Labor of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

the first decade of the twentieth century gave way to the second, the middle classes gradually accepted dating as a legitimate form of courtship. In 1914, Ladies’ Home Journal —the largest-circulation magazine in the country, with more than one million readers—ran a short story about a sorority sister and her love life. The author put the word “date” in scare quotes but did not see a need to explain it further. By the early 1920s, stories about college students going out to dinners and dances and vaudeville shows and movies had become widespread.
    Soon, nobody seemed to remember that these activities ever appeared dubious. Today, authorities like The New York Times refer to them offhand as “traditional.” Americans seem to have gotten over the ambiguities that once made vice squads worry that dinner dates were just another form of sex work. Yet other ambiguities remain. If daters are often unsure about what it is they are trading “on the market,” there is also a lot of uncertainty regarding the point of dating.
    What is dating for?
    The rituals of calling had served a clear purpose: marriage. The parents and relatives who oversaw the process had a clear incentive to make sure that courtship led to the formation of new couples, who would start new households and produce heirs. Not only would this make their children happy. It also would enlarge and extend their family property.
    The first entrepreneurs to create dating platforms had different incentives. The success of restaurants, bars, and amusement parks did not depend on the quality of marriages that resulted from dates there. It depended on the volume of daters who came and went. Unlike your mother, a bartender did not care if you ended up making babies with the guy you came in with. In fact, the best thing would be if no one ever settled down.
    By bringing courtship out of the home and into the marketplace, dating became a lucrative business. The practice made it possible to take basic human needs for sex and attention and affection that can never be sated and turn them into engines of potentially endless demand.
    For the first time in human history, dating made it necessary to buy things in order to get face time with a prospective partner. This remains true today. Even if we find dates on apps that cost nothing to download, we pay in the hours that we spend creating and updating our accounts. We pay in the attention that the owners of the apps sell to advertisers. It may be a symptom of the confusion about work and play that dating first created that it would be hard to say whether we are working or enjoying leisure. Updating your OkCupid profile seems like both and neither.
    For OkCupid, getting us into a relationship that might take us off the app is, at best, a secondary goal. The first priority is to harness our desires in order to increase their profits. In this sense, every dater is still a Charity Girl even if you pay for it, and even if you think you are just having fun. These are the tricks dating now plays on everyone.

 
    CHAPTER 2. LIKES
    Dating moved courtship from the home onto the market. As it became possible to shop for your own mate, it also became necessary to sell yourself. Taste became a key way that a dater could create her brand.
    â€œWhat really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”
    In the movie High Fidelity , John Cusack says these words directly to the camera. His character, a thirty-something record store clerk, wouldn’t dream of sleeping with a woman who preferred recent Sting to a classic Police record. When the indie rom-com Garden State came out in 2004, the group the leading couple bonded over was the Shins. By the time 500 Days of Summer followed, five years later, the 1980s were cool again, so it was the Smiths.
    The editors of the “girl-on-girl” blog Autostraddle agree with Cusack.
    â€œIt’s not what you’re like, it’s what you