Strange Details About Dating In The Past

Here's Fun Fact No. 1: Dating didn't exist until the late 19th century. But surely, one might protest, people had to be getting together before then, so what gives? Well, here's the deal, as explained by historians Allan Carlson and Beth Bailey in the audio report "Wandering Toward the Altar: The Decline of American Courtship (via Boundless). In a nutshell, early couples participated in courtship, which is a more formal way of deciding whether or not the other person is marriage material. Partnerships were often arranged, reasons were often based on financial concerns instead of romantic motivations, and meetings took place in a family-chaperoned, at-home sort of situation. 

Dating, on the other hand, is the practice of going out in the big, wide, and more importantly, unsupervised world to meet up with the person of an individual's choosing to have some fun. That's not to say courtship is non-existent in our modern world, but it is different — and that's an important distinction.

Things were starting to shift toward romantic dating during the Victorian era, inspired by none other than Queen Victoria herself. She set an example of marrying with love in mind — famously mourning Prince Albert for the rest of her days — but there were still chaperones in play for many young couples. That went out the door with World War I, and honestly, that's just the tip of the iceberg. So, let's talk dating, how it became what it is today, and the weird, weird things that happened along the way.

Ask anyone what they think of Ouija boards, and they're bound to have a pretty definite answer. Still, regardless of whether they're seen as a diabolical way of summoning demonic spawn or a shameless money grab, Ouija boards have a fascinating place in the history of dating.

It didn't start that way, though. The death-obsessed people of the Victorian era were fascinated with spiritualism, and truth be told, they had a good reason to be obsessed — particularly Americans. Pretty much everyone knew someone who had died in the Civil War, and the prospect of being able to contact them one last time was undeniably alluring. The Kennard Novelty Company soon realized that there was a market for this sort of thing, and mass-producing Ouija boards made them widely available.

By the time the Jazz Age rolled around, they weren't just being used to contact the great beyond — they were being used by couples to get up-close-and-personal in a socially acceptable way. It was such a popular dating activity that it inspired one of Norman Rockwell's iconic Saturday Evening Post covers (pictured). It depicts a young couple with a Ouija board between them, more interested in their touching fingers than anything the board might say. It was based on a real-life couple he saw at a 1919 party at a dance hall, and made the magazine's cover the following year.

Most people think computer-assisted dating really got going in the mid-1990s, but the truth is much stranger: Computer dating had already been going on for decades. Way back in 1957, George W. Crane set up the Scientific Marriage Foundation, and it was every bit as epic as the name suggests.

It was also pretty straightforward. Singles would order some forms, fill them out, and send them in to the company, which would use an IBM sorting machine to pair up likely matches. Crane said it was pretty successful, too, and it was just a few years later that a British businesswoman named Joan Ball went from working in a matchmaking bureau to opening her own, where she made matches with the help of a computer.

Ball's version was the St. James Computer Dating Service, and she sort of flipped things on their figurative head when she decided to use a computer to pair up people based on their answers about what they didn't want in a partner and a relationship, instead of what they did want. She was ultimately forced to sell to another computer dating service called Dateline, which was started in 1966 with some inspiration from a Harvard-based dating service. Even in those early days, there were people outraged at the idea: One columnist from The Guardian wrote (via The Economist) that "no computer — however flashy its innards — can introduce you to anyone whose details [aren't] already in its maw."

While the 1930s saw something of a revolution in terms of what women could do — including living on their own and finding work in an office or shop — there were still limits. For starters, women who were hoping to hit the town and head to some of New York City's biggest and best nightclubs were out of luck if they wanted to go solo or with a group of other women.

Ted Peckham had a solution. He realized there was a massive market targeting women who were visiting the city and had no local connections, and founded his Guide Escort Service. It was precisely that, and employed only the most gentlemanly of gentlemen to serve as a hired date-for-the-evening. That's not an exaggeration: Peckham required a resume that included things like an Ivy League education or connections to royalty, and a steady job. Given that the Great Depression was in full swing, that was no small ask.

Writing of his business plan in a memoir, Peckham explained (via The New Yorker) "We did not permit hanky-panky, and our boys could hold coats but never hands. ... I am not so foolish, however, as to exclude sex completely, for I know it registers itself in everything we do." That said, Peckham required all dates to meet the same standards, regardless of how they ended: "[Escorts] would have to remain the perfect, cavalier, attractive, entertaining, and ingratiating throughout an entire evening, even if he didn't like the woman who had hired him."

World War II changed a lot, including the social landscape of all the countries involved. Teenagers found themselves forced to navigate a world with a whole new set of challenges, morals, and obligations, but they had something to guide them. Short movies inspired by World War II propaganda films were called "mental hygiene films," and covered everything a young person would need to know about. That included dating.

Let's take a specific example (via History). "Dating Do's and Don'ts" was released in 1949, and it started with a young man finding a ticket to a carnival that specified it was for one couple. He's given instructions on how to choose a date, how to ask a girl out, and how to behave on the date once he's there. And saying goodnight? They suggested the proper way to do that, too, and it definitely didn't include being too pushy or too standoffish.

Ken Smith is the author of "Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films, 1945-1970." In a piece for The New York Times, he wrote that thousands of films were made, millions watched them, and they're interesting artifacts that depict life not as it was, but as adults wanted teens to live it. "The students were supposed to believe that what they saw was real and to adopt the film's point of view," he explained, calling them "ham-fisted, dogmatic, frequently brutal... films [that] preached the joys of domesticity and uniformity." Sounds fun!

The late 19th century was a time when relationships were shifting away from courtship into a sort of dating that's more familiar to modern eyes, and one of the reasons it happened is pretty strange. By the 1890s, many church and community leaders were denouncing what they saw as a major threat to morality, decency, and — presumably — all that was good and sacred in the world. That was the bicycle, which skyrocketed in popularity once the ridiculously difficult-to-ride penny farthing gave way to the sort of bicycles still ridden today.

Bicycles are, of course, designed to be ridden by a single person, and that included women like Beatrice Grimshaw. She was known as one of the Victorian era's so-called "revolting daughters," and wrote (via Counter Currents), "I bought a bicycle, with difficulty. I rode it unchaperoned, miles and miles beyond the limits possible to the soberly trotting horses. The world opened before me. And as soon as my twenty-first birthday dawned, I went away from home, to see what the world might give to daughters who revolted."

And there's a key concept in there. The getting-to-know-you phase of courtship had typically been done under the watchful eyes of chaperones, but with the dawn of the bicycle, women could go off on their own. Instead of relying on fathers and brothers, they could — gasp! — step into a pair of pantaloons and ride off into the sunset... and a meeting with a paramour. And then, they didn't look back.