Was dating and relationships a lot easier in the 1950-60s? (boyfriend, girlfriend)

[fleetiebelle]

Originally Posted by zentropa

Yeah, weird take.

OP, to answer your question, people with your issues were not going to find dating or socializing easy at all. There were few social penalties against bullying and ostracizing people with disabilities...and no authority figures to encourage "acceptance" and "inclusion." You may have ended up being hidden by an embarrassed family or even institutionalized. Even if you escaped that fate and managed to get a date, her family would likely strongly discourage her from being seen with someone with a disability.

And even now, with autism, which tends to be an invisible disability; a person who has a hard time recognizing social cues, reading between the lines of a conversation, or showing empathy is going to struggle with dating. In a time when that behavior wasn't widely understood? Even more difficult.

[arleigh]

I think people have become more selfish.

[shelato]

A lot of the reasons people have problems with marriage that cause them to want to divorce are just as common today as back then, like personality disorders and mental illness, but because it was a lot more difficult to get divorced, people had more problems getting divorced and were trapped in bad relationships. Alcohol use was higher in the 50's, but drug use really didn't start picking up until the very tail end of the sixties, so in terms of substance abuse that might have been less common especially for women who seem to drink less than vs today. So substance abuse on the whole is likely higher today, meth and Fentenyl just weren't the issues that they are today. Marijuana was available, in the late sixties, but was much less potent.

More men had seen combat and so there were likely more men with PTSD.

Women were under much greater social survelience. The sexual revolution didn't occur until the late sixties. Young people, but especially women were much more likely to live with their parents before marriage, but even when women moved out of the house, they were likely to live in housing with curfews and people watching over them. Residential Halls and sororities often had house mom's who looked over women and enforced curfews. When women moved to big cities, they often moved to residential apartments for women only where again, their were curfews and their was an older woman enforcing curfews and preventing men in rooms overnight or men in residents with out doors open. My hunch is that all of this social survelience likely did reduce date rape, so that might have been a plus in terms of date rape, but likely a negative in terms of bodily automony for women. Its a little hard for me to accurately guage the actual rate of date rape because a lot of women don't talk about it or report it, but there are estimates that it could be as high as 1 in 4 women today and the US leads the world in date rape, so maybe this is an area where things were better back then than today. Women today have a larger number of sex partners and spend more time not being married. Figure 16-20% of men have personality disorders and 4-6% are psychopaths and 20% of the men have anxiety issues making it difficult to ask women out also the psychopathic men have zero approach anxiety and thus could constitute 20-25% of the men asking women out.

So I am guessing less women had been date raped and thus fewer women likely were dealing with less PTSD.

In terms of the sexual revolution. The pill was invented in 1958. Griswald vs Conneticut which guarentted the right for married couple to get contraception was passed until 1965, but it wasn't until 1972's Eisenstadt v. Baird that unmarried people had the constitutional right to buy contraception and Roe v Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. Now there were some states that had legalized abortion before row, I know California did and in some states contraception was also a lot more readily availble to women, again my understanding was Californisa had liberalized this too earlier, but I am using 1968 and the summmer of love as roughly the time when the sexual revolution happened, but in fact the sexual revolution was probably something that occurred in different states in slightly different time lines.

In terms of the underlying economics of affording to get married, the social safety network was probably a lot more robust in terms of creating the middle class. Most men had served in the military and were able to get access to the GI bill, that raised the incomes of a lot of these men and helped them enter the middle class with no college debt when they got married. Additionally past military service qualified veterans to be able to get little or no money down VA loans. Lastly there were just a lot less growth controls in this period and the interstate freeway act was opening up access to land in the suburbs. That made housing cheap and widely availble. So financially it was fairly easy to buy a home and start a family.

Access to good schools in most areas is a positional good. Part of the reason people need two incomes today to buy a house is because you need the combined incomes of both families to buy into a neighborhood with better schools. But when women's incomes could be used to qualify for loans, that defanged somewhat this financial arms race to afford neighborhoods with good schools. Using women's incomes to qualify for home loans is the big reason women today mostly have a much greater difficulty affording being able to stay at home with the kids when they are little. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I think is going to be an area where different people might come to different conclusions.

But a big point that Elizabeth Warren made in her book the Two Income Trap is that today families are much more financially fragile than they were back then. Today one of the biggest predictors of whether a woman will experience bankruptcy in her lifetime is getting married, but back then marriage increased a woman's financial security. In the past even if the were reliant on one income, if dad got injured or got sick, between unemployment inurance and or disability insurance and mom going back to work at a part time job, it was often pretty common for that lost income to be made up and the family to not go bankrupt. Similiarly if elderly parents needed care as they got older, the stay at home mom could provide a lot of that care and again the family did file bankruptcy. Today families are much more dependent on both incomes. If either working parent gets sick or disabled, the family might end up in bankruptcy because there isn't the same ability to make up lost income. Similiarly, if elderly parents need care again their is no one able to step up and file that role without dropping out of the labor force and when that happens again much higher incidence of bakruptcy. So I would argue the social safety system worked better in the past than today.

Lastly in the 1970's and ealy 1980's the divorce rate shot up to almost 50%. I think some of that occured because people married in the earlier era were in unhappy marriages and when divorce laws were relaxed, some of the unhappily married people got out of bad marriages. But more recently divorce rates have been dropping again. A big part of that the age of first marriage is being delayed past 25. Auto insurance rates are much lower for men over 25, because men's brain's don't finish growing until age 25. This is also thought to be the reason divorce rates are dropping. Guys older than 25 are a much better marriage risk.

[Sonic_Spork]

Couldn't rep you again, shelato, but that's a great post.

Originally Posted by arleigh

I think people have become more selfish.

I don't necessarily disagree but I don't tack on to that any kind of implied judgment. If being selfLESS gets you nowhere but trampled on and taken advantage of... If you remove the incentives for delaying gratification, which people like me grew up believing in, if you make it so that doing the "right" things does not bring about the outcome that is expected... I really don't blame anyone for being selfish instead.

If nasty bland health food and candy had no difference whatsoever in their benefits to one's body or health or teeth then who would pick tofu over Twix? If your choices are:

- Work your backside off full time, never spend money on frivolous things for yourself, be faithfully married and give birth to a couple of kids, raise them as best you can and one day...wait... One day retire? In a house you own? With no debt? HAHAHAHAHA! Not so fast there, scooter. The vultures have sensed you might be just a smidge too prosperous... You cannot afford to own a house, ever. You cannot afford to retire, ever. Your partner doesn't give a damn about your feelings, thoughts or needs. And your kids are refusing to grow up and expect you to support them for life, apparently. But you are so selfless. Surely you will go to heaven.

Or.

- Apparently one should not have kids if they cannot afford them, should not have sex if they don't want kids, and so the only rational conclusion is that only rich people should be allowed to have sex? I dunno, this whole thing is pretty unreasonable. Maybe just find ways to get our jollies in non-reproductive acts, get a competitive career, make bank, and instead spend life traveling the world or living in luxury. It's all probably gonna burn before our kids could grow up anyhow. Oh, but you will get old and die alone, wuh boo hoo, huh? lol. Like my kids wouldn't just put me in a home. Psshhfft.

Selfish? Maybe. Or maybe people are just sick of selling their own lives right out from under themselves from the moment they are old enough to start making any choices at all.

[tinytrump]

Originally Posted by Sonic_Spork

OK so I just did the math and if you're talking about people who married around, say, age 20, in say, 1955, they'd be 87 years old now.

A LOT of things have changed since that generation was getting married. And I don't even know where to start with the weird premises you put out here.

"successfully" married. Successfully? What does that mean exactly? Do you include households featuring a raging alcoholic who terrorized everyone else? Do you include those who eventually divorced? Simply getting married by 30 when it was the default norm of society and women's opportunities to live independently were severely restricted, does not carry much weight.

And women could not have their own bank accounts or credit cards or get housing on their own. Birth control? Not in the 50s. And for decades later it would be a matter of contention in various places whether unmarried women should be allowed to have it (they might have sex! Gasp!) or if married women should be allowed to have it (because the family is for breeding!) so even after it came around, it wasn't really seen as something a woman was entitled to.

I mean, being a conservative, you might find it to be far more acceptable to subjugate women and demolish their freedoms so that more men can have what they want. A wife and kids that cannot leave, no matter how he treats them. For "society." For "the common good."

I admit, we do have a bit of an issue here. Because a lot of people in the modern world want to actually ENJOY THEIR LIVES. And frankly, raising a family is hard. It's often thankless brutal work. And if you don't believe in a reward in an afterlife, then it's pretty hard to justify spending all your lifetime slaving away to benefit others and never getting any kind of a payoff for yourself. The left ideology says, "make life less punishing, including raising a family, and more rewarding so that people will choose it." (carrot.) The right says, "No, you have to take away people's freedoms and smash them into a rigid societal mold that dictates their choices and punishes deviance from the norm" (stick.)

Dating...man, OK I can see how it might look like a frustrating and elaborate BS game to someone who holds to stick thinking, when women just seem to want carrots. But that's what is underneath this, most women don't want our lives to suck. We do not think it will be fun to be a fully employed woman who also is a second class citizen and a slave in our own homes, or to be treated like breeding livestock. So a guy who comes in acting like people are fungible mathematical units and not individuals, who seems upset that society has not issued him a wife unit to go with his picket fence expectations... I mean it stands to reason that being with such an individual ain't gonna be a good time.

But I doubt if you get 1950s results without just taking away all of the freedoms that people (especially women) have fought for ever since then. Some (probably you) think that women were actually happier back then without it. Well, I'm sure that some were. The lucky ones. But the unlucky ones like both of my grandmothers, were stuck living in horror with no way out.

Also? There is not some formula of hours of sustained combat that a soldier must endure to be rubber stamped PTSD. It can be one single traumatic event. I was married to man who was in the Army for 6 of our 18 years together, so please...dude...you know not of what you speak. There are certain things about simply being trained in the military mindset, that can change the psychology of a man for life. Let alone the horrors of war.

Socially challenged people or introverts...

If you were wealthy enough, it probably didn't matter. Or in some communities, one's parents might set them up with someone. But honestly, the degree to which "introverts" now are anti-social probably wasn't much of a thing. No one would be like, "oh, he's just introverted or neurodivergent." They would instead call you a weirdo or an a-hole if you did not act the way society said you should. A shy boy who was afraid to go outside and play with other kids would just get hit until he changed his mind, in probably most households of the 30s and 40s. If you haven't spent much time talking to elderly people and hearing their perspectives, maybe you don't know... People were not making space for autistic types so much back then.

Frankly, it is arguable that a whole lot of people from that generation have/had some kind of PTSD just from surviving some of the harsh realities of growing up during the Depression, let alone if they were involved in the war. But no one really cared and there were no excuses offered, you just got on with life as best as you could.

Perfectly said. One thing to mention is religious views. Even moral ones. Open sex has diminished a lot of trust. Finances is another hindrance to raising a family. I know three in the family -young couples will not be having kids. Unfortunately a lot of kids live in homes that are not the “leave it to beaver” dreamworld. . It’s all BS - kids hate parents - parents are tired of kids - many are divorced and there are plenty of other blended family units now.
I see more friends as family. Your buddies your BFF. Grandparents have had to have laws implemented to see the kiddos. Fl is full of lonely old people. Good luck in having the kids coming to see you. There is a big disconnect.
There’s a new norm. Come straight in dating or it’s just a one night stand. Women don’t need men and they are not called names, if date more than one guy anymore.
Men have always been afraid of women but now they don’t want the responsibility either. We are also global. Were soldiers used to get foreign gals, now anyone can meet n travel. Things have definitely changed.

[The Dissenter]

Originally Posted by Nancy739

Shy people meet. They meet at church, they meet getting the mail, they meet when they least expect it and from what I have heard over and over is that they end up happily married to the person they thought they would never date and a lot of times under quite unusual circumstances. Love strikes when you least expect it.

Haha, I needed a laugh from an unrealistically funny joke today.

[E-Twist]

In the 70s all of a sudden a lot of the kids I went to school with had parents divorcing. Most of the parents would have married in the 50s. That pretty much shows those relationships weren't all sunshine and roses.

A person with poor social skills wouldn't have done any better in the 50s or 60s. Plus, a man that wasn't financially able to support a wife and children would not have had as many opportunities to date, and sex wasn't going to be as likely to happen just because someone felt attraction.

[E-Twist]

Originally Posted by HoneyWest

Still happens except now they are called "trophy wives".

I was called a trophy wife by rude people and I was treated like a treasure until the day he died.

[artillery77]

The 50's was a love affair of a new stability. The war was over and production was shifting into peacetime...and frankly the economy wasn't necessarily great despite years of pent up demand. Women, who shown their prowness in the supply chain were to be unceremoniously shoved out of their jobs to make way for the soldiers returning home.

If you're last picked and lower paid for a job...economically it would make sense to find a husband. Especially as the dynamics were changing to where it was time to spend money. Spend money to move the family from the crowded and increasingly crime infested inner city and escape to the wide open spaces of a new phenomena we call suburbia....made possible with new interstates being built and tank factories now pumping out cars...cars almost as big as tanks that will be perfect for ferrying your 8 children around. So ladies, go to college for home economics and get yourself an MRS degree.

The US had the world as it's customer as well. Literally every major industrialized competitor had been bombed. It would take the world decades to rebuild, along with nearly 100 nations renouncing their colonial masters and taking their own spin at governance again. US manufacturing was so dang expensive for most of the world and with so much demand that companies dropped traditional stigmas. If you were an Italian only shop, you couldn't compete with someone that would hire anyone. As cities that were once static balkanizations of various groups moved to suburbia....factories began to follow.

While change was in the works, the reality for most women is that the choice was stark. Get married, or live out a poorly paid life where one is likely to encounter harrassment at work, lower pay and limited options for promotion. I mean, the right to even vote had just been won a generation before.

I'd say 95% of people who buy their unspeaking sex dolls from Japan likely have long lasting relationships. Those dolls don't sass back like the live versions of females. They aren't demanding like the live versions of females. They don't spend money like live versions of females. You don't have to entertain them with witty jokes. They'll wear exactly what you want them to. They'll stay exactly where you put them. They suck at cooking and housework, but they don't make a mess either. No periods or moods to deal with. OP, go get a Japanese made sex doll. Leave the ladies alone.

[Lodestar]

I think we thought our issues with dating and relationships were complicated at the time. They are universal.

But today's young have so many more choices than we had which must complicate their decision-making process.