Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by Moira Weigel (+ Book Club Discussion)

I've been thinking a lot about modern dating culture lately. For some reason within my circles, the concept of friends and lovers has been on everyones' minds. I have a few theories about this, supported by psychological research, extensive crowd-sourced opinions via my Instagram stories, and my own murky philosophies on the subject. (Plus, book marketing via tropes is more popular than ever, and I even wrote the dynamic into my own book, Mountain Sounds. So it's relevant, y'all.)

Recently, my friends asked me "Do you think guys and girls can be friends?" (My spoiler: yes.) For this discussion, I'm only chatting hetero friendships, but bear with me.

My gut instinct is that it shouldn't matter, that you hang out with people for the pleasure of their company and not the eventual thought that you might persuade them otherwise. Still, experience has taught me this can get messy because not everybody thinks about it the same way I do. Still, the prevalence of the other perspective forced me to go back to a read I once adored to see if it held any gems of insight.

I first read Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by Moira Weigel a few years ago; it was released in 2016. Since then, a lot has shifted, although there are still plenty of relevant gems and insights to pull from. In some ways, the book anticipated factors like the saturation of dating apps and how the gig economy's complicated our mindset re: time scarcity. I rarely reread nonfiction, but went back to this one just a month or two ago—and so much felt newly applicable this time around in my mid-20s.

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Labor of Love: The Invention of Modern Dating by Moira Weigel

A brilliant and surprising investigation into why we date the way we do

It seems as though every week there’s a new app available on your smartphone promising dates aplenty—just swipe right. A mate, on the other hand, is becoming harder and harder to find. The age-old quest for true love requires more effort than ever before. Let’s face it: Dating is work.

Which, as it happens, is exactly where it began, in the nineteenth century—as prostitution. In
Labor of Love, Moira Weigel dives into the secret history of dating while holding up a mirror to the contemporary dating landscape, revealing why we date the way we do and explaining why it feels so much like work. This isn’t a guide to “getting the guy”; there are no ridiculous “rules” to follow in Labor of Love. This is a brilliant, fresh, and utterly original approach to help us understand how dating was invented and, hopefully, to lead us closer to the happy ending that it promises.

My Review

I adore a good social history. Truthfully, I should have majored in psychology instead of history, but loved the history of science as a sub-topic precisely because of the types of microhistories I got to read during class.

As a philosophical gal, I'm always curious about human behavior. I love anything that relates to how we move. I recently loved Drunk by Edward Slingerland because I wanted to know why we drifted to activities centered around alcohol.

Dating-wise: I read Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (good but dry in sections, so I like this one better), and How to Not Die Alone by Logan Ury. (I should have guessed from the title, but it was more self-help-y rather than scientific, which was not my preference. I do not care for the former. I personally don't date, but like to read about the "why"s of it.)

Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating is engaging and voicey the whole way through. It largely focuses on how economic factors affected women's dating experiences—such as teen labor laws giving spending money who then started going on dates more actively in restaurants, parks, etc,. (The decline of third spaces is also a modern factor affecting our dating.)

It talks about yuppie culture and whether buying someone dinner then expecting them to sleep with you is prostitution (and how they determined the difference between gifting and exchanging cash into law.) How contract workers have a harder time dating because of fixed hours (which reminded me of one of my favorite books of 2022, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman), how Playboy and other consumer models changed how men viewed sex, why the media fear-mongers about hooking up, the shift in dating preferences when women's personalities stopped being viewed as mental disorders (lol), class mobility worries, and more.

It opened my mind in a healthy way too. For example, girls often joke about how boring dating app profiles are. Respectfully, answers like pineapple on pizza?, The Office, and "best way to get to know me: go out on a date" seem like wasted prompts that tell us nothing about the men in question. Personally, I've never been on a Hinge date or even actually swiped to match, probably for that exact reason; it feels stiff and forced.

But actually, Scott Kominers, an economist at Harvard Business School, discovered that "this push-pull effect is actually due to competing tendencies toward 'pooling equilibrium' and 'skewing,' or 'polarization.'"

“When there are high costs perceived with providing a certain response that is seen as unusual, people will tend towards giving answers that they see other users give—answers that are average.”

It makes sense when I think more deeply about it. A lot of outgoing people I'm friends with will swipe right on lots of people and let the date doing the talking; more introverted types like moi are drained by the thought.

That thought alone sent me down a rabbit hole about who's good at apps and what that might say about them, and whether stumbling across each other in reality involves the same amount of luck and confusion with the benefit of knowing you could at least craft a friendship out of the end result.

Similarly, we're in a wellness era that prizes optimization and habits. (See: Atomic Habits by James Clear.) I will devour literally any book that talks about the psychology or history of how we view time, as someone obsessed with the idea of needing it to slow down.

“[We] might be the first elite in human history to boast, as a mark of their status, that they could not afford a moment's leisure...Marketers soon discovered that you could sell yuppies anything if you promised it would make them better...Spending long days at the office, and one or two hours a day [in the gym], many yuppies found that they had little of themselves left over to invest in romance.”

Literally: this book covers so much, which would normally make a narrative like this feel perhaps disconnected to me. Instead, it was a full-fledged look at dating over time that felt cohesive, entertaining, and both timeless and timely. Very underlinable, and I'm dying for someone else to read it so we can chat.

(Caveat being that this is a macro-level analysis, all people and relationships are different, etc,. etc,.)

Back to Reality—and My Whole Friendship/Dating Book Club Spiel

Credit: Sex and the City.

Sparked by this book and by many other anecdotes, I've been pulling the Carrie Bradshaw vibe lately and really deeply thinking about how to best interact with others. Of course, all of these thoughts are just through the lens of what I've observed and the way my friends have spoken about these scenarios lately:

Many might tell you that people hook up or "talk" more casually now (although studies in Labor of Love actually indicate that premarital sexual relations were just as high if not higher in previous generations), but dating app culture does—in my opinion—incentivize us to think about meeting others through the lens of what they can do for us as opposed to who they are holistically. To our detriment, I think we sometimes label others before we even know them, restricting whatever relationship you might have into a specific lane from the get-go. Which isn't necessarily good or bad, but just somehow sands down the possibility of organically shifting your label once you get to know someone and see if they fit with who you are.

Friends I interviewed said when they meet someone specifically within an avenue meant for dating—like an app—they're less likely to befriend them after a failed date because they don't fulfill their intended purpose. Multiple people agreed; they might really click with someone as a person, but if they don't end up dating, they'd likely never reach out to transform that synergy into a friendship. They'd just lose the chance to know them entirely. People are moving more often. People are filling their time in other ways, and with new romantic prospects. Why bother?

Factors like in-person work, tighter social networks (thanks to Internet), and lesser class mobility play a role in our dating behaviors too; previous generations had to recategorize others if it didn't work out, or at least reach an acceptable middle ground of interaction because they had a smaller pool from which to draw. More proximity likely helped make shuffling more possible. It's definitely uncomfortable and shitty and awful to reabsorb someone into your life as a friend when the initial intention may have been different, but I still think it's worth doing.

I guess I just find it weird that so often, we (or society) decides that we can either date someone within our preferred demographic or not engage with them at all; there's not as much of a middle ground of simply liking someone as a person, at least in regards to one-on-one hangouts. Which is disappointing because we're leaving such good relationships and connections on the table! Perhaps it's the social circle I'm in being skittish about blurred lines, but the rules feel entirely too strict for the way people connect and get to know each other.

If you met someone randomly without the prompt of a date starting things out, they might become a friend or a lover, or occupy some confusing (perhaps pleasant) gray area that lets you get to know each other simply based on enjoying each others' company—whatever that means to you.

Overall, I just think it's a major bummer that we don't give people more flexibility to take up space in our lives. If you're interested in someone as a person, shouldn't that transcend the awkwardness? Shouldn't you just want to, idk, spend time together? I'm not saying it's impossible or never happens. I'm just saying I think we're kind of screwing ourselves over by forcing the binary choice so quickly in the modern era, and it's sad to me that we're not keeping others in our lives that we like or love even if the context shifts.

• Is the answer that you can only be friends with people you're not attracted to—a true neutral?
• Do you lose a friendship as soon as attraction enters the picture on either side?
• Or that single people can't be friends with the demographic they're into, but married people can?

I absolutely believe that two potential or past romantic interests can be friends, and in my social circle, it's a less common perspective which continually strikes me as odd. I'd rather keep people around as friends than narrow my chance to keep them in my life, because we're erasing the midpoint of being able to redefine others based on how time goes (which is partly why I don't date at all.) If you cross into romance, it's not easy to go back, sure, but we're pushing that decision way, way earlier before we even know who the other person really is (IMO.) Somehow, that feels significant.

Some scattered thoughts that inform my book club chat:

• I do think (and have interviews to back it up) that people find it much, much weirder and more suspicious to remain friends with an ex nowadays. There are plenty of people who have had new partners request they block or unfollow exes or people they're attracted to. So a lot of my "can [romantic interests] be friends?" musings are based on the assumption that people no longer care to even try to remain friends with exes.
• I think some of this also has to do with therapy-speak and general modern selfishness, how individualism has pushed us to think about others more often through the lens of "but what can they do for me?" and that bleeds into how we date and befriend others. Are you spending time with someone because you like them as an individual or because that person fills a role/need/void for you? (And yes, sometimes the answer is both. But I think we're prioritizing the latter and losing sight of the former sometimes.)
• I do think that the gray area of friendships/interests falls victim to the observer effect, which is a whole other discussion. In physics, the very act of observing a particle changes it. In a friendship dynamic, I see this parallel as being: as soon as one party views the other in a different light, you've already changed the nature of the relationship. It's been fascinating to hear others' perceptions of the various rules that come into play, because people have strong opinions.
• On that note, it really does depend on someone's intention. If you go into the whole "can guys and girls be friends?" scenario of friendship with the goal of eventually persuading someone to get with you and your interest collapses without that endpoint—or once your relationship status changes—then maybe you were never really friends. Because friendship should be unconditional, right?

In summary

Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by Moira Weigel hit at the right time, and likely at a turning point for culture. Insights feel relatively universal even when discussing extremely specific phenomena. I know plenty of peers (women especially) who would benefit from this thoughtful overview of how the culture's shifted, for better and for worse, at various stages.

Similarly, I'm curious what will happen in the next few years, as we're seeing more and more people drop off the apps entirely thanks to ghosting, choice paralysis, and other trends after the saturation of the peak COVID-19 era. It's not only the apps, but they're definitely a catalyst in some ways to how we express and navigate modern dating.

If you read the book and want to chat, let me know. Or slide into my DMs—but hey, let's keep it friendly.*

*Kidding, kidding. Had to make an ending line joke—sorry. I'm not that obnoxious.