Hey David Brooks, Enough With the Courtship Nostalgia

In his column on Monday, David Brooks discusses the effect of texting on modern courtship [2]. He says cell phones corrode “poetry and imagination,” turning single people into “free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships” and leaving modern courtship doomed to an “atmosphere of general disenchantment.” Here’s a round-up of DoubleX responses to David, whom none of us will be booty texting any time soon.

Hanna Rosin: Sometimes I wonder if male columnists write columns just to piss off their daughter’s friends. In David Brooks’ case, his dissection of modern dating habits is less annoying than Michael Gerson’s similar attempt, because he is less scolding and more anthropological. And because I am closer to his age than his daughter’s, I will admit—with some fear of my fellow DoubleXers—that I found it intriguing.

Brooks does his research at New York magazine’s online sex diaries, which he admits is not a representative sample. What he discovers is a new mating market which operates something like an eBay auction, where buyers are, up to the last minute, searching for the best deal on a lay. I’ve had friends newly on the dating market, so I’ve seen some of this in action, and I do find it kind of amazing. Most interesting to me is the creation of a texting persona—almost a literary persona: always somewhat ironic, flirtatious, and almost never honest or hurt.

This doesn’t mean, as he says, that we need medieval chivalry, or Bruce Springsteen to keep us in check. I, for one, can’t stand Bruce Springsteen. I think there must be new rules here, and Brooks and I just haven’t figured them out. I can see, for example, how this resembles in some ways dating from the '50s, with everyone angling and protected. But I’m not sure. Anyone with more experience want to explain?

Noreen Malone: I’m not so sure how my mother would feel about me answering Hanna’s call [3] for someone with “more experience” to chime in on David Brooks’ confused disquisition on the booty text, but here goes. What’s so wrong, or so new, about hedging your bets? It strikes me as oddly old-fashioned: My parents always talk about how people dated casually and more widely in their day, rather than enter into pseudo-marriages and serial monogamy that are often the other side of the coin to the booty-text. Some people want to settle down quickly; some people don’t. Hamlet would have noncommittally booty-texted Ophelia, were it an option.

There is, in fact, a certain syntax to it, a “pattern of being,” to steal Brooks’ words: a casual 11 p.m. text inquiring about evening plans lays the groundwork for a more direct 1 a.m. text, perhaps. Brooks’ real problem, I imagine, isn’t actually with the texting. It’s with how black-and-white the goal of that 1 a.m. text is—with the access, in all senses of the word, that’s both defined and accompanied the digital age—but he doesn’t want to play the Laura Sessions Step card [4] too clearly. Divining new ways of living from pseudo-trends is less broadly alienating than moralizing against the hookup culture.

I realize how crass the texting ritual sounds, and I should add that my beef with Brooks isn’t generationally universal. And that he’s right that the black-and-white endgame has led to more shades of gray along the way. People get hurt in this “new” way of courting. Often. As they did in the “old” way, with all the rules. But don’t the hurt feelings just prove Brooks wrong—that we’re not, in fact, monsters of ironic detachment?

Amanda Marcotte: I'm a huge fan of hedging your bets. Every monogamous relationship I've embarked on meant I had to let some other guys down easy. That wasn't fun, by any stretch, but a big improvement over treating each date like it was some kind of commitment. Most of those relationships are going nowhere, and so why close yourself off to other options that might pan out?

Jessica Dweck: I would just like to point out the irony that the conservative Brooks is railing against a hyper-free market in romantic partners.

Emily Yoffe: I am the product of the “simpler” '50s dating culture. My parents were young, hot for each other, met their families' requirements of looks (her) and potential earning capacity (him), and married at ages 19 and 20. Their union produced four children, lasted 20 years, and was a nightmare for all concerned. So I do not share David Brooks’ nostalgia for a time when dating had “guardrails.” I dated for decades in the pre-cell phone era, and it wasn’t technology that gave me an ironic, contingent feeling about my adventures. One of my male friends once said to me, “Sometimes I think you deliberately go on bad dates just so you have a story to tell.” Also, one doesn't have to do more than read Jane Austen to understand that it’s not the advent of SMS technology that make males and females circling each other strike poses, make harsh, comic judgments, and wish for someone more appealing.

Lauren Bans: I think this was the ridiculous part of the essay:

It also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment. Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment. But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination.

He's positing the notion that people were better daters because of Bruce Springsteen songs? Ha! Text messaging may have made it so that multiple dalliances are more accessible, but the idea that texting has made us all love utilitarians and vacuumed poetry out of the world seems far-fetched. Look at Don Draper: That man organized all his meaningless trysts with a landline.

Danny Townsend: In a way, Brooks is even more disenchanted with romance than he thinks we are. Committed relationships should be attractive to the people in them, not just to their parents, neighbors, or clergymen. We aren't going to lose our appreciation of such real emotional attachments just because technology makes it easier to have a fling. Brooks suggests that the idea of love just can't hack it without "social scripts." I think it's strong enough on its own.