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    Dating
    Dating
    Dating
    Ebook58 pages50 minutes

    Dating

    By The School of Life

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    About this ebook

    • A PRACTICAL GUIDE: to dating in the modern world. 
    • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S 'LOVE' SERIES: focusing on the joys and sorrows of relationships. 
    • ADVICE AND GUIDANCE: on how to make the most of our dating years. 
    • AN INDISPENSABLE ROAD MAP: to the highs and lows of dating.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe School of Life
    Release dateJul 23, 2020
    ISBN9781912891320
    Dating
    Author

    The School of Life

    The School of Life is a groundbreaking enterprise which offers good ideas for everyday living. Founded in 2008, The School of Life runs a diverse range of programmes and services which address questions of personal fulfilment and how to lead a better life. Drawing insights from philosophy, psychology, literature, the visual arts and sciences, The School of Life offers evening classes, weekends, conversation meals and other events that explore issues relating to big themes such as Love,Work, Play, Self, Family and Community.

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    • 3/5
      Good ideas but doesn’t really explain it clearly. This book made me interested in some topics I never thought about before.

    Book preview

    Dating - The School of Life

    A BRIEF HISTORY OF DATING

    Our present dating habits can feel like a natural part of existence, but in reality, they’ve only been around for a very short time and (we predict) won’t continue for too much longer in their current form. Dating has a history, which it pays to try to understand as we navigate the ritual’s often paradoxical and tumultuous aspects.

    We can take a selective look backwards – as well as a peek forwards – at the history and future of dating:

    1489, Medina del Campo, Spain

    In a treatise signed between England and Spain, the two-year-old Tudor prince Arthur is formally engaged to Catherine of Aragon, who is at that point three years old. It’s an extreme example of what is an entirely normal practice all over the world in the premodern era: Relationships are thought of as strategic transactions between families, where the feelings of the couple themselves are of no importance whatsoever. The idea that you might love, let alone be physically attracted to, the person you ended up married to would have been deemed profoundly irresponsible, if not plain peculiar.

    1761, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    The publication of Julie, a novel by the French Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, becomes the fastest-selling book ever written. The novel tells the story of Julie, a young woman from an aristocratic family who is expected to marry someone of her standing, but, contrary to all the rules, falls in love with her middle-class teacher, Saint-Preux. However, they cannot get married because of the differences in their social status.

    Rousseau is on the side of the unhappy couple – and his novel is the first major statement of the idea that relationships should essentially be founded on the feelings that exist between people, and have nothing to do with class, lineage or family concerns. But as yet, Rousseau and his novel see no way of upturning the social order: You still marry who your parents and society tell you to, but now at least, with Rousseau’s help, you can feel very sorry that you have to.

    1855, Rome, Italy

    In the major Italian novel of the 19th century, I Vicere by Federico di Roberto, two characters, Lucrezia and Benedetto, are in love but can’t marry because Lucrezia’s mother refuses to give her permission on the grounds of social propriety. Crucially, the mother is shown to be old-fashioned and narrow-minded; couples formed by ‘reason’ are, the novelist suggests, a lot less happy than those guided by instinct. The book works with the growing Romantic assumption that relationships should be based on sentiment and that the best chance of finding someone we can get on well with over a lifetime is not to fixate on what their job is or whether they come from a good family, but whether we experience an overwhelming physical and emotional attraction in their presence. Marriage should be a sanctioned union consecrated by a wondrous feeling.

    1892, London, England

    The most successful comic play of the year, Charley’s Aunt, turns on the fact that Charley has invited Kitty to lunch on a date but, at the last minute, learns that his aunt won’t be able to join them. This creates a panic because a dating couple should have a chaperone, an older woman whose presence will ensure that nothing very intimate can be said or done. Charley’s solution is to get a male friend to put on a dress and impersonate his relative. The comedic atmosphere of the play suggests that the old rules around dating are firmly on their way out and are accepted as having some of the fustiness of a maiden aunt. The audience is meant to agree that dating couples should be left on their own to discover how they feel; there should even be an option for a little kiss at the end if things go swimmingly (as they do for Charley and Kitty).

    1914, Eastbourne, England

    The young George Orwell gets into trouble at school when he is caught reading Youth’s Encounter by Compton Mackenzie, the first novel published in

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