First Comes Love,

Dating is not what it was fifty years ago. Dating is evolving into this gradual process of moving in. It involves nights spent over at one or the other’s place. There’s the toothbrush, then a few items of clothing. All of a sudden, they realize they’ve moved in. —Pamela Smock, University of Michigan Institute for Social Research “So, catch me up. What’s going on with school? Your love life?” I asked my friend Sara at our monthly girls’ night in. “School is fine,” she said, glossing over the de- tails to get to what she really wanted to talk about: her rela- tionship. “But I’m in a stalemate with Adam,” she confided. Her boyfriend of over a year had just dropped the bomb that he wasn’t sure if he was ready to get married. She told us, “He says he is waiting for some sign that this is right. I’m twenty- five and he is twenty-seven, shouldn’t we be moving toward • 9 • 1 First Comes Love, Then Comes A Little Bit Married h‚ j Why the Long-Term Relationship Has Become the New Romantic Rite of Passage 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 9 marriage? And now do I just wait around for him to be ready? My time is valuable.” Right, in other centuries women gave their virginity, now the equivalent is our time. The room fell silent as everyone channeled some version of their own cur- rent or past “Adam” situation. My grandparents went on five dates over a ten-month period before my grandfather proposed. They were happily married for forty-seven years. Nowadays, five dates is the point when you’ve friended each other on Facebook and are in the midst of a series of coy e-mail and text-message exchanges. The era in which my grandparents courted was defined by a compressed time frame—everything happened very fast. It’s the opposite today; the courtship and dating rituals have been elongated. In another not-so-distant time, to even sleep in the same bed—let alone live together as a couple—was considered an unspoken agreement to get married. But today, as Evan, twenty-nine, who has been dating his girlfriend for six years, puts it, “You can start your life without a gold band on your fin- ger.” Marriage is no longer the big bang it was for earlier gener- ations. There is now a huge stopgap between dating and marriage—it’s a place where young men and women are forming long-term relationships that have many similarities to marriage, yet aren’t quite. Welcome to the age of A Little Bit Married. The Odyssey Years In a widely circulated piece, “The Odyssey Years,” David Brooks, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times, recently pondered 10 ‚ A Little Bit Married 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 10 the new pathway to adulthood. He wrote, “There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adoles- cence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.”1 Professor Michael Kimmel, a leading researcher on men and masculinity and the author of Guyland, says his bird’s-eye view of the dating landscape is “dizzying”: “Today, I see a lot of young people leaving college and eventually they start dat- ing and drifting in and out of a state of arrested development.”2 Are we a generation defined by the hook-up culture of ca- sual sexual encounters? It’s true that shows like Entourage and The Hills popularize the image of singles on the prowl for a dif- ferent sexual partner every night of the week. And in real life, many twenty-somethings are angsting over the protocol after a one-night stand. However, there is another story line to Genera- tion Y romances that sounds more like, “What should I get his mother for her birthday?” Long-term relationships are an equally common romantic state of affairs. In her “Sexplorations” column for The Columbia Spectator, student Miriam Datak- sokvy documented the sex lives of her peers for two-and-a-half years. She observed that there are two ways to be romantically involved when you are in college: hooking up or intense monogamy, otherwise known as the “college marriage.”3 In fact, a Pew Research study found that about a quarter of unmarried Americans (26 percent or about 23 million adults) say they are in a committed romantic relationship4—this First Comes Love, Then Comes A Little Bit Married ‚ 11 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 11 means that well over half of the eighteen- to-twenty-nine set are or are seeking to be coupled.5 “A Little Bit Married” is a term I coined to describe a new romantic rite of passage taking place among the urban, college- educated, under-thirty-five demographic: the long-term, un- married relationship. Yet, despite its pervasiveness, multi-year dating for young people is terra incognita, whose terrain we are just starting to map. For Gabby, twenty-eight, the half-decade she spent dating her boyfriend was a precursor to marriage: “We had dinner with his parents, went on each other’s family vacations—we basically did all the same things that we now do now that we have a marriage license.” Robert, twenty-four, says A Little Bit Married is an apt description for his year-and- a-half relationship: “I realized I was in deep when I went to two Passover Seders with her, and I’m not even Jewish. We go on vacation, do holidays with each other’s families, and I flew across the country for one day just to be her date at a wed- ding.” For many, A Little Bit Married (ALBM) is a relationship pattern that they ebb in and out of for a good part of their twenties and thirties. It’s not unusual, as many ALBMs noted, to stop playing house with one partner and then move in or start seriously dating another. Serial monogamy is back, except now it comes with a dog and a shared mailing address. Jason, twenty-eight, dated his girlfriend for over two years and de- scribed their dynamic as “very domesticated.” “We were like an old married couple, except that we didn’t have rings.” Chloe, thirty-one, has been A Little Bit Married a few times in her twenties. She even went as far as talking about buying a house 12 ‚ A Little Bit Married 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 12 with one of her long-term boyfriends, stating, “You share things with the person like you are married, but you aren’t, which can be quite confusing.” Signs You Are ALBM The baseline ALBM definition I’ve come up with is being in a monogamous non-matrimonial relationship for at least twelve months. In practice, however, what being A Little Bit Married means varies dramatically. Maybe you and your boyfriend have lived together long enough to reach what many states would deem a legitimate common-law marriage. Or maybe you’re not living together, but are fielding questions from relatives about where you two would like to eventually settle down. Perhaps you’ve talked about honeymoons, or made geographical adjust- ments to accommodate the other’s career. Tara, thirty, who dated her boyfriend for four years before getting engaged, cap- tured a prevailing theme: ALBM is all about living in the hypo- thetical. “When we were A Little Bit Married,” she said, “everything we talked about was qualified with an ‘if.’ It’s not the kind of conversation I would have if I were talking to my husband.” Sure, prolonged dating is full of fun coupley things: there are anniversary dinners, vacationing together, and owning a dog. But ALBM is riddled with emotional baggage. We are giv- ing up on dream jobs and other goals to be close to our partners. We’re settling for each other’s foibles and imperfections as if we were married. And more often than not, we’re emotionally, First Comes Love, Then Comes A Little Bit Married ‚ 13 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 13 QUIZ: ARE YOU A LITTLE BIT MARRIED? 1. My boyfriend and I have spent the last three holidays together. YES or NO 2. We live together. YES or NO 3. His parents and I talk on the phone. YES or NO 4. We’ve been on each other’s family vacations. YES or NO 5. We’re casual about using statements like, “When we get married. . . .” YES or NO 6. We talk about and plan for the future. YES or NO 7. I often wonder, “Where is this going?” YES or NO 8. If I got a great job in another city, he’d probably move for me and vice versa. YES or NO 9. I’ll be ready to get married within the next year. YES or NO 10. I don’t think my boyfriend is ready to get married anytime soon. YES or NO For every “Yes” give yourself a point. If you scored above a six, you are one of the millions of ALBMs. jh jh jh jh jh jh jh jh jh jh ‚ 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 14 First Comes Love, Then Comes A Little Bit Married ‚ 15 financially, and psychologically banking on these relationships turning into wedding invitations—when many times they don’t. The consensus from those in the throes of this life stage is this: A Little Bit Married is a gray area. And a gray area is the midwife of relationship stress. Beth, twenty-eight, says “percolating anxiety” described how she felt about the future and the meaning of the past three years that she and her boyfriend, Alex, had spent practi- cally living together and integrating into each other’s families: Where is this going? Where is the ring? Why is he not propos- ing if we spend every holiday with his family or mine? She explains that, “It was difficult being in a state of unknown.” Beth recalls the many occasions she raised the question of her future with Alex: “At the time, he said he wanted to finish graduate school and then see where he was at. That was two years away. I was so baffled that he didn’t know where we were at. I definitely felt like he was putting the brakes on the whole marriage thing. I wish I had had some guidance during that period, because it was really tough.” Nina, thirty, who has been dating her boyfriend for five years, says dating for half a decade took her by surprise: “It never oc- curred to me that this would be a form of a relationship . . . that I could be dating someone for this long without it being legally sanctioned by the state. Yet we definitely function like a married couple, in that we know each other’s families and live together.” It’s a morass of confusion out there about how to swim through this life stage toward marriage and not just tread water. 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 15 And, as Beth points out, it’s hard to hold back when you get deeply entrenched with someone, not to mention their friends and family. A Little Bit Married isn’t only about always having a plus-one; there are a bevy of issues with which to contend during this period of marriage-lite. Couples have to negotiate how to harmonize their career goals, how to live together and manage the problems that come with domesticating, not to mention figuring out how, or if, to take the next step—crossing the marital readiness gap. There are custody battles over the parrot or about apartments with rents that can’t be paid be- cause the “breadwinner” isn’t ready to tie the knot. It’s a life overshadowed by the looming questions: Is this right? If it is, how do I know? You are beyond the point of being just boyfriend and girlfriend, but you aren’t married, so you exist in this constant state of limbo that even the most intrepid daters can find unsettling. But here’s the thing: Just as there are rules for casual dat- ing, shouldn’t there be rules—or at least guidelines—for rela- tionships that will take up the better part of our early adulthood? Why Is Everyone Dating for Such a Long Period of Time? It’s now become the norm for couples to date for three, five, even ten years.6 But after a few years, people get restless. Lilly, twenty-six, who has been dating her boyfriend for three years 16 ‚ A Little Bit Married 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 16 and currently lives with him, says she’s gotten the A Little Bit Married itch: “It’s hard for me because I’m such a planner, and it feels like I have no control over when it happens.” Melanie, thirty-two, now married, says she hit her wall at five years: “At our four-year anniversary, I was kind of like, whatever, but at half a decade, I thought I was wasting my life.” Many A Little Bit Marrieds say that while they’ve been dat- ing, they’ve seen friends circle through a whole “life cycle”— they’ve met, gotten engaged, married, bought a house, and have had kids during the duration of the ALBM’s relationship. Here’s a bit of context for why you and all your friends are plodding along with no imminent plans to send out save-the- date cards. Let’s start with this: The median age for a first marriage in the United States is the highest it’s ever been— 27.1 for a man and 25.3 for a woman7—and it tips even higher in many cities. As people have postponed walking down the aisle, other new dating rituals—prolonged courtship and cohabitation—have become socially acceptable. In fact, the number of cohabiting couples has grown more than ten- fold during the last forty years. Forty years ago, in 1970, only about 500,000 couples lived together in unwedded bliss; now, over five million opposite-sex couples in the United States live together outside of marriage.”8 A 2005 article in the Detroit News came close to calling the rise of cohabiting couples an epidemic, complete with a governmental response: “The bur- geoning number of cohabiting couples—about 8 percent of American households, and most between the ages of 25 and First Comes Love, Then Comes A Little Bit Married ‚ 17 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 17 18 ‚ A Little Bit Married 34—has sparked a national discussion among sociologists and researchers about the political, social and economic ramifica- tions of so many marriage-wary people living together. It also prompted the Bush administration to push for more marriages with the Initiative for Healthy Marriage.”9 As you’ll see in the chart on page 19, there is a massive cultural shift taking place about how people go about tying the knot. A Little Bit Married is a product of modernity. We live in a time when loose and undefined dating structures have become the norm. Remember, though, that formality was a large part of the dating culture for previous generations. In early parts of the twentieth century, a man would “pin” a woman with his sports pins or give her a class ring as a sign they were now “an item.” Though many have eulogized courtship and formal dat- ing, that might be overstating and oversimplifying how people today date, but what is indisputable is that dating has funda- mentally changed. And yet, although it seems like a modern phenomenon, Dr. Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of Why Him? Why Her?, says the story of A Little Bit Married is an ancient one: “Hunters and gatherers had relationships that were akin to A Little Bit Married called trial marriages. A trial marriage, very much like it is today, is when you move in and try it and see how you get along together, and if it doesn’t work out, then you don’t have to go through the full number of rituals. They are very com- mon in tribal societies.”10 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 18 DATING: THEN AND NOW Dating How Your Grandparents Did It How You Do It Age Meet your mate, get married Go on 875 bad dates, in your early twenties, buy a sign up for Match.com, house, and have two kids by and then get married in twenty-six. your late twenties or early thirties. Become an adult at Twenty-one Thirty-five College Go to college to get your Go to college to get M.R.S. degree your B.A. with high honors and then start globe-trotting. Dating ritual Courtship Long-term relationship Dating I want to find my mantra Get married soul mate. Career Work for one company Work in eight different and retire with a gold watch jobs before your forty years later. thirtieth birthday. Cohabita- Living together outside of Today, 5.2 million tion wedlock was considered unmarried heterosexual scandalous. couples live together. To be married in your twen - ties means . . . You were in the majority. You are in the minority. Conven- You’re an old maid if you’re Don’t get married tional an unmarried woman at thirty. before you’re thirty. wisdom “Marriage What people believed. What? I was raised is forever” by a single parent. ‚jh jh jh jh jh jh jh jh jh jh 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 19 Fast forward a few thousand years to the 1850s and you can also see the origins of A Little Bit Married, according to Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University. She argues that, as the industrial revolution proceeded, adult children were gradually freed from parental control over their choice of when and whom to marry. Men and women became increasingly free to choose their mates, and romantic love, based on a couple’s sense of compatibility and shared feelings, became the ideal.11 A Little Bit Married is that idea on steroids: It’s the ultimate statement that taking your wedding vows is a genuine choice. Jeffrey Arnett, a research professor who studies twenty- somethings and the author of a seminal book on young adults called Emerging Adults, attributes the radical change in court - ship to the loosening up on the timeline of when someone should become an adult. “The concept of emerging adults,” he states, “didn’t even exist before Gen Ys, because in previous generations there was no transition into adulthood, you just be- come one.” Today, there’s a common conversation between par- ents and children that often sounds something along the lines of: “When I was your age, I already had a mortgage, a career- track job, and your mom was pregnant with your little brother.” The zeitgeist today, however, is captured by lines like: “I’m in no rush. There are developing countries to visit and graduate degrees to be accrued.” The timeline to adulthood now looks a lot like the continent of Africa—sprawling. Arnett’s analysis mirrors what the vast majority of the men and women I interviewed expressed: What’s the hurry? Right, 20 ‚ A Little Bit Married 9780738213163-text:5.5x8.25 10/13/09 2:10 PM Page 20 exactly, especially when there are multiple careers to be forged and climates to be cooled. Mark Golin, the former editor of the lad magazine Maxim, described how an American man’s adolescence may now last until age thirty-five or forty: “In the past you grew up at 21 and you were a sober, productive part of society. Now, you have guys who are 35-year-old 17-year-olds. When it comes to dating, they’re out pulling some girl’s pig- tails. It is not grown-up behavior.”12 Flexibility Is Convenient Another factor driving us toward long-term dating is the scat- tered geography that fosters a great deal of impermanence. Young people today lead a peripatetic lifestyle. The map of a twenty-something life often looks like a cross-country road trip or an around-the-world ticket. You grew up in Denver, went to college in Boston, migrated to New York for your first job, did a stint abroad in Australia, and then moved to Washington, D.C., for your second job. Nathan, twenty-five, is one of these nomads. From college in San Francisco to a year abroad in Chile to his first job in New York, he is now on the brink of transplanting himself again, this time to graduate school, which could mean going back to San Francisco or perhaps to Boston or Philadelphia. He has been dating his girlfriend Alli- son for