The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (45 page)

And church may not be the only venue where you can meet guys in an atmosphere shaped by standards that come from beyond our hookup culture. If I were unmarried and looking, I’d definitely try church. But I’d also scope out other pockets of culture where some really old-fashioned ideas are taken seriously—the Jane Austen Society of North America, say, and maybe the Wodehouse and Chesterton societies, too, figuring that men who take old-fashioned and chivalrous ideas seriously at all might be amenable to courtship on other-than-modern terms.

But if I were single and interested in meeting men, I’d also try a really newfangled method. At the opposite end of the spectrum from looking for a mate at church, we have—computer matchmaking. Okay, once again, please hear me out before you roll your eyes and close the book. And right up front, let me tell you that, doing a little informal research over the last few months, I uncovered the fact that
four
of the most attractive and together women I have ever worked with all met their men via internet sites for singles. Honestly, finding out how many impressive women I know have met great guys this way has completely changed how I see computer dating. One of the co-workers mentioned above is engaged, and I’ve heard that the other is about to be. And two are now married to men they met online. One is a thirty-something mom of a two-year-old who’s had great jobs in TV
and publicity. The other was a widow in her forties juggling a high-powered publishing career and raising three teenagers; she’s now remarried. They both met their husbands on
Match.com
.

Meeting men via online dating services is a new option, but it’s essentially just personal ads transfigured by technology. And personals have been around for quite a while. For so long that
the eighty-four-year-old pope’s parents
actually met through a personal ad.
²⁶
(Meeting girls at church wasn’t working for him, apparently.) More recently, but still in the Dark Ages compared to today’s computer matchmaking, Amy Dacyczyn in the 1990sera
Tightwad Gazette
wrote the best argument ever for personals
.
²⁷
Amy found her husband by answering a singles ad in a Boston paper. She points out several reasons that personal ads are a good option. Rereading her now, I see that finding men via singles ads strangely has a lot in common with Jane Austen-era opportunities for meeting guys.

Dacyczyn addresses the most common objections to this kind of match-making—that it’s only for “weirdos and losers,” that it’s dangerous, and that it’s “unromantic.” She gives the now-standard prudent warning against giving out personal information or getting into a car with anyone before you’re sure he’s safe. (Notice that those precautions might possibly improve the pacing of any relationship.) And she says she met some losers, but also some “‘take-charge’ people who refused to wait around for the perfect mate to materialize.” (Those guys sound like Jane Austen-hero material to me.) And she’s got an answer for “it’s unromantic,” too: “Some people believe love should be left up to chance ... all ‘calculating’ methods are unromantic. But, whether they know it or not, nearly all unattached adults are looking for a relationship, and so, on some level, are using ‘calculating’ methods to attract people. It’s rarely a true chance meeting.” She also talks about how you miss opportunities with casual acquaintances and co-workers because it’s not so easy to know who’s available.

This is where computer matchmaking or any other way of finding men by advertisement really starts to have a clear advantage, and a lot in common with the methods of Jane Austen’s day. Ads “tell people clearly that you’re available, rejection is relatively painless, and you can meet a lot of available people in a short time.” You can also present yourself, and screen the guys, based on what you really want. Dacyczyn’s own requirements were almost Regency Era in their clear-sighted realism: “I wanted a man who was at least 6’ tall, single (not divorced), between 25 and 35 and had a good-paying job (plumbers, yes; perpetual students, no).” And she got one. The story of how Amy Dacyczyn first selected four potential guys, then got caught up in a massive project to repaint her grandmother’s house and had less time for going out with anyone, found her future husband suddenly “much more attractive” when the others were frustrated but he volunteered to help out, and ended up engaged “by the time the house was painted” is very appealing.

There’s a lot more room for rationality in a process that begins with some deliberation on your part. But applying rationality to making your own match does
not
have to mean excluding romance (just Romanticism). Computer dating is not unlike letting the master of ceremonies at the Upper Rooms introduce you to a dance partner because you’re in Bath with family friends who don’t have any acquaintance there. That’s how Catherine Morland meets Henry Tilney, and Jane Austen clearly approves. A third party (whether the MC or the computer service) has the job of providing introductions. Both you and the man you meet are free to walk away after a couple of dances (or today, after lunch or a cup of coffee in a public place),
²⁸
or to pursue the acquaintance further. If things develop from there, that’s plenty romantic enough for Jane Austen. If the man you meet that way turns out to be a stand-up human being and you start seriously falling for each other, it’s going to get plenty exciting.

Okay, so computer matchmaking is not Bath at the turn of the nineteenth century. How come Jane Austen heroines have these glittering occasions on which to meet potential mates, and twenty-first-century women have to subscribe to Match.com? Well, those assembly balls didn’t drop out of the sky. Human beings planned them. True, they were drawing on some cultural reserves that have since been exhausted. The social life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and the real, original rules Regency ladies and gentlemen lived by—developed out of a long cultural process. But that process was driven by the choices of individual men and women. If we think Jane Austen and her predecessors developed a marvelous way of arranging matches, there’s absolutely nothing to stop us from taking it as our model.

Social networking sites like
Meetup.com
make it easy to organize local groups of people around any interest. If I were single and looking—and ambitious enough to try for something more like the opportunities Jane Austen heroines had—I’d try organizing something around dancing. Mr. Darcy says, “Every savage can dance.” Sadly, a lot of us highly civilized people have lost touch with this nearly universal human experience, which was a huge part of the social scene in Jane Austen’s day.

On the theory that you can never have enough of everything Jane Austen at any stage of your life, my husband and I have actually done some “contra dancing.” That’s what the folklorists and hobbyists who still practice
it now call the “country-dance” that Henry Tilney compares to marriage.
²⁹
“The man leads,” said one of our instructors, “but it’s not like the waltz, where he does all the work and she just clings on for dear life.”
³⁰
I notice that at contra dances, there’s a lot more of strangers asking strangers to dance than at other similar public events. The style of dancing itself seems to promote more mixing—but a kind of mixing that’s structured by limits. And when I helped organize contra dancing for the kids at my son’s school, you could see the same thing. Dancing with more than one partner is part of the nature of each dance anyway, so it models something more like Jane Austen-era social life than modern people often see. Contra dances seem to be most popular with the kids who aren’t natural “alpha male” or “queen bee” types. They’re a trip back to a time when the mating game was less ruthlessly competitive.

But it wouldn’t have to be a contra dance.
By far
the most successful social event for the kids in my son’s class has been a parent-organized series of dance lessons followed by parties on consecutive weekends. Not the ghastly cotillion thing where the children get shown the box step once or twice but never really learn how to waltz. Instead, two-hour-solid lessons in swing and Latin dance, followed by dinners and then parties at which the kids actually dance because they
know how
. Part of the reason it works, I think, is that one family that helped organize it is from Latin America. When I showed up to pick up my son one Saturday night, I got to hear all about the kind of social life one mom had growing up in Colombia, where dance parties broke out on every possible occasion, and the girls all made sure their brothers showed up so everybody would have somebody to dance with. She married a friend’s brother she had met at that kind of dance—shades of Jane Austen.

But if I can’t sell you on ambitious plans to reintroduce the assembly ball via online social networking, or even on looking at church or online matchmaking—then how about making one simple choice in your own personal life? Try laying down some Jane Austen-style boundaries, wherever and whenever you happen to find yourself in the company of an interesting
guy—even if it’s at a bar. After all, in even the hookupiest of hookup scenes, there
are
men who, like a lot of women, are interested in something they can’t typically get there.
³¹

What happens if you tell the guys you meet, wherever you meet them, that you’re playing by different rules? A married friend of mine was actually on the receiving end of something very much like this from her now-husband. He explained on their first date: the fact that he wasn’t trying to jump her bones didn’t mean he was gay; he found her very attractive, just not worth going to hell for. I think I saw a suggestion for something along these lines—only less jive-cat and more suitable for people whose limits aren’t for religious reasons—somewhere on Susan Walsh’s “Hooking Up Smart” blog: simply tell a guy that you don’t sleep with men you don’t know well.

A girl in my class at the University of North Carolina went a step further than that (and closer to Jane Austen). The scuttlebutt our freshman year in Chapel Hill was that she explained to every guy she went out with that she wasn’t planning on pairing up; she was interested in going out with people, not having a boyfriend. And you know what? It didn’t turn men off at all. They found it intriguing. I think she got more male attention than any woman I knew. And probably had more fun freshman year, too, getting to know different guys in a we’re-all-friends-here sort of way, without allowing her life to be swallowed by one intense relationship, or by all the drama that comes with hookups and breakups.

It is possible to be a Jane Austen heroine in a twenty-first-century world. But only if you’re sometimes willing to swim against the tide. Even in the novels, Fanny and Anne, Elizabeth and Jane are not just living like everybody else. Their circumstances have some advantages over ours. But they’re extraordinary women, willing to pick their way through the “folly” and “vice” around them to value what’s really important, maintain their own dignity, treat their fellow creatures with respect and compassion, and never lose sight of the fact that love is for happiness. If you want a love story like Jane Austen’s love stories, you’re going to have to aim that high.