In this fascinating piece, Molly Gorman & William Park describe how Europeans have been flirting and propositioning each other over the past couple of centuries. The remarkable thing is that not much has changed over those five centuries.
18th century England is where the idea of a “marriage market” i.e. a market where men & women go out and look for a partner was first born. Soon, all manner of contraptions – from fans to flags – were created to allow one party to signal to the other their interest:
“In novels by Regency era writers such as Jane Austen, characters often pursue marriage for financial or social prospects – but love tends to win by the end. Marrying for love became a “widely celebrated ideal during the 18th Century”, says Sally Holloway, research fellow at the University of Warwick in the UK and author of The Game of Love in Georgian England. People emphasized finding love before marriage, as opposed to developing love for someone later, “not dissimilar from how you would assess compatibility with a partner today,” she says.
A love interest might develop at one of society’s social events. Holloway says that there was fun to be had in subtle flirtation in these public settings – for example, there was a “language of fans” during the period, “but it was more a bit of fun than a serious method of communication”.
In 1797, the designer Charles Francis Bandini created a fan on which he printed a coded alphabet in tiny, ornate lettering – to allow women to send messages from across the room. The fan, called Fanology or the Ladies Conversation Fan listed different hand positions to indicate each letter in a similar fashion to semaphore, which was a method of communicating employed mostly by sailors using coloured flags.”
However, there were settings where fans did not work. For such settings, other methods were invented in 19th century Europe:
“Fan signals were useful at crowded and noisy dances, or where discretion was required. But in closer quarters, men and women could use scents to “stimulate and strengthen feelings of love and sexual desire,” says Holloway. Liquid scents were also applied to love letters in order to entice a lover.
Holloway says that men during the Regency era typically presented women with a wide range of gifts, from flowers to miniature portraits, to show their affection and suitability as a partner. “Couples would check that their disposition and outlook on life were suitably similar by exchanging books as tokens and underlining the passages that they most agreed with,” says Holloway. “In their letters, they discussed their hopes and fears, their moral views, what they hoped to find in marriage, and worked to build a closer emotional bond.
In return, women “typically presented men with handmade items such as embroidered ruffles and waistcoats to indicate their domestic skill and time invested in a suitor, and pressed flowers such as violets, which symbolized their modesty, truthfulness and faithful love,” says Holloway.
The two most symbolically important gifts were locks of hair – a physical piece of the loved one’s body which would outlast their time on Earth – and a ring, which symbolized their hand in marriage.”
In the second half of the 19th century, photographs made their entrance into the marriage market:
“As photography became more accessible and widely distributed during the Victorian period, more people had the chance to see likenesses of celebrities and even royalty for the first time. Friends and family could also exchange mementos of each other. And soon the technology sweeping through British Victorian society found a romantic purpose: the cartes de visite – a portrait photograph around 9cm by 6cm, pasted onto a piece of card that could be sent to prospective lovers…
Originally made famous by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert before becoming more accessible to the middle and upper classes, the cartes were “part of an individual’s construction of themselves in relation to a wider collective identity,” wrote Plunkett in a paper published in the Journal of Victorian culture.
Cartes provided some people with their first and perhaps only opportunity of having their photo taken. As with modern dating apps, a carte could allow them to make an impactful first impression. “You’re going to dress up in your Sunday best,” says Plunkett. People included something of their personality, showing themselves reading, or posed in a way that showed how dominant or demure they were.”
And, finally in the 20th century came dancing and nightclubs where prospective partners could meet & flirt. Interestingly, before the Nazis made a mess of things, Berlin was the place to party in the Europe of the 1920s:
“Around this time, in the 1920s, Berlin became the poster city for ultra-modern night life. Some Berlin clubs were “immense, multi-level, with movable floors and even water for water ballet shows,” says Jennifer Evans, a professor of 20th Century social history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and author of Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin.
Technology of the time enabled dancers to flirt in busy clubs. The Berlin nightclub Residenz-Casino, known familiarly as the Resi, became famous for offering night-clubbers the means to contact each other using either a telephone or an elaborate system of pneumatic tubes from their table. Like the tubes used in internal office mailing systems, department stores and banks to send money from the shop floor to the back office, a message could be stuck inside a metal canister and pushed into a tube, where it was sucked by a vacuum to its destination.”
In fact, in Ms. Gorman & Mr. Park’s telling, the modern practice of flirting via texts has its origins in the Resi nightclub in Berlin:
“Someone could write a message on paper and send it to a switchboard, where an operator would read to ensure it was polite (a bit like, an early example of content moderation on social media today) before diverting it to the recipient’s table. Alongside messages, gifts “from cigarettes to small trinkets to cocaine” could be bought and sent to the intended love interest, says Evans.”
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