Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

Summary of Labor of Love

1. 1

   When Romance Became a Second Job

   

   00:00

   00:00

   Think about the last time you got ready for a date. The outfit changes, the carefully angled photos, the witty text messages crafted and deleted a dozen times before sending. Now imagine someone told you this was work-unpaid labor you've been performing your entire dating life. Sounds absurd, right? Yet this is precisely what dating has become: an exhausting performance where we've learned to focus entirely on being desirable while forgetting to ask what we actually desire. Dating emerged around 1900 as women left their homes to work in cities, mingling freely with men for the first time in history. What began as a social revolution quickly became entangled with commerce. Unlike traditional courtship that happened in parlors under parental supervision, dating required money-for dance halls, movie tickets, dinners. For the first time, you had to purchase things just to spend time with potential partners. This remains true today, even with "free" dating apps. We pay with our time creating profiles and our attention, which app owners sell to advertisers. Getting users into lasting relationships that might remove them from the platform is secondary to harnessing desires for profit. Our language around dating betrays its transactional nature. We debate whether someone "owes" physical intimacy after an expensive dinner. We call people "damaged goods" and talk about "shopping around" for partners, revealing an uncomfortable truth about how commerce has colonized our most intimate moments.

2. 2

   The Marketplace of Desire and the Birth of Personality

   Start Listening

   The line between sex work and "legitimate" dating has always been blurry. By the 1920s, dating shifted from homes to commercial venues-dance halls, movie theaters, restaurants-that profit from keeping people cycling through. Digital platforms haven't fundamentally changed this dynamic. Early dance halls were social technologies just as Tinder is today, both bringing strangers together and structuring their interactions. Working women pioneered "dating up" in the early twentieth century. Department store salesgirls used their positions to meet wealthy men, becoming expert readers of class signals. But the Shopgirl's appeal went beyond looks-it was about cultivating "personality." Unlike nineteenth-century "character" revealed through moral actions over time, personality became the new currency of attraction. Writer Elinor Glyn called this magnetic quality "it"-a mysterious charisma that helped women win men and sell products. The Shopgirl pioneered using sexual desire to sell unrelated products. As economic activity became eroticized, romantic life required more work. Today, in an economy where few Americans make physical products, we've all become Shopgirls-selling ourselves to sell what we're selling. Your dating profile is your storefront, your personality the product, your matches the customers.

3. 3

   The Political Power of Going Out

   Start Listening

   Dating venues have always drawn lines between who's "in" and who's "out." Around 1900, Ralph Werther discovered New York was full of men like him-"adhesive personalities" attracted to other men. They gathered in cafeterias and dance halls, using secret signals: white kid gloves, red bow ties, green accessories. During Prohibition, Harlem's drag balls became wildly popular, with the annual Hamilton Lodge ball drawing hundreds of drag queens and thousands of spectators. After World War II, gay daters created their own spaces. Jose Sarria transformed San Francisco's Black Cat Cafe into a true gay bar in the early 1950s, addressing everyone as if they were gay. Going out became politically powerful for the LGBTQ community. Spontaneous resistance at social venues-Stonewall in 1969, Cooper Do-nuts in 1959, Compton's cafeteria in 1966-sparked the gay liberation movement. Going out creates relationships beyond couples, building community that's inherently political.

4. Chapter 4

   The Paradox of Sexual Freedom

   Linda LeClair became a national sensation in 1968 when the Barnard sophomore openly acknowledged living with her Columbia boyfriend. The firestorm revealed a fundamental contradiction: the sexual revolution promised liberation but often just deregulated the dating market. Hugh Hefner's Playboy, launched in 1953, sold a fantasy where sex was just another consumer pleasure. When Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmopolitan in 1965, she created a female version - with a crucial difference. While Playboy showed women readers could enjoy and dispose of, Cosmo taught women how to make themselves enjoyable and disposable. Brown told women to date around and enjoy casual sex while focusing on careers, but warned: "There is a catch to achieving single bliss. You have to work like a son of a bitch." The Single Girl wasn't freed from having her worth defined by men - she simply had to perform like a Playboy while making herself into a Playmate. Fun Fearless Feminism succeeded because it was market-friendly. Companies sold women's liberation back to them as products, from Virginia Slims to empowerment cosmetics. The sexual revolution removed regulations without addressing underlying power imbalances.

   Chapter 5

   Love in the Age of Algorithms and Assortative Mating

   By the 1980s, Berkeley's former free-love advocates pursued finance careers, and dating became strategic self-branding. Modern dating balanced serendipity with market strategy-online services promised perfect matches through data, but users first had to narrow their criteria. The decade saw the rise of "assortative mating"-people increasingly partnering with educational and economic equals. By 2005, 48% of university-educated men married similarly credentialed women, up from 25% in 1960. This trend amplified economic inequality as dual-professional households thrived while others fell behind. Yuppies made busyness a status symbol, perhaps the first elite to boast about having no leisure time. Professional matchmaking services charged $500-1,000 annually, using computer databases to match clients-analog predecessors to online dating that trained singles to package themselves as products. As one founder told clients: "You're a product, you're a service... and you're here because you want to mate, date, procreate." Dating had come full circle-once criticized for bringing courtship into the marketplace, it was now celebrated for making romance behave as rationally as markets supposedly did.

   Chapter 6

   The Impossible Standards We Can't Meet

   "Settling" shifted from describing smart matches to an insult. Lori Gottlieb's 2008 Atlantic article urged women nearing thirty to lower standards, calling marriage "a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." Dating guides demand women question every instinct. "The Rules" (1995) prescribed elaborate self-restraint: don't call him, don't accept weekend dates after Wednesday, always end dates first. Pickup Artists weaponize similar tactics. Neil Strauss's "The Game" taught men to destroy women's self-esteem through feigned indifference. This mutual mystification enriches the multibillion-dollar self-help industry. Bestsellers like "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus" insist men and women approach romance fundamentally differently, suggesting dating has a secret code only they can unlock. The truth? We're all just people trying to connect, made anxious by systems profiting from our confusion.

   Chapter 7

   Toward a Third Sexual Revolution

   Dating problems aren't individual failures-they're social issues shaped by inherited roles and cultural forces. American culture treats dating as simultaneously crucial and frivolous, creating enormous pressure with minimal support. Rather than endless self-improvement, we need collective action. Political changes like better healthcare, affordable childcare, and real maternity leave could reduce dating anxiety. We need a "third sexual revolution" celebrating diverse forms of love and recognizing that love consists of acts of care we can extend to whomever we choose. When we recognize love as labor, we can evaluate its worth and distribution. Love requires vulnerability and acknowledging our needs-the fearful process through which we grow. Honoring love might transform dating by treating reproductive work with deserved seriousness, revealing its creative potential. We need each other-not just as romantic partners, but as allies in reimagining what love and connection can be.

   Continue Reading