A few decades have passed since I asked a girl for a date. How things have changed. We didn’t own cell phones, use dating apps, or send text messages. The height of our communication technology was a pay phone hung on the wall in the middle of the dorm hallway. We’d dial the pay phone at the women’s dorm, converse with the desired co-ed, and then pass the receiver to another guy without hanging up. Today, even dorms segregated by gender are foreign to most college students.
However, the dating practices of my college years drastically differed from earlier times. In the nineteenth century, courtship held higher stakes than the causal dating scene known in the last few decades. Marriage was the goal and divorce was anathema in that culture. Without the telephone, couples wrote love letters to communicate—even if they lived in the same town.
Recently, I researched the courtship etiquette of the 1800s. One practice surprised me. Etiquette did not permit a man to ask a woman if he could court her. Manners dictated he could hint at his desire to receive an invitation to court her, but her family held the power. They could invite him to call on her or not.
If he received an invitation, etiquette also “prescribed how soon one should make a call after being invited to do so, whether refreshments should be served, to what degree the call should be chaperoned, proper topics of conversation, and how the call should be ended.”1 The woman being courted also “tested” the young man, creating dramas of doubts, emotional crises, and other obstacles. The goal was to reassure the pair they possessed the devotion needed to sustain a marriage.
You may also be surprised to learn that the courtship practices during the colonial period differed from the 1800s. It seems culture changes over time. I wonder what the dating practices will be in 2050. If you’d like to read more about courtship etiquette in American history, check out the following web pages:
1“History of courtship in the United States.” Wikipedia. Last updated September 10, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_courtship_in_the_United_States
“5 courtship rituals from colonial America.” The Week. Last updated July 8, 2015. https://theweek.com/articles/462497/5-courtship-rituals-from-colonial-america
That was an interesting article. Maybe some of the older ways will return within the next 30 years.
A swing back would be interesting. Do you suppose those practices would be incorporated into a phone app? Imagine a woman allowing friends and/or family to rate the men interested in her before she accepts messages or a date. Should dating apps provide guidance on etiquette, conversation topics, etc.? Could phone tracking translate into a chaperone or is that too “Big Brother”? It seems any change in practices would have to involve smart phones unless people break their addiction.