One seemingly common impression of older generations is that 50 years ago, men and women got married a lot more easily, married someone who was “good” - better than average was considered a ‘catch’ - had more realistic expectations of relationships and marriage - weren’t very picky, etc.
Can older Dopers confirm this or is this looking at history with a rose-tinted lens?
I think it must be true considering that due to communication/travel limitations, one’s pool of potential partners was much smaller ‘in the past’ (bump that date to 100 or 150 years ago and it gets smaller still). Not only were the options fewer, but the marriage rate was higher.
So, the numbers support that impression.
I dunno about 50 years ago, as I’m not old enough. Way I’d cut it is that the advent of widespread Internet dating made a huge difference in this respect - but that was much more recent.
It’s undeniable that societal pressure to marry was stronger in the past than it is now, and I can’t see how this pressure wouldn’t result in less pickiness.
Another change is that women are more financially independent, so there are fewer economic reasons for them to marry. They can afford to be more selective in who they pair up with because they can feed and clothe themselves.
Changing sexual attitudes also mean men can get access to sex without making a lifelong commitment. They don’t have to glom on to the first woman who seems interested in them for fear of not finding another one.
Nowadays it is generally acceptable to live together without being married; 50 years ago it was generally considered to be immoral.
You also have to remember that in the past divorce ranged from simply being frowned on to down right illegal. So if you married a “dud” you tended to be stuck with him/her till either one of you died.
Also, I’ve heard that a lot of people in the past (not sure how correct this is) would “pretend” to be Mrs Cleaver, happily married house wife, when in reality their situation was anything BUT happy.
Or to put a finer point on it, sex outside of marriage was much less common in 1965. People can only suppress their physical needs for so long.
I can’t find the statistics right now, but I’ve heard that 50 years ago, a large number of people married someone from their block, or at least from their town. So your dating pool was much smaller, so there was only so picky that you could be.
But now with how much people move around, and with online dating, your dating pool is basically as big as you want it to be. So it’s much harder to settle for someone good, or even really good, when you think that there could be someone great or even perfect out there.
I don’t know which makes for a happier marriage. It could also be that our expectations for what makes a happy marriage has changed in 50 years.
To put a finer point on this, if your options are currently limited, and are unlikely to grow much (no one moves around that much), then it behooves you to select the best you can before the pickings get slimmer. As you wait around dreaming of the “perfect 10” mate, your friends are getting married and snapping up the best mates. Soon enough, the only person left is “Pat” and he/she could back a dog off a meat truck.
Men could also be less picky on some attributes because they were seen as more of the head of house. If she has to toe the line, it matters less how “compatible” her views are on certain things. If marriages today are more equal, the men need to be picker because they will have to live with the woman as more of an “equal.”
They didn’t have Tinder 50 years ago.
But I remember as early as 20 years ago, shows like Seinfeld, Friends and Sex and the City creating a trope of doofy looking guys and girls being insanely picky about dating otherwise extremely attractive people.
You may want to read Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance book. This is one of the questions that they (he and his co-writer) look at. The short answer is “yes, they are.”
I guess it was easier to be a “good husband” or a “good wife” back then, as those roles were much clearer. Today it seems we ask the impossible from our prospective life partners.
I think it depends on your perspective, to be honest. It would be hard for me to be a “good wife” based on old, traditional standards. Just because a role is clear doesn’t mean it would be easy.
Years ago it would not be uncommon for a woman and a man to marry without expecting they’d be each other best friend. The rigid gender roles that governed the household often meant people didn’t select mates based on how well they would do as close companions. Other qualities were given more priority when deciding “catch” status. Back in the day, you didn’t need to feel comfortable sharing your innermost feelings with your mate or share the same sense of humor. Not saying these things didn’t matter at all, but I don’t think they were as likely to be dealbreakers like they are now.
This notion is foreign to me, as I can’t imagine marrying someone who isn’t a friend first and foremost. But in talking to older people, it seems like is a relatively new expectation that people are bringing into their relationships. This seems like a good thing.
Maybe slightly less common, but not uncommon at all. Just slightly harder to pull off if you didn’t have your own place. I went to college and lived in a dorm in 1969, and while they removed all restrictions about women staying over the year before, no one thought we were inventing anything.
I started dating in high school, 48 years ago, but close enough. Before the net you didn’t ask out or chat up someone you hadn’t already vetted. In Boston and Cambridge many colleges had mixers where you got to look over the opposite sex and ask ones you like to dance. (Or ones you thought you might say yes.) I don’t know if that counts as picky - women who didn’t get asked might have thought so.
As for marriage, living together was not quite as common 50 years ago. By 40 years ago, no big deal.
I think it is true that today people have more access to options. So, as a result, we suffer from the Too Much Choice syndrome. One result is the stress of the inability to make a choice - one can become frozen and unable to decide. Fewer options makes it easier to choose.
I can see this playing out in choosing a mate in today’s world. Even if you do get together with someone, there is the sense that something better is just an app-swipe away! So, a mate who is perfectly fine can seem lacking in some quality or trait.
IIRC I remember my mother telling me that most of her female friends/classmates got married right after WWII ended – all these soldiers returning home, either getting back together with their high school sweethearts or dating somebody from the neighborhood, getting married, then baby after baby (aha, the early Baby Boom!)
Now that I think of, I know the military tends to push for “young” marriages so all the benefits can be accessed…I’m presuming it was the same thing back then, yes? If so, that also had a lot to do with it.
(If you know more than I do about this, please feel free to jump in. I just remember being told something along those lines.)
Let’s see, 50 years ago a lot of young women still felt they HAD to get married, economically, because otherwise they would lead a life of poverty. There was a lot of pressure to find a good catch–some man with the potential to earn a good wage. Of course you didn’t really need a potential millionaire, just someone with a work ethic, because you could still, in those days, live a good middle-class life if you were married to a taxi driver or a warehouse worker.
Now, 50 years ago this was a little less than in earlier generations. A young woman might be a “career woman” and not get married. But it was understood that she’d probably be relegated to a studio apartment somewhere. Of course this was a lie. Determined young women could do just fine. But this was the sentiment.
You had a few years after high school, if you didn’t go to college, and about six months after college, if you did, before you were considered an old maid. A lot of parents sent their daughters to college to meet eligible, promising young men.
Now? Not so much. You don’t HAVE to get married. There are lots more options. So you can be a lot pickier than if you thought you were going to be an old maid.
I confess, it seems to me it would look better today from the man’s perspective too, but I don’t know about that.
And obviously I’m speaking about middle-class white people here. Rich people did what they wanted, poor people (the underclass) shacked up and also did what they wanted. Lower-middle-class women worked, single parents worked. But a lot of women expected that marriage to a good man would take them into another economic world, and it did.
Things changed fast. People in my high school who were five years older typically were married by the time they were 21. People in my year, hello, some of us didn’t get married until we were pushing 30, or not at all, and we thought nothing about it.
Don’t forget that a lot of people who got married back in the day were coerced by pregnancy, as contraception usage wasn’t as widespread.
Being single carried a lot more stigma back than it did now.
We put a lot more emphasis on being “equal partners” nowadays.
Maybe people didn’t hear about bad marriages as much as they do now. We live in a time when nothing is sacred and no topic is too personal to discuss. There are fewer taboos. Today everything you hear is a cautionary tale. But in the 1950s, this wasn’t the case. Everyone kept up appearances. Perhaps people weren’t picky back then because they didn’t realize what can happen if you AREN’T picky. No one was talking about “dead bedrooms” and that kind of stuff.
Maybe people have healthier self-esteems than they did back in the 1950s. Maybe only the rich entertained thoughts like “I deserve better”.
In many times and places, there was an unwritten rule that if a girl had a boyfriend when she graduated from high school, they got married whether they wanted to or not. And if she went to college and had a boyfriend when she graduated, again, they were expected to get married even if they didn’t want to.
I also know that it was a huge disgrace to be a divorced women, whereas I have never been able to get a definitive answer about divorced men. :rolleyes:
I also think there was a lot more emphasis placed on the wedding vs. the marriage than there is now.