How Work Changed Love

NICOLE TORRES: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Nicole Torres. Today, I’m talking to Moira Weigel, a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Yale who just published a fascinating book called Labor of Love. It’s a thoroughly-researched history of dating, tracing how society and the ways that we meet people have changed because of who works and how we work. Moira, thanks for joining us.

MOIRA WEIGEL: Thanks for having me.

NICOLE TORRES: So one of the first things I noticed when I got your book was the jacket, which says that after years of first-person research on dating, you are now off the market. So how did you meet your spouse? Did you two meet at work?

MOIRA WEIGEL: We actually have a funny story. We met at Harvard in undergrad, very briefly. We took a very early morning freshman German class together. And then we met by chance in what felt like a very improbable way– at an engagement party for two friends who then didn’t get married. When we met, I was dating someone else, I had a fellowship to go to China for four months the week after I met him. So something was very lucky, because a lot of odds were stacked against our reconnecting, I think.

NICOLE TORRES: That sounds like quite a saga. So in your research, you found that meeting people at school and at work and, you know, dating colleagues and dating classmates, that’s all pretty common, right? Is that more so than it used to be?

MOIRA WEIGEL: It’s certainly true that from the very beginning of when people start to date or to go out, lots of people meet through work. The mass entry of women into higher education happened a bit later. And so I think meeting people who you marry through school takes a little longer to become very mainstream. But through much of the 20th century, those are both sort of tried and true ways to meet a long-term partner that many people happened to experience.

NICOLE TORRES: Right. It seems natural that one of the most likely places where you’re going to meet someone is in the office, or through coworkers, because that just takes up such a big part of your life. But I was very surprised to learn, perhaps more than I should have been, that this was not always how it used to be. So what did dating and courtship look like before this became the norm?

MOIRA WEIGEL: Well, the subtitle of my book is The Invention of Dating. And I do think it’s a practice with a pretty clear starting point. You know, it’s not that one person had an idea and invented it, but groups of people did start doing it all around the same time, which was in the 1890s. Before that, although it varied from time to time and place to place, for the most part young people meet in family-supervised situations or in community-supervised situations.

So if you’re upper middle class, upper class, it looks like the Jane Austen scenario. If you’re working class, maybe it’s a church social, or a factory dance, or the matchmaker from your synagogue. But first encounters happen in supervised settings, and they unfold according to protocols that the community sort of sets up and subscribes to. Then the invention of dating blows all that up.

NICOLE TORRES: Right. And before I read your book, you know, I didn’t realize how much women entering the workforce totally changed how people dated. But why did this happen? Why did a growing workforce have such a big impact on who people went out with? Was it just that everyone was exposed to more people?

MOIRA WEIGEL: It’s hard for us to even imagine now, but when you think about the time where my book starts, which is in the 1890s, you have this wave of urbanization. So, people moving to cities, especially young people, in the United States for a variety of reasons. There is a terrible economic crisis in 1993 which drives a lot of people, and women in particular, to leave their homes in the countries and go look for work in the city.

And so, it’s urbanization. It’s immigration. And then it’s women starting to work outside the home before those things happen, and especially before women have both the opportunity and the obligation to earn money outside the family. There was just no context where young people would meet unsupervised. It was just a huge change.

And there wasn’t even a precedent for quote, unquote, “nice women” being in public, certainly not unaccompanied by a male family member. I mean a public woman, in 19th century slang, is famously a prostitute. There was no other context for a woman to be out and free to meet who she wanted to. So it really is part of the dramatic change in gender roles around the turn of the last century that, you know, dating comes from.

NICOLE TORRES: Right, so around what decade does this become more normalized?

MOIRA WEIGEL: Dating was invented twice. The first time was 1896. It’s the first time we see someone use the word on the print record. And in that case, it’s a very much a working class phenomenon. It’s very much these first women, often driven by poverty and necessity, who are going out and going mingling and mixing freely, often thought to be prostitutes, looked down upon by authorities and social workers. It gets mainstreamed around the time of World War I.

In 1914, there is an article in the Ladies Home Journal about a very nice, white, middle class college girl going on dates with someone from the fraternity nearby. And it’s in scare quotes, the word “date,” but the writer doesn’t explain it, and clearly expects readers to know what that means. So I sort of think that is the first hint that it’s becoming mainstream. But I think then in the 20s, you get hugely more women going to college and hugely more coed colleges. And so that changes the culture of courtship enormously.

NICOLE TORRES: Right, and then those young people start to enter the workforce. And something I found really interesting was back in the day, it was pretty normal for a boss to marry his secretary, or for a doctor to marry his nurse. So there was more of this going up and down the economic ladder than say, going outside of your affiliations. But then today, this seems to have flipped because you found that there are more diverse relationships now, except when it comes to economic mobility. So what happened here?

MOIRA WEIGEL: I think it’s a tricky issue for anyone who’s both a feminist and committed to equality, because what happened is that women started to be able to be doctors as well as nurses. It’s hard to measure very precisely, statistically, who dates whom, but there’s a lot of very good data on who marries whom. And if we take the latter as a kind of proxy for the former, it’s very clear that in the 70s, as you have women breaking into these upper corporate echelons, you also see the beginning of the dramatic trend toward what a sociologist or a biologist might call assortative mating– people marrying people from their own class background, or similar socioeconomic and education levels.

So it’s just one aspect of inequality that grows in all sorts of ways in the United States starting in that period, and tends to reinforce and amplify itself. But I think most directly it’s an effect of people working all the time, and people of all genders being able to do high-level jobs, at least in theory. So now a lawyer can marry a lawyer. A secretary isn’t the only woman in the office anymore.

So that’s a big change. And of course, as a feminist, it’s really exciting that women have more career options. As someone who cares about, worries about, equality, it’s troubling that it becomes a factor that amplifies inequality in the United States among families. So it’s a tricky issue.

NICOLE TORRES: Right, right. It is a tricky issue. I was really surprised to learn that women have been growing anxious about their fertility at younger and younger ages.

MOIRA WEIGEL: Right.

NICOLE TORRES: But then at the same time, they’re waiting longer to get married. So what’s going on here?

MOIRA WEIGEL: It’s a great question, and a complicated one. And I think issues surrounding female fertility are so fraught and so difficult to talk about. I write about this in the book, because there are all sorts of myths and all sorts of misinformation surrounding the relationship between aging and fertility. I think that basically, the late 70s early 80s was the first time you see widespread reporting on this phenomenon of the biological clock.

The reality, is in any situation where women are given more control over their fertility in the form of contraception and access to legal abortion, better educational and economic opportunities, they always put off childbearing and have fewer children. And I think that’s true in Africa and Asia. It’s true here. And so anyway, in the 80s you have this first generation of women who came of age with the pill, who have access to abortion, who have the opportunity to break into these higher levels in the workplace. You do see a lot of women putting off childbearing, and it starts this panic about the biological clock, and about diminished fertility with age, that I think then sort of creeps younger and younger.

There’s a scene in When Harry Met Sally, which is from 1989, when Sally says to her friend, you know I’m not worried. The clock doesn’t really start ticking until you’re 36. I’m 31 now. I don’t think anyone my age thought the clock started ticking when you were 36. I think we were already stressed about it, thinking about it, when we were in our mid 20s.

So anyway, I think there’s been this creeps backward, which then of course does affect how women think about their career possibilities, because American workplaces remain so inflexible. And maybe that’s changing. Maybe these new laws in California and New York state mean that we will start to see more humane policies toward parental leave and family leave.

But it’s been very rigid. And in that respect, I think that women, in particular, are always feeling pressured to date efficiently so as to line things up to have a child at the quote, unquote, “right time.”

NICOLE TORRES: So is this trend toward delayed marriage mostly happening at the higher end of the income distribution?

MOIRA WEIGEL: Yeah, well that, there’s really good data on this. Andrew Cherlin, who’s a sociologist, I believe, at John Hopkins, has a really good book on this called Labor’s Love Lost. There’s a lot of really robust data on what sociologists call the big split, I think, between working class Americans or Americans without college degrees and Americans who do have college degrees or upper income Americans. And it has become very clear and very pronounced that one cohort, sort of the lower income cohort, just isn’t marrying at all, or is marrying at much lower rates than in previous generations– having children, but not marrying.

I think it was in the late 90s that the median age, or maybe it was the early 2000s, the median age of first childbirth dropped below the median age of first marriage. So sort of the median first childbirth in America I think is 25, and the median age of first marriage for a woman is 27. So those lines crossed in the late 90s, early 2000s. And what I think that indicates is that a certain group of Americans with diminished educational and economic prospects are tending to forego marriage and have children outside of marriage.

At the same time, in the higher income group, sociologists describe a shift from what they called the cornerstone marriage to the capstone marriage. So marriage is no longer the cornerstone on which you build an adult life. You no longer get married in your 20s and then build a life with someone. Marriage has become this capstone that higher income people feel they do to consummate the adult life.

So it’s an achievement, and it’s another sign that your life is professionally in good order. And I think this makes sense to any of us with student debt, or with grad school plans, or career plans. But that drives up the median age of marriage in the bracket of people who are still marrying to something higher than it’s been in previous generations.

NICOLE TORRES: And it doesn’t sound like it’s just about professional concerns too. Women are advancing higher up in companies, and simultaneously we’ve seen this rise in reproductive technologies. But this also gives people more time to date and to meet the right person, which you talk about in your book. And I’m wondering if you know whether this has worked. Has waiting longer led to more successful marriages, or have divorce rates actually gone up?

MOIRA WEIGEL: Divorce rates, I believe, are down from a generation ago. Again, it’s very interesting and very complicated, the way these figures manifest across different sectors of the population, because there’s a widespread perception that in blue states– where people do tend to delay marriage, delay childbearing, in people of a certain income level, delay marriage and childbearing with access to contraception and abortion, other means of doing that– I think we are seeing lower divorce rates. And it’s hard to judge from the outside the more successful marriages in terms of how satisfied the people within those marriages say they are.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah.

MOIRA WEIGEL: And in other states, or in other demographics, we’ve seen a trend away from marriage. You know, any of us probably can imagine, or knows firsthand, huge financial stress with no end in sight is like not the world’s greatest aphrodisiac. And I think for certain families, they’re feeling that. So I think that happy and lasting marriage, like many other things in America, may be becoming a class privilege limited to a certain group of people.

NICOLE TORRES: Right. And even they’re delaying starting their families. I mean, you mention in your book that some tech companies are even starting to consider paying for things like egg freezing to help women buy more time to advance their careers or to find the right partner.

MOIRA WEIGEL: I mean, I would like to believe that the companies that are offering egg freezing as a benefit have the best of intentions. It boggles my mind, actually, that in America today, the workforce is more than half female, and that egg freezing a treatment that is still labeled as experimental, and expensive, invasive, is thought to be a more realistic fix to work life balance problems than basic paid parental leave, like there is in every other developed country. For any of these technologies, I think individuals can have very good reason to want to use them. I always would want more health care rather than less health care, fewer options for women. But I think that the normalization of egg freezing with the suggestion that like, this way you should be able to just work forever and never get any time for your life– or, to put it in the romantic perspective, you know, this way you can shop around for that perfect mate forever and ever– I think that egg freezing as a way to delay your life so that you can work harder and consume longer as an individual before pairing off, I think that’s misguided and troubling.

And I think that the way these things tend to work, an opportunity can also very quickly become a kind of de facto obligation. You know, if my company offers egg freezing, does it then send a signal that I’m not serious about advancing professionally if I decide not to freeze my eggs and to have kids earlier? I mean, I think it creates all these complications. So if I had a magic wand, I would much rather see more flex time and family leave policies rather than egg freezing, which again is still labeled as an experimental treatment by the professional organization of doctors who offer it.

NICOLE TORRES: Do you have suggestions for the types of flexibility that would make a difference at helping work-life balance?

MOIRA WEIGEL: Yeah, I mean I think paid parental leave for both genders, all genders, is absolutely crucial. Because if it’s just for the mother, that already normalizes the expectation that all kinds of childcare and child rearing are the burden of mothers, and not fathers. In many developed countries, there are different kinds of subsidies to help support child care. I mean the total unaffordability of privatized childcare in this country is a big challenge to lots of families.

I guess health care is its own separate issue. But I think that really, the paid parental leave would be a huge thing. I don’t know, America, we have this love affair with work, and we really define ourselves in relation to our work.

And there are some great things about that. But I think we need to reclaim parts of our lives from work. Now we have sleep trackers and activity trackers, it’s like every part of life can be converted into a form of work. Every activity, even your sleep. This is a strong trend in our culture, but it’s important to try to pull back a bit. You shouldn’t have to put off your life forever.

NICOLE TORRES: Right, right.

MOIRA WEIGEL: It’s like, what is one waiting for, actually?

NICOLE TORRES: I know it’s tricky for researchers to measure, but do you think that in 20 years, people are going to be marrying their colleagues more just because they’re working more?

MOIRA WEIGEL: I wonder also, with the way that many workplaces are transforming, whether we’ll even have colleagues. Or like, what will be meant by colleagues. I mean, we don’t all work in big corporations that everyone works at for decades anymore. We move around a lot. A lot of workplaces now contract out different kinds of work.

And I expect those trends to continue in the next 20 years particularly, given how different kind of on-demand technologies facilitate that. So I wouldn’t be surprised if people still meet through the work they do. Whether we’ll have people we think of as colleagues who share the Xerox machine and sit next to every day, or go to meetings with all the time– I wonder if that landscape will change, you know? I feel as if that’s really undergoing transformation.

NICOLE TORRES: And this definitely coincides with online dating, right? So how will that factor in?

MOIRA WEIGEL: Well, if I really knew the answer to that, I would be starting an online dating site rather than writing a book. But what I expect is that, as our physical and our virtual lives get more and more integrated, I think we’ll see a proliferation of more and more kinds of lifestyles, and more and more kinds of apps. So I think that we’ll keep seeing a trend towards this sort of idea of flexibility and relationships on-demand.

You know, an app like Tinder is sort of like an Uber for dating. It’s an on-demand dating app. And I think we’ll see more of that.

I think also about housing arrangement and real estate. The whole ideal of the 50s nuclear family was so underwritten by federal housing loans. I’m curious about how that ideal will change with delayed childbearing, with people moving more for work, with this sort of permanent contract work, freelance lifestyle, and how we organize our families and the spaces we live in. I just wonder how they’re going to change how we think about family and how we live with in the longer term.

NICOLE TORRES: And now we’re also living in this 24/7 work culture. And it seems like all the tools we have for online dating are trying to make meeting people a lot more efficient.

MOIRA WEIGEL: Well I certainly agree that this way of thinking and speaking– like, efficiency, or productivity, or ease– has totally taken over how we talk about courtship. And that’s precisely what these apps promise, right, is the ability to make the search for love, or the search for pleasure, or whatever it is that we date for, more quote, unquote, “efficient.” I think it does beg the question of like, well, efficient for what? Efficient to what end?

I love a lot of the apps. I think they’re great tools for finding people. But I do think it’s important to keep in mind that each of those, every app, is designed to keep you on the app. It’s a weird service business. I think Christian Rudder, who founded OkCupid, said this. He said, you know, I’m in a very funny service industry where if I do a perfect job, my customer never comes back.

So anyway, I’m getting off track a bit. But I think that they certainly can make the search for a person more efficient. But of course, finding that person is only the beginning of a process. And whether it makes the rest of it more efficient, I don’t know. And I am very suspicious of the way this language of efficiency and productivity– as I said, we leave no part of our lives untouched. Like, we track our sleep now to optimize it. And I don’t know if love can be made efficient. It might be intrinsically.

NICOLE TORRES: So what kind of advice would you give to people, then, who are trying to build their careers but they also want to meet people, and they’ve been told all of this– to be efficient– but they don’t necessarily know what that means? What do they need to know? And then, what should they forget about?

MOIRA WEIGEL: One thing people can definitely forget about is there’s so much terrible advice literature out there. And there’s so much advice aimed at straight people that is all about of hyping up dating as this weird game where you’re always trying to out-psych the other person. There’s this whole weird theory of gender, which is totally outdated, but about how women need to follow the rules and then play the game, and all this stuff.

Again, the goal is to sell advice books. I think the sort of mutual mystification of men and women to each other is really counterproductive and makes people really anxious, which makes it much harder to be open to other people. And I think for women, especially, just all those advice books ever say is like, whatever you might want to do, do the opposite.

Like, don’t do that. Don’t ever act on a desire. Don’t ever follow a feeling. Romantic advice is so far behind career advice in terms of allowing women to have agency.

There’s so much anxiety. There’s so much dating advice and so much about these apps that is designed to make us anxious and take us out of ourselves, because it’s very profitable to make Americans anxious. We’re great at that.

But I think that to try as much as possible be present for interactions, and not try to treat it as this game that you could make efficient if you only gamed it right, that’s my other general advice. I would say, again, this is all rather corny, but pay attention to your friends’ friends. I have so many friends who’ve ended up very happily partnered with someone who was a friend of a friend. I mean like, my personal story happens to be with someone I have met and then never really thought about again. I was dating someone else who was crazy at that the time when we met. I mean it’s like, be open to that.

I think that the sort of obsessive emphasis on monogamous romantic love that we have as a culture can be very counterproductive, both in terms of finding a romantic monogamous partner and in terms of personal well-being and happiness. We all need many kinds of relationships in our lives. And if you look at history, it’s basically only about a 200-year-old idea, this idea that you would find one person defines your whole personal life.

And I think it’s a lot to ask for. It creates a lot of expectations that are difficult. So yeah, I think seek out, maintain, cultivate loving friendships with other people who you’re not necessarily having sex with is another piece of general advice which I think can actually help people have richer romantic lives, too, in all sorts of ways.

NICOLE TORRES: I think that is create advice, and I cannot wait to share that with my friends. Moira, thank you so much for this great conversation.

MOIRA WEIGEL: Thanks Nicole.

NICOLE TORRES: That was Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love, The Invention of Dating. For more, go to hbr.org.