In January 1930 a 27-year-old woman placed an advertisement in the Matrimonial Post. Perhaps it was a new year's resolution after being badgered by the family at Christmas. Act now, or you'll be settling in on the shelf. So what did she hope for, this young woman, who described herself as "in business"? "Desires to meet clean, and if not good looking, at least pleasant man, earning about £5 per week." This was fairly standard in the matchmaking newspapers (which had been going since the late 19th century). Another woman wanted a "homely man, not too stout, well educated, and of sober habits".
Do we smile, or pity, or admire their expedience? How different are these people from ourselves? Social historian Claire Langhamer works carefully through diaries and magazines, watching for the shifting tones and tendencies of romantic love in mid-20th-century England. "Love has a history," she writes, and it's a striking premise, given our tendency to think of love as an emotion that transcends history and geography and much else besides. If love changes, there's a danger of Shakespeare's sonnets going out of date.
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But in fact she rarely gets very close to emotional experience. There's no sense that actually being "in love" felt any different in 1920 than in 1970. What Langhamer attends to is the infrastructure and habits of love: the social rules that determine who you could – and should – fall in love with, the way to meet and court them, the wisdom or otherwise of marrying them. Already we're back in safer territory. Few would dispute that the practice of courtship has a long history involving all kinds of high thrills and sober longueurs, and that today's internet-dating culture (inaugurated in 1966) will soon evolve into something new again. Courtship changes, as do the motivations for choosing life partners. Historians have long been telling versions of these stories.
Still, Langhamer lays out vivid evidence for small changes amounting to something so radical she calls it a revolution. The language of those pre‑war Lonely Hearts, pragmatic as good brogues and three vegetables, is replaced by talk of emotional fulfilment. By the 1950s and 1960s, you would no longer seek out a man who was "at least pleasant". You hoped for a soulmate, you hoped for the love of your life. And increasingly it seemed that "real" love must involve physical attraction. If, on a first date, the "chemistry" wasn't right, then there was no point in carrying on – even if he was earning a good few pounds a week. "Emotional intimacy became increasingly valorised as the key to happiness," writes Langhamer, "it promised self-fulfilment and well-being." People at any time might have felt this, but the trend towards a majority of people feeling it, and publicly expressing it, is remarkable.