Recently, I was chatting with a friend whose teenage daughter was starting to get the attention of teenage boys; he was very nervous about the whole thing.
Understandably so. And though my daughters are still far removed from this situation, I can’t say that I’m excited for it to arrive either.
For generations now, it’s been the fine tradition for American fathers to feel confused and helpless when confronted by the dating games and rituals of their children. Where else did the “cleaning the shotgun on the front porch” cliche come from except from a position of utter powerlessness? Parents sit around and wonder:
“What does this mean? What does that mean? Is this thing my kid doing normal? Should I be concerned?”
These concerns might all be a tempest in a teapot if the parents were the only ones who didn’t understand how dating and relationships work today. But, it’s worse than that: the kids don’t know what’s going on either.
And this is self-evident. But if you’re a data wonk, you don’t have to believe me; there’s a mountain of evidence out there proving that the kids are just as lost as the adults. Studies show that most young men don’t have the confidence to approach a young woman, that men and women enter the dating market with mismatched expectations and fewer Americans say that marriage is something they should be focusing on anyway.
Parents should remember that beneath the veneer of teenage coldness and distance, usually lies a thick layer of insecurity. And they’re asking the same questions the adults are: ““What does this mean? What does that mean? Is this thing I’m doing normal? Should I be concerned?”
A Brief History of Dating
You can’t go back, nor should you try but sometimes it’s helpful to know where we came from. Prior to the 1900s, in most American social circles, a young man would call upon a young lady at her home, under the watchful eyes of her mother, aunts and/or sisters. Walks or other simple outings outside the young lady’s home, also attended by the family, could be allowed as the courtship progressed. This escalated until engagement and marriage. While the system was not flawless, it had the benefit of being predictable: everyone understood what was going on.
But after 19001, a combination of urbanization, the invention of the car, and the widespread popularity of new consumer attractions like the diner and the cinema meant that courting didn’t have to take place only in the formal family parlor, at the discretion and pace of your future mother-in-law. It could happen anywhere.
And it did!
This is the birth of “dating”. And from the very start, the meaning and structure of dating was difficult to pin down.
For example one generation might use dating to “play the field” and to measure their popularity – a way to see and be seen. Another generation, like the post WW2 teenagers saw it as a way to “go steady” and be more exclusive. And each generation thereafter has tweaked what dating is further.
Today, there is no uniform understanding of the term.2 After courting, no system has emerged to offer young people, and their parents, a clearly defined and well-understood path from interaction with the opposite sex, to dating or courting and into marriage and family formation. It’s a mess!
Dating Alone
The absence of any commonly understood way to interact with the opposite sex means that dating is like a “choose your own adventure” novel now. For the first time in all of recorded history, adults leave it to the youth to discover and define the meaning of their own romantic gestures, relationships and milestones – to decide what is appropriate with who and when and why what he or she did is good or bad, expresses interest or disinterest, and is either attractive or strange.
We adults abandoned our communal obligations to the youth because the world we grew up in and dated in no longer exists. This is true no matter how old you are. And it was the same for your parents and their parents before them. Nothing sure related to dating and courtship was given to us, so how can we give something sure to our kids?
As each generation’s dating and relationship preferences drift further away from what came before, the more adults will cope by helplessly uttering phrases like “They just do things differently today.” “Don’t interfere, you just gotta love ‘em.” And at peak impotence: “Don’t worry, everything will turn out fine.”
So What Can We Do?
A fundamental aspect of the problem, whether it’s about church, or boys thriving or now dating, has nothing to do with the teenagers themselves but with the parents. Parents who are alienated from other parents; and so, alone and fractured, they can’t offer the rising generation any coherent alternatives to the ever changing, emotionally distressing and increasingly difficult dating scene.
And as a result, the children struggle. We all know it takes a village to raise a child but what are we willing to do to create that village?
When it comes to dating in particular, what are we willing to do to make sure the village continues? The goal here is not to go back in time to some seemingly perfect arrangement of courtship and slap it onto today. But we do have an urgent need for new dating and courtship approaches, especially if you want to have grandchildren. Even more especially if you’d like your grandchildren to understand you and vice versa.
Personally, I’m agnostic on the details of what these new courtship and dating arrangements should look like. They will arise naturally out of the social dynamics, economic realities and cherished beliefs of each community as parents form them. But they will have to be formed! It’'s not enough to simply shield our children from all the bad things, or even to expose them to it carefully, “inoculating” them while under our roof. We must instead create a coherent set of good alternatives.
To be meaningful and for parents and youth both to buy into them, they will have to part of the family and community identity. They will have to bestow some sense of status, confidence and safety. Our enemy, i.e., what our kids deal with today, is not strong nor very compelling, it simply has the inertia.
But unfortunately for us parents, we’re the only ones who can push back.
Ideas summarized from a good book on the history of American dating: “From Front Porch to Back Seat" by Beth L. Bailey.
Some desperate souls have taken to writing contracts which attempt to create a binding agreement to a set of expectations before the very first date. They can hardly be blamed for this. It’s the wild west out there.
I have daughters as well, so this topic is very salient. I second the idea that new norms must stem from a sense of family and community identity. I also think they will be driven by the expectations of young women.
One framework I like is that it is the responsibility of young women to judge which men in society are worthy. Everything can be a mess, but grounded young women who take this responsibility seriously can hold things together.
Dating sucked, especially in college. I didn't know anyone and had messed up a previous relationship.
I went 4 years without dating, and didn't meet my wife until i went back home after college.
If I could spare my kids the stupidity of dating, I'd gladly go back to chaperoning them as they court.
It would save a lot of hassle and heartache.