹⁷ As Rolling Stone argues, millennials and Gen Xers are taking the sexual revolution a step further than their baby boomer parents, avoiding early commitments altogether in favor of casual sex, eschewing monogamy to leave space for flexible relationship structures, and refusing limits on their sexual orientation.¹⁸ In what is portrayed as a welcome and freeing change from an overly rigid past,¹⁹ young adults are no longer confined to just one relationship pathway, but instead feel free to pick and choose what works for them. As Slate states, “good riddance” to courtship and the sexism and heteronormativity embedded in its rituals.²⁰ Yet this assessment certainly doesn’t reflect the experiences of the majority of the people with whom I spoke.

In spite of the supposed and much-trumpeted rise of hooking up, the majority of young college-educated adults remain committed to gendered dating and courtship practices. Once college ends, even those who avoided dating in favor of hooking up tend to follow conventional dating patterns as they begin the search for a committed, long-term partner.²¹ Those without college educations may be upending traditional courtship, but it’s the result of financial constraint, not empowerment. Struggling to attain the economic resources and stability that Americans understand to be the foundation of a good marriage, young adults who are low income or working class often feel shut out of the dating and marriage markets altogether.²² Even so, many of the steps they can enact are often taken in a rather traditional manner.²³ Thus, alongside these narratives of gender role reversal and relationship anarchy, outlets such as New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and Women’s Health puzzle over why young adults, especially young heterosexual women who are vocal in their commitment to gender equality, remain so attached to old-fashioned rituals. As one article asks, “You’re a Feminist . . . So Why Don’t You Date Like One?”²⁴

These competing messages about how intimacy should look leave young adults with a murky sense of what constitutes an ideal romantic relationship. Very few of the people with whom I spoke either expressed a desire for a fully traditional, male breadwinner, female homemaker type of relationship or articulated a radical, gender-neutral worldview. Instead, I heard story after story of how, while the division of paid and unpaid labor in partnerships should be equitable and not determined by gender, gender-traditional romantic behaviors should be preserved. This was especially the case among heterosexual women and men. Indeed, three-fourths of heterosexual women and men wanted or expected some semblance of a traditional courtship, and almost everyone wanted at least certain aspects of one. In contrast, 80 percent of LGBQ young adults wanted relationships that explicitly reject traditional dating conventions in favor of gender-neutral and egalitarian practices. This raises interesting questions about how, why, and among whom gender norms persist in romantic relationships.

DATING AS AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION

Current courtship conventions may put men in the proverbial driver’s seat, but historically women and their families had substantially more control over the process. Prior to the 1920s and the advent of the modern dating system, wooing often took place within the confines of women’s family homes.²⁵ Under the “calling” system, interested male suitors would visit women in their homes, where they would sit in the parlor and have a conversation. When a woman first came of “appropriate” age, dependent on her social status, her mother or guardian would invite eligible men to call on her. As she matured, a woman was able to invite her own suitors to the house. Those deemed unsuitable or undesirable were turned away at the door. Widely embraced, “calling” was created to emulate the wealthy counterparts of a newly formed and rising white middle class.²⁶

After the 1920s, the United States saw the ascendance of “the date.” Courting was no longer relegated to the private sphere, but instead took place in public. Originally a lower-class response to a lack of private space in which to receive suitors, dating was rapidly embraced by the middle class who saw it as exciting and freeing and who established it as an “American institution.”²⁷ And as middle-class white women increased their presence in the public sphere, entering college and professions, they also demanded broader access to public spaces. Yet ironically, as these women took their place in public life, they lost control over courtship. The date took women and men away from the prying eyes of family but also required transportation and money, as couples went out to dinner or a movie theater. In the process, control over courtship shifted to men, as they were the ones expected to ask for the date, plan the date, pick up the woman and drive, pay for the date, and then take her home again. As the relationship progressed, the man was supposed to ask her to go steady and, if things went well, to propose marriage. The woman could pick and choose among suitors, but she was never to initiate.²⁸

Based on an assumption of a breadwinning, dominant male and a dependent, passive female, these courtship norms dictated distinct behaviors for men and women. They were premised on the belief that men and women are innately different and that these differences are reflected in their skills, activities, desires, and the separate spheres they inhabit. Cultural narratives about gender associated men with power, agency, ambition, and the public sphere, where their breadwinning activities were used to support their wife and children in the home. Women, on the other hand, were represented as nurturing, reactive, and expre...