Labor of Love (14 page)

“Going steady was the thing to do in my high school,” one of Herman's students wrote.

“The fad in my school was going steady,” another corroborated. “You either went steady or you never went.”

*   *   *

That was basically how it worked at my high school, too. A handful of boys and girls were known to hook up with each other without committing to any one boyfriend or girlfriend; the rest of us whispered about their liaisons with disapproving fascination. But most of my friends passed through cycles of being celibate, then being coupled, and back. They seemed to assume, as I did, that we would each go through a string of partners until by some mysterious mechanism, one of them turned into The One. Then we would stand side by side, in pairs, as the screen faded to black.

Such a simple trajectory seemed natural when I was fifteen; now my faith in it strikes me as naïve. But the first adults who noticed that teens were beginning to date this way found their behavior strange and scandalous. Columns offering personal and romantic advice were becoming a common feature of American newspapers during the 1940s and '50s, and the new class of nationally syndicated experts seemed to agree: Going steady was a terrible idea.

Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer was the most strident. Writing under the pen name Dorothy Dix, Gilmer became one of the highest-paid female journalists in the United States. At the peak of her popularity, she had millions of regular readers around the world. And as early as 1939, Dix was warning young women against the “insane folly of ‘keeping company.'” “The custom has all of the worst features of marriage and none of its advantages,” she wrote.

Doris Blake agreed. Blake was another pseudonym, for a woman named Antoinette Donnelly; her column was syndicated in forty-five daily papers nationwide. In 1942, Blake published a lament for the good old days of high school and college dances, where young men cut in on girls and girls filled up their dance cards.

“It's simply a pernicious habit grown out of we-don't-know-what that has fostered this ridiculous custom of a couple of 16, 17, or 18 year olds pairing off to the exclusion of everyone else on the dance floor,” Blake fumed.

The advice from the
Baltimore Afro-American
was more measured. The largest black-owned paper in the country, the
Afro
featured a weekly column called “Date Data” signed simply by “the Chaperone.” It offered thoughtful advice to steadies experiencing a wide range of problems. But at the end of the day, the Chaperone agreed that young people would be better off dating around.

When one girl wrote in, despairing because her boyfriend had joined the army, the Chaperone reproached her: “Just remember that you are not married to him, and he has a life to live.”

When a fourteen-year-old pleaded for advice on how to save a steady relationship with a boy she knew “talked sweet” to others, the Chaperone was blunt. “Seems as though he's already given you up. However, don't feel too badly about it. When you're as young as you are, it's healthy to be interested in lots of boyfriends/girlfriends, rather than settling down to one steady.”

*   *   *

What were the skeptics so worried about? For one thing, going steady seemed to deprive young people of the pleasures of courting and being courted. In the era of rating and dating, you had to make plans to see a partner. In the 1920s, if a Fusser had wanted to take out a Flapper, convention said he had to call her. If a College Man wanted to see a Coed, he had to propose some activity—a walk around campus, a joyride, or a trip to the movies. Going steady changed this. For the first time in history, it was possible for daters to take one another for granted.

In 1951, the education branch at RCA-Victor made a short film that was used in high school classrooms to teach students about the danger of falling into exclusive relationships. It featured two forlorn steadies, Jeff and Marie. They look like children but already they are feeling bored and trapped. In the opening scene, Marie's mother asks her whether Jeff will take her to the school dance that night, and she wrings her hands in anguish.

“Oh Mother, that's the trouble. Jeff doesn't ask me, he just shows up!”

We then cut to Jeff. He turns out to be equally distressed.

“We haven't agreed on anything,” he sighs to his wiser, older brother. “We haven't even
talked
about going steady. We just sort of … go steady.”

He pauses. “How did I get into this?”

If you were foolish enough to rush into a steady relationship, the fishbowl quality of high school could make it difficult to get out. Peers conspired to enforce the Steady Code. In
Seventeenth Summer
, a clique of boys called “The Checkers” spends evenings loitering in front of the town's most popular date spot. “They watch to see who is having a Coke with whom and to report any violations on the part of the girls who are supposed to be going steady,” Angie, the narrator, explains.

One popular textbook for college “marriage and family” courses claimed that young people who wanted to see more than one person had to resort to “late dating”—sneaking out for a second dinner or Coke or beer after their steadies had brought them home. Was this cheating? Is it possible to betray someone to whom you have sworn to be true for a semester or a summer? It certainly seemed to be possible to feel guilty about it.

If going steady made for less fun before marriage, the authorities worried that it could also harm your marriage prospects. Dorothy Dix warned that it was a lose-lose. A girl could squander her best years on a boy who ultimately left her in the lurch. Even worse, a couple could end up drifting down the aisle out of habit.

Dix was too delicate to point out another likely possibility: that Steadies would find themselves in need of a shotgun wedding. The Catholic Church was not. On Ash Wednesday 1957, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Samuel Alphonsus Stritch, publicly denounced the practice as a trap that would lure children into sex: “Too much familiarity between the adolescent girl and the adolescent boy is dangerous and sinful,” he said.

That year, Catholic schools across the country began expelling students who were discovered to be “seeing one other student to the exclusion of all others,” and a Catholic magazine issued a warning to its readers: “It is impossible for a boy and a girl to be alone together in an intimate and exclusive companionship for any length of time without serious sin.”

*   *   *

Cardinal Stritch was not wrong. In the United States, a long tradition gave courting couples tacit permission to engage in sexual behavior so long as they stopped short of intercourse. One familiar custom in Colonial America was “bundling,” sometimes called “tarrying.” Two young people were allowed to sleep side by side in a bed, partially clothed or enclosed in a sack that shut with a drawstring at the neck. Sometimes a piece of wood called a “bundling board” was placed between them.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin reminisces about how the parents of his first marriage prospect encouraged him to fool around with their daughter. They would invite him over and leave the two of them in the parlor alone. Versions of this wink-winking permissiveness toward serious couples persisted up through the Calling Era.

By the time urban vice squads were breaking up the first daters, many working-class parents had accepted the fact that their children would have premarital sex with their future spouses. In the 1910s, several fathers in New York State successfully sued men who had slept with, then spurned, their daughters, for “seduction under promise of marriage.” The courts that ruled in favor of these fathers implicitly decreed that sleeping with your fiancé was a reasonable thing to do.

In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey had discovered that most of the students he interviewed at the University of Indiana engaged in “heavy petting,” which often included stimulating each other to orgasm. The Kelly Longitudinal Study, a survey of three hundred white couples who started families in the 1950s, found that only 7 to 10 percent of them had only hugged and kissed before marriage. All others had “gone farther.”

But if premarital sex had become common well before the Steady Era, going steady increased the odds that kids would have
pre-
premarital sex with partners they did not intend to marry. Studies conducted throughout the 1950s found again and again that teens believed going steady sufficed to make even the heaviest petting respectable, so long as you did not “go the limit.” In 1961, the sociologist Ira Reiss coined a phrase for the new moral code. He called it “petting with affection.”

It was not all bad. Becoming emotionally intimate with one partner created opportunities to explore that felt safer than casual dates or “petting parties” had. It still does. I remember the long afternoons my high school boyfriend and I spent in the apartment his working parents never came home to before six or seven. Having exhausted the obvious things, we spent hours searching for the body part that could not be made erogenous. Where had we learned that word? The search became a game. We would leave for sports practices and come back saltier. Forced to fumble in the bathroom at some party, I would never have learned the important lesson that
basically nothing is not A Thing.

For young women especially, going steady provided reputation protection. It limited your overall number of partners and let you “neck” with someone who cared about you. The fact that his public image was tied to yours discouraged kissing and telling. Having a boyfriend could also shield you from unwanted advances. In 1963, the girl group the Angels gleefully repeated a steady's threat to an aggressive admirer:
My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble
. Any woman who has been hit on hard can relate. Sometimes, telegraphing or even outright stating that you have no interest in a man will not cut it. You have to drop the “B” bomb—bring up a boyfriend real or imagined—to make him back off.

Still, petting with affection placed a heavy burden on young women. It conscripted them into a kind of police force, tasked with guarding sex. In surveys and studies, teenagers continued to profess that nice girls did not go all the way. Yet they also asserted that most boys would go as far as their girlfriends would let them. The outcome was a setup that subjected girls to constant stress, self-blame, and regret. And the games of brinksmanship that couples played often blew up in their faces.

In the 1950s, rates of teen pregnancy soared. In 1957, 97 out of every 1,000 girls age fifteen to nineteen gave birth. (In 2013, by contrast, that figure was 26.) Between 1944 and 1955, the number of babies born out of wedlock who were put up for adoption also increased by 80 percent. If a girl got pregnant, the parents often simply handed her and her boyfriend wedding rings. There is no reliable data on African Americans for the decade, but over its course, the proportion of pregnant white brides—brides who gave birth less than nine months after their weddings—more than doubled.

The 1958 movie
Going Steady
turned this peril into a source of comedy. In the theme song, the young star Molly Bee breathily conflated going steady with marriage.
I will marry the dream that I adore, the boy that I've been getting ready for
, she murmured.
And we'll be going steady evermore.…

Bee plays a chipper high school senior who elopes with the classmate she has been dating for all of six weeks, when her parents let her accompany him to an “away” basketball game. The couple finds a justice of the peace, who also happens to own an inn and is willing to marry them after hours. They use a class ring as a token of their vows. Because their marriage looks basically identical to steady dating, they plan to conceal it until after they graduate. Their plot takes an unexpected twist, however, when they realize that their wedding night tryst got her pregnant. He moves into her parents' house, and both immediately realize how unprepared they are to start a family. Hilarity ensues.

In real life, however, most young Steadies did not end up going steady forever unless they had to. Instead, they let relationships run their course. Then they did something else that an earlier generation could not have imagined. They broke up.

*   *   *

Steadies invented the Breakup. Going steady was a prerequisite for that specific kind of heartache. In the 1920s and '30s, a College Man might have stopped calling a Coed for dates without offering any explanation. However, she was likely to have other dates lined up. If he privately felt disappointed when she declined his invitation to a dance, he could seize the first chance to cut in on her sorority sister.

For Steadies, however, things were different. A Steady was likely to mean more to you than any given person you went out with. And because so much of high school social life revolved around coupling off, a split meant more than losing a boyfriend or girlfriend; it meant getting left out. The first lovers who
forgot to remember to forget
their exes learned that
breaking up is hard to do
.

After a breakup, most people I know make a point of trying to stay friends. When they run into someone who knows an ex, they say,
Oh, X was one of my best friends in college!
And yet when she calls out of the blue and asks whether you will meet her for dinner, because she is having family problems that only you will understand, you have to admit that dinner is awkward. If he writes, years after you moved out of a place you shared into two tiny, separate places, to ask whether there's any chance you ended up with his college diploma, you say
Sure
, of course he can come over to search the boxes in your basement storage unit. You two grew up together. Yet when my first love does this, I cannot help wondering what he still has of mine.

I don't mean boxes. Looking over faces of which we once had every inch memorized, we realize that our exes must have stashed the selves we were with them somewhere. “Love's monuments like tombstones on our lives,” the young poet James Merrill wrote, heartbroken, in the 1940s. To pick through memories of old love can feel like wandering through a ruin whose intact image haunts your dreams. Scenes from our past lives drift around the Internet.