this is behaviour that we may engage in at any time in our lives after puberty. There are love affairs even in old people’s homes. In my interviewing for this book, the people I talked to ranged in age from the early teens to the mid-fifties.
Courtship doesn’t follow a similar pattern right through the life cycle. Our courtship behaviour, and the kinds of relationship we seek to achieve through that behaviour, vary with age. In particular, as we get older our sexual negotiations gradually move out of the public into the private domain. Eventually, for many of those people for whom courtship continues, it becomes one of the most secret parts of their lives. To get a clearer picture of courtship, let’s look at how our behaviour changes through the life-cycle.
The first bits of courtship behaviour are enacted in a very public arena. Chloe at thirteen says, ‘These ten- and eleven-year-olds will see Eve Taylor on the bus, and they’ll say, “Ooh isn’t she gorgeous, isn’t she hot” – and they don’t really mean it, they’re just doing it to show their mates they’re cool. I’ve heard these little ten-year-old boys say to their friends, “I got off with Eve Taylor last night!” I’ll think, oh yeah I’m sure you did. She’s fifteen, I don’t think so … Even your friend when it comes to a boy – well, you might think she’s your friend, but she isn’t really – if they thought someone was going to ask me out, they’d sort of sabotage it a bit and spread different messages and rumours.’
In a sense, young people at the start of adolescence are playing at courtship. Most of the time, it’s rather like ITV’s ‘Blind Date’ – the form without the content of sexual behaviour. There’s talk about who you fancy – even if you don’t. Passions are communicated via go-betweens, though the message may get distorted in the telling. Love letters are written and sent: some express real feelings, some are fake and may have a group authorship, and any of them may get read out on the school bus.
The public nature of this courting can cause distress. Young people of this age tell cautionary tales about the risks of using go-betweens. As Chloe points out, friends entrusted with messages may have their own jealous or malicious agendas. And in the tabloid culture of the school cloakroom, everyone knows how far you went: girls get given marks out of ten and a fourteen-year-old who admits to still being a virgin may be consigned to the ‘V-group’. Rumours are spread and reputations destroyed: and a girl who’s been out with too many boys will be cornered by girl bullies in the toilets and called a slag or a dog.
But the public nature of this behaviour also has a protective role. Friends are used as a source of courage: a boy who goes to visit a girl he likes may take his best mate too – rather like working-class adults in the eighteenth century, who often went ‘a-wooing’ together.10 And the social group protects by establishing the norms, however cruel its effect on an individual young person. For instance, though there may be sexual harassment – and boys’ early attempts to show interest in girls are often crude and intrusive – there will also be social support for coping with the harassment. Girls are by no means the voiceless and innocent victims of boys’ playful or bullying expressions of sexual interest that they are sometimes made out to be. Kieran’s approaches to Lydia mixed romantic offerings like letters saying how much he fancied her with more harassing approaches: he offered her a pepperami from his lunch – ‘I cut it off just for you’ – to which she responded with a well-rehearsed gagging routine, to the delight of her friends.
As people reach their mid- and late teens and early twenties, they move into the kind of courtship territory with which most of the existing research is concerned. Courtship is now a more private affair but the resulting relationships are highly public, and may be recognized with public ritual. Pairing-off may lead to a one-night stand or life-long marriage and parenting or anything in between.
Recently there have been some fascinating changes in courtship customs for this life stage – and there’s a ‘back to the future’ theme to several of these developments. Some of our new customs – cohabitation, the rave, and sharing a bed without intercourse – revert to older ways of doing things. We’re returning to courtship patterns that predate that era, lasting roughly from Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 to the 1950s, which was the most sexually repressive period in recent English history – a period when the sanctions against pre-marital sex were particularly punitive, when the clitoris got forgotten, when the very essence of femininity was a denial of the woman’s sexuality.
Today’s custom of cohabitation, to be followed by marriage at the point at which the couple decide they want children, has analogies with the betrothal system that pre-dated the Victorian system of courtship. Betrothed couples lived together and were sexually intimate but the contract was not regarded as binding until they got married, with the proviso that the man would support the child if the woman got pregnant.11 Cohabitation, like betrothal, is a profoundly rational custom: both give the couple a trial period together before they take the irrevocable step of having children. Both institutions also allow women a lot of independence. The betrothed woman kept her name and single legal status, and today a cohabiting woman will probably have her own bank account and her own circle of friends – signs of separateness which she may give up on marriage.
The changing role of dancing in courtship also looks back to the way things used to be. Club culture restores to dancing its atavistic function. ‘When we go to clubs, it tends to be all the girls,’ Natalie told me, ‘and all we want to do is just dance and have a good time. We don’t talk to anyone else except the barman.’ For the past hundred years or so, dancing has had a narrowly sexual purpose as a form of regulated physical contact between men and women who otherwise were rarely permitted to touch. But today, as in the more distant past and in other cultures, dancing isn’t only a route to sexual pairing, it’s also an end in itself. It’s about a sense of oneness with the group which may or may not be enhanced by street drugs and is sometimes almost transcendent. ‘There was such an intense, communal feeling of happiness, it was overwhelming. Everyone facing each other, smiling, singing, hands in the air.’12
The young couple who get into bed together but don’t have intercourse are also reverting to an older pattern. In sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England and Wales, bundling or night-visiting was commonly practised by courting couples: this is what those folksongs in which men come tapping at women’s windows are all about. The man would come to his sweetheart’s window after her parents had gone to sleep and she might choose to let him in and invite him into her bed. Historian John Gillis writes, ‘We know from accounts of bundling practice that a certain degree of fondling and kissing was permitted’, but couples must have taken care for the woman not to get pregnant while they were still unsure about each other.13 This situation, where two people who are attracted to one another share a bed in privacy but try to avoid pregnancy, implies a particular kind of sexual activity – orgasmic but not penetrative – a pattern that tends to suit women well.
And it’s a distinct change in sexual etiquette today that a woman’s agreement to share a bed with a man doesn’t essentially mean she’s assenting to intercourse. This move makes sense: it’s safer, protecting from infection as well as pregnancy, and it often means more pleasure for the woman. But in the absence of clear guidelines, it’s also potentially problematic. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a generally recognized code: if she went back to his place late at night, and certainly if she got into bed with him, she was saying yes to penetration. Where some of us, but not all, no longer act by that code, everything depends on clear communication, and on that communication being listened to; in particular, men have to understand that for women intercourse has a different meaning to other sexual acts, because of its attendant risks. A number of cases in which men have been prosecuted for rape and subsequently acquitted – the cases of David Warren and Ben Emerson, for instance – have hinged on this issue: surely if she shared his bed, undressed, massaged
