Can anybody a book on dating customs in other cultures, and in other periods of history? Is there such a book?
I’m curious to know how romance and dating worked in past eras. Obviously I expect things change enormously even within a single country; country folk do things differently than city folk, rich and poor have different traditions, and certainly royalty had different rules.
I can find books on marriage custom, but dating-wooing-romancing information seems hard to come by.
Umm… courtly romance was one thing, but weren’t arranged marriages the norm until relatively recently?
As I understand it, “courtly romance” was a product of Jacobean England — the idea that a man could be romantically attracted to a married woman, so long as he wasn’t hoping to score.
I’m not sure “arranged marriages” were the norm unless there was a substantial amount of property or prestige to hope for. I can’t see peasants being all to keen on it.
Actually peasants had a high interest in whom their sons/daughters were marrying. The smallest piece of land was important, even if held only as a tenant. As late as the 1920s, my great grand parents opposed my grandmother’s marriage because her future husband’s family owned less (say, they owned respectively 7 and 3 cows). One generation later, during the early 1950s, and in the same farm, my mother’s cousin caved in his parents’ pressure not to marry the woman he loved for the same reason (he never married, and during her last years, my great-aunt would express her guilt about this episode).
I understand that marriage based on love and individual choice became widespread during the late 19th century within the urban working class (since neither money nor land was at stake for impoverished factory workers, and social pressure was greatly diminished in large cities).
If you’re looking for an overview of dating over the years, I can’t help you. But Edwina Williams autobiography Remember Me to Tom (Mrs. Williams was the mother of Tennessee (Tom) Williams) includes stories of her youth and would give you an idea of what courtship was like among moderately well-to-do Southerners in the early 20th century.
Exactly — while I can find any number of highly specialized books, like “Courtship in Regency England Between People Named Murray” I can’t find anything like an overview.
I really, really doubt there was such a thing as “dating” in the past, as mentioned above, until the early 20th century. There has been, certainly, courting with a view toward eventual marriage. There were activities for young people (picnics, dances) in Victorian times which were heavily chaperoned. Most marriages were arranged and had nothing to do with love, but that wasn’t a bad thing, it was just the way things were done. When the automobile gave people freedom, mobility, and privacy, I think that was when women, after WWI, during the flapper era, were allowed to go places with men. Do you actually think in the far past young women were able to leave their parents houses to, say, go to see gladiators at the Coliseum??? Women have been chattel and under control of men for centuries, and dating as we know it is recent.
I think women were allowed to go places with men in lots of eras.
But “dating” as we know it today is a rather special thing born out of circumstance. Most of us, particularly city dwellers, are not very social these days. We work in one place, where we regularly see a handful of people, we don’t really know our neighbors. (More importantly, the people you know at your job don’t really change much.) Dating, the ritual invitation to go someplace at a certain time, is all about solving the problem of how do you have a romance with someone you’re not seeing under ordinary circumstances. Or more importantly, with someone you meet randomly through a friend and will not see ever again unless you arrange the meeting concretely.
In most cases in the past, I think relations were more natural. You’d just hang out with people.
Of course, in the stricter societies, and especially the higher class, things were more formal. In the case of all-out arrange marriage (and there’s many degrees of parental involvement below that!), you would be introduced to your future bride at a meeting with all parents present. Maybe you’d have several such gatherings.
In general, I think parental power in the past was more of a veto. If your parents didn’t like somebody, you would actually listen. Instead of telling them to go to hell–you do what you want.
This needs to be repeated for emphasis. The further back we look in time, the more and more we see arranged marriages, but much of that is because the further back we go in time, the less and less we see of courtship in general–only the most elite of marriage arrangements were recorded, and they were the ones most likely to be externally arranged. We simply have only the vaguest clue how non-elite Roman or Merovingian or Celtic or Native American marriages were determined.
The Puritans, god love 'em, were huge proponents of companionate marriage–it’s all through Paradise Lost. By the 18th C, the question was not whether or not personal preference should play a role in mate selection, but whether to what degree it should play a part–the works of Defoe (little earlier), Fielding, Austin, all revolve around this question.
In practical terms, I think long courtships are less vital in cultures with strong gender roles. In today’s society, everything in a marriage is negotiable. You really have to have a coincidence of sentiments. In my grandparent’s marriages, almost nothing had to be decided–who did what when and to what degree were all matters of traditions. There was a mutual sense of what each person’s responsibilities were. Today, it’s a blank canvas, and while I much prefer that, it does demand more of a shared paradigm going into it, and more ability to communicate effectively once you are there.
No, courtly love is much, much older than that. It was a favorite theme of troubadour poetry and music. Of course, some troubadours, including William X of Aquitaine, sang of love that was not at all courtly. There was plenty of illicit sex going on according to the troubadours, and William X has one poem about meeting two women on the street who take him home and have a threesome with him.
In India arranged marriages are still very common, at least among the people who go to college and move to the US. I know a guy who went back to India for a month to find a wife and he came back married to her. My wife’s ex boss is Indian and he was close to marrying an American but his parents told him if he didn’t get an arranged marriage to an Indian woman, his sisters would not be able to get married - he would have “shamed” his family by marrying an American.
Well, maybe “dating” is the wrong word. “Romance” was too closely linked with sex, and I think we know how that worked in other periods of history, and “courtship” doesn’t really have the right flavor. Or maybe it does.
I don’t think we do.
I think your OP is a good one. We all have preconceptions of what romancing was back in the day, but are they really true? For instance, how often did people sleep around? Did they have “micromarriages” like we do today with our boyfriends/girlfriends? At what age did people start relations?
I don’t think we have any clue. As someone said, not even about major societies like Ancient Rome. At least, not about the lower classes.