Think back to your childhood when you were a young girl, perhaps in elementary or middle school, and your older sister, mother or some other female figure in your life told you about their college experience. Was college the place where they met their husband? Did they tell you about their dating experiences? My mother met my father while they were both in college so I grew up with the presumption that was the norm and that I would also continue this trend. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with one of my aunts when I was a young teen. She was telling me the story of how she met my uncle in college at the University of South Carolina; she then looked at me and told me that if I didn’t have a potential husband nailed down by my junior year of college, then I might as well forget ever being able to find one.
Well–here I am, a junior in college and currently single with no prospective husbands. Should I assume that I’ll never be able to find a mate and begin to plan my life as a perpetually single woman? I think not. Dating and mating have evolved in tremendous ways over the past few decades; while some women and men still do find their life companions during college, that’s not the case for the majority anymore. What has caused this change? While there are many possible reasons, I focus on the shift in cultures that includes the emergence of “hooking up,” the rise of the median marrying age and increasing motivation among young women to establish themselves through education and careers.
To get to the root of the difference between dating back then and now, we must consider the definition of dating. A recent article published by NPR looked at this very subject and dubbed the definition of dating “then” as, “the evolution of the courtship ritual.” Basically, dating involved two people going to a movie or a meal together, which doesn’t seem much different than what we consider dating today. However, the difference emerges from the modern phenomenon of “hooking up.” The article featured insight from Kathleen Bogle, a sociology and criminal justice professor at La Salle University. Boggle summed up the effect hooking up has had on the evolution of dating by stating, “The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening. In the hookup era, something sexual happens; even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating.” Ask anyone to define “hooking up” and you can get a response that mimics the old-school dating term, i.e. courting, or you can get the simple response of sex.
However, most people would deem their definition somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, which is one key difference between dating then and now. The formal recognition of dating then would be a relationship that encompassed everything that the casual term of hooking up implies, but dating now indicates a different, more formal relationship that is completely separate from the terms of hooking up. When and how did this hooking up phenomena emerge? Conveniently, it aroused with the increasing number of women entering college.
One of the reasons that the term dating has evolved so much is because of the increasing age at which women are getting married. As mentioned, dating “then” was primarily a way for men and women to meet someone that they could potentially marry. A study conducted in 2007 measured the median age of marriage for women and men, from 1960 to 2005. The study recorded the median age of marriage for women in 1960 to be 20.3 years old and for men, 22.8 years old. The study lists the median age for women to marry in 2005 as 25.3 years old, and for men it as 27.1 years old. This figure signifies that over the past five decades, both men and women are delaying marriage. It is also important to notice that both median ages in 2005 are older than the age of a typical college graduate.
It’s also important to compare women’s median marrying ages in 1960 and 2005 and relate them to the average age of college graduates. A typical college graduate student–who finishes their undergraduate degree in four years–would be approximately 22 years old, which is higher than the median marrying age of women in 1960 but lower than the median marrying age of women in 2005. This statistic can be inferred many ways, but the bottom line is that women and men are getting married at higher ages and that this figure continues to rise. The fact that many women are entering college also suggests that women’s priorities have changed–women are prioritizing their education and careers above marriage. I find this indication to be very true for myself and for most women I know at UNC; it’s difficult to find a woman who is pursuing her Mrs. Degree.
The “then” definition of dating refers to a time period when many women did not have the access and the ability to attend college; the ones that did were sent to acquire skills necessary to be a homemaker. One study of the American college student population revealed that between 1970 and 2000, the number of women entering post-secondary school grew by 136% while the number of women entering professional schools grew by 853%. In the past decade, the number of women enrolling in colleges across the U.S. grew to exceed the number of men enrolling, which is a major accomplishment for the status of women in respect to education.
In addition to gaining more access to post-secondary education, women also gained easier access to men, and vice versa. With the creation of apartment-like dormitories also came the revolt against strict policies that established rules about having members of the opposite sex in rooms, curfews and lights out. These revolts lead to the development of co-ed dorms and lightening up on the strictness of the aforementioned policies. Bogle reflects on this by saying that, “what you see on college campuses now… is that young men and women have unrestricted access to each other.”
Another major trigger of the hooking up trend is the sexual revolution, which includes women’s increasing empowerment and particularly the availability of contraceptive methods. The sexual revolution has lead women to become more independent and empowered, especially in regards to their sexuality. This new take on dating has lead many women to view relationships in a compartmentalized way in that they must always have a way to classify what type of relationship they have and hooking up has been able to encompass many different types of relationships, or rather the lack of one.
It’s no surprise that the term dating has evolved over time and especially between our parent’s generation and ours, but why? Hooking up leads many women to engage in sexual encounters with no strings attached, while dating signifies a more formal and definite relationship. Has hooking up replaced dating? That is a question that only we can answer for ourselves but one thing is certain: because women are focusing more on establishing a career and pursuing their education, they are also becoming increasingly more independent and less focused on finding their potential husband–this is comforting for all of us!
Sources:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105008712
http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2009/jun/marriage/
http://education-portal.com/articles/Leaving_Men_Behind:_Women_Go_to_College_in_Ever-Greater_Numbers.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36663479/ns/us_news-census_2010/t/census-women-equal-men-college-degrees/#.TrQ5lHHiP7A