traditional male role and how difficult they found it: they told me how few risks they took, how shy they were, how they waited till they were sure.
Younger men in particular played down the amount of planning they did. Geoff, twenty-six, said, ‘I think planning spoils it. I take it as it comes, play it by ear according to the situation. With some girls you genuinely just want to have a coffee and a chat and see what happens … .’ He mused on this, then added, ‘Subconsciously I probably do plan what’s the best way to go about it.’
Our attitudes to courtship are Janus-faced. Like Geoff, we look to both the past and the future. People talk first about how things should be – women should initiate, men should welcome women’s initiatives, we should all be as clear as day in our sexual dealings, no-one should scheme. It’s only later in the conversation that they reveal, like Geoff, what they actually do – which may well be less open and egalitarian than they’d at first implied. It’s all very encouraging for those of us who’d welcome a new kind of courtship. In our heads we’ve invented a whole new world: we’re just not living there yet, because we’re not quite ready to risk it. In courtship the stakes are so high. And when we’re approaching someone we’d love to get into bed with, we do what seems safest – and for now that so often means looking back to the past and taking our lines from the familiar script.
COURTSHIP CONSERVATIVES: From the Stone Age
But I also talked to people who felt that the pattern simply couldn’t be changed, however much they might want it to be changed. These courtship conservatives were always women. To explain why men should always do the asking, they referred back to the ultimate authority – their mothers – or invoked the concept of the ‘natural’ and pointed to the sexual behaviour of their children’s pet hamsters.
Jessica was one of these sexual conservatives:
‘I’ve wanted to ask men out, but I wouldn’t have done, ever, ever. I’ve always used other ways to invite them out, to do with one’s behaviour, as I think most women do. You don’t use words, you play a game.
‘I don’t think men like to be asked, I really don’t. I think they do like to have a woman come and make sexual passes at them, I think that’s lovely for them. I think what you get then is the one-night stand – where he says, “Ooh, that was great fun, wasn’t it? Bye, maybe see you next year …” . But I was never into doing that because I was never that into sex, I was into long-term relationships. I think they like to play a game of chase, where it looks like they’re doing the chasing – and it may well be you’re doing the chasing but no-one’s going to admit to that.
‘It’s probably based on what my mother said, “Don’t chase them, they hate it …”, so there’s all that kind of feminine lore from the past which I think there are seeds of truth in. Of course, women should be able to ask men out – but I just can’t see it happening, the game is so set.
‘My brothers have had streams of girls whom they laughed at. One of them actually booked a flight on the same aeroplane to Canada – he got on the plane and there she was, booked a seat next to him – and as far as he was concerned she was just a one-night fling – and it’s been a joke ever since. So the horror of that sort of thing – realizing it was not a tactic that worked, and it was far better to pine by the telephone for a few days and then get over it than to make a fool of oneself – “hurling yourself at a man” as my mother would say.’
Jessica refers back to the past, to female lore, to the way things have always been. It’s because this is how the game has always been that she feels it can’t be changed.
Yet this belief that ‘the game is so set’ is worth examining. Because in fact Jessica is wrong. There are crucial elements in our present courtship patterns that don’t go back as far as we imagine. Conventions about who initiates have changed radically within living memory.
In her study of courtship in the US from 1900 to 1950, From Front Porch to Back Seat, Beth Bailey describes how before the First World War, in the calling system that preceded the dating system, it was women who took the initiative at the start of romantic relationships.7 The behaviour required of the genders at the beginning of a relationship was then quite different. Even though women had little power in the public world, they did have complete responsibility for making arrangements at the start of courtship. At first the young girl’s mother invited men to call. Later the young woman herself could invite round any unmarried man to whom she had been properly introduced. These initial encounters took place in a social milieu controlled by women. It all happened in the parlour, in the women’s sphere, and even the patterns of consumption were quintessentially feminine – little cakes and hot chocolate. This is the world of T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock – written in 1915 – whose life was measured out in coffee spoons in rooms full of the rustle of women’s skirts.
And in this world, male initiative at the start of sexual relationships was very differently viewed. In 1909 a worried young man wrote to an agony aunt of the time, the US Ladies Home Journal adviser, Mrs Kingsland. He asked, ‘May I call upon a young woman whom I greatly admire, although she had not given me the permission? Would she be flattered at my eagerness, even to the setting aside of conventions, or would she think me impertinent?’ A man making the first move? Absolutely not, said Mrs Kingsland: ‘I think that you would risk her just displeasure and frustrate your object of finding favour with her.’8
But after the First World War, courtship changed. It moved out from the private female world into the public male-controlled sphere. Under the dating system, the couple went out – to a meal, to a dance, to the pictures – and the man took all the initiatives: he asked her out, planned the evening, bought the tickets, booked the table, paid the bill, opened the car door. And once the required behaviour had changed, people rapidly came to believe that the new convention was the way it had always been. In our thinking about sex, we have very short memories and no sense of history. A mere fifty years later, advice books were giving precisely opposite advice to that offered by Mrs Kingsland – and referring back to the palaeolithic as their authority. ‘Girls who try to usurp the right of boys to choose their own dates’ will ‘ruin a good dating career. Fair or not, it is the way of life. From the Stone Age, when men chased and captured their women, comes the yen of a boy to do the pursuing.’9
COURTSHIP LIFE-CYCLES: Looking for love
For people today, the very word ‘courtship’ can be alienating. It seems to come from another era. Courtship is for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, eyeing each other lecherously while doing the most decorous of dances. Yet surprisingly we have no other term for that sequence of behaviour through which we indicate our sexual interest in a more or less stereotyped way.
‘Courtship’ also implies quite a narrow range of relationships as the goal of the behaviour. As in Pride and Prejudice, we take the purpose of courtship to be the formation of the pair-bonds that lead to marriage. In this analysis, it’s the marriage that defines it as courtship in retrospect. This is the kind of courtship that’s examined in much US close relationships research. But in this book I’ll include every type of relationship – casual sex, adultery, passionate and troubled affairs lasting six and a half weeks – all the many and various kinds of sexual activity or connection which are preceded by some kind of courtship process, however truncated, elliptical or secret it may be.
Courtship isn’t only for the young, either. It’s obviously young people who are most involved in this process, and the US research on the subject is all about
