I’m 28 years old and single, and I’d rather not be. (Single, that is - being 28 actually beats the heck out of one’s early 20s, and I suspect it’s rather better than anything after the mid-thirties as well). So, I’ve done a bit of speed-dating, and (very rarely) I’ll chat up a girl in a bar or ask out a friend-of-a-friend - but mostly, I meet girls online. There are a bunch of free or cheap websites with sizable membership rosters; in a very short time, I can log on to such a site, filter out the women who match my age/education/nerdiness preferences, and ask them “Hey, how you doing?” I don’t need to work with them, or be connected to them through a mutual circle of friends, or bump into them by happenstance; information just flows, from them to me and back again, as if the dead hand of Adam Smith himself were gently nudging me towards the pretty girl at the end of the bar.
That is, when you think about it, an extraordinary tool. And I find I’m rather at a loss for how people found mates without it. I mean, most peoples’ social networks just aren’t that big - and randomly approaching strangers in bars is a damned awkward business. For very young adults, it isn’t that tricky - college students, for example. But other than that, how the hell did folks put together adequate pools of people to find dates? Or did you all just muddle through until you found someone more-or-less acceptable to date, and then cling to them frantically?
There used to be phone services you could call. You’d leave a message and others could listen to it. I’m the same age you are and I used to see ads for them on tv up to my teens.
I’m in my mid 40s and I met my husband while inner-tubing down a river on a hot summer day. My older sister met her husband in a book club. My younger sister met her husband while doing volunteer work. Ad the very youngest sister met her husband while traveling.
Your own immediate circle of friends might not be so large, but now take all the friends of your friends. All it takes is one person to say “Hey, Alice and Bob have a lot of interests in common-- I should introduce them to each other!”.
There are also a variety of larger organizations both you and a prospective partner might belong to: A school, or church, for instance. There are a lot of folks who get married right out of college, and back when going to college wasn’t so common, a lot who got married right out of high school. And I know a fair number of couples who met at church.
Parties, walking down the street, at a lunch counter, waiting for the bus, on the bus, walking to the subway, waiting in line, in a store, any place where there are people.
I met my partner in a sleazy “back room” filled with gay men. For various reasons he was the center of attention of a swarm of admirers. Though I was not part of that swarm he managed to literally stare me down. I helped him break free of the swarm, and before long we were alone at my place. For an entire weekend.
There’s probably no parallel to this in the straight world.
We could interpret your initial question “How did dating work…” to mean “How well did dating work prior…”
One answer might be: About the same as with the internet now.
That is: There were those who could get pretty much all the dates they wanted any time they wanted, and maybe a good number of lays too. There were those who could only somehow manage an occasional date, a few times a year. Then there were those “olympian daters” (once every four years) who could hardly ever get a date, if ever at all, and those few never went well.
It all seems to boil down to the prospective daters’ level of social skills, or lack thereof.
I think that modern internet dating hasn’t changed that all so very much. You still have people in all of those categories of dating successfullness, and I think it’s largely the same people. (Or, allowing for the aging of the generations and the rise of a new generation, I mean it’s largely the same sorts of people.)
Social skills am social skills, and them as has them has them, and them as hain’t, hain’t. Internet dating can only improve on that a little bit at the edges, maybe, if even that.
ETA: Note that this entire thread so far, this post included, is written and/or addressed entirely from/toward the male point of view. I haven’t a clue how this post would apply to females, although I am going to guess it’s at least similar.
This. I met my husband at a juggling convention we were both attending, in an acrobatics workshop we were both taking. We started talking and hit it off from there. Mutual interests, mutual hobbies, we got to know each other and heck, now we’re married.
The equivalent back then was matchmaking services, where you would fill out your info on paper, and an actual person would find you compatible matches. There were also later ones where you’d make an intro video and watch others.
I met my first “grown-up” boyfriend whilst working at a contract branch post office. I threatened to close his post office box if he did not pay his box rental. He told me that he wouldn’t pay the rental fee unless I went out with him…in hindsight, should have just closed the box…was not worth the $17.50 yearly mailbox rent! LOL
