The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (44 page)

Agreeing to dance with a man was “accepting him” on a temporary basis. A woman got to try out being courted, won, enjoyed, and cherished
⁹
by a particular man—without the risks inherent in our more intimate and unregulated trials and errors in love. The physical nature of the dancing contributed to the trial-marriage aspect of the experience. Who can doubt that Mr. Collins, “awkward and solemn, apologising instead of attending, and often moving wrong without being aware of it,” was as utterly ghastly in bed as he was on the dance floor?
¹⁰
Luckily Elizabeth’s exposure to this unhappiness is limited and temporary; he’s able to give her only “all the shame and misery which a disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give.”

Ironically, it was the limitations that allowed the freedom. Here’s yet another case of that perfect eighteenth-century balance. The society that invented this kind of social life hit on a happy medium. They made it safe (well, relatively safe—as safe as such an inherently life-altering thing ever can be) for women to fall in love. Partly because the rules allowed women to get just close enough to men, but not too close. And partly because those same rules facilitated some up-front screening of the male population. Men whose character made them really bad romantic risks were made unwelcome—by the heroines themselves. True, there was chaperonage from older married women. But Jane Austen, no Victorian fetishist of decorum, is quite scathing about the women who feed their egos by bustling about presuming to manage other people’s love affairs.
¹¹
She expects her heroines to realize it’s ultimately their job, not the responsibility of their mothers or married sisters, to police their own love lives.
They’re
responsible for avoiding men who are obviously bad bets.

We modern women have a curious blind spot on this subject. We’ve got enough historical memory of the Victorian dispensation (or at least of its overthrow at the beginning of the twentieth century) to be vaguely aware of all the fuss about how much leg and neck and breast women could show without being blamed for tempting men. But the opposite precaution—that men were ever expected to curb the way they talk to women—has long since vanished down the memory hole. The danger to women, as Jane Austen and her contemporaries understood very well, is more in what men
say
than in how they look. Our sexuality is auditory where theirs is visual. Men look at porn, we read romance novels or erotica. In Jane Austen’s day, responsible members of both sexes avoided exploiting the weak spots of the other sex. A man who went around telling women he loved them without meaning anything in particular by it could find himself excluded from the company of women worth pursuing.
¹²

You know the good girl-bad girl divide people talk about prevailing in the 1950s? Once upon a time, there used to be something like it for men, too. In Marilyn Monroe’s day, you were a bad girl if you dressed and behaved to tempt men. In Jane Austen’s day, you were a bad man if you told a woman you loved her without having the most serious intentions. Really bad. Worse than Willoughby or even Henry Crawford, both of whom carefully avoid ever going that far—they know they’ll be crossing a line and exiling themselves from polite company if they do. That’s why a “declaration” (of love) always implies a “proposal” (of marriage) in Jane Austen. If a man said “I love you,” it was
totally fair
for you to assume that he meant, “And will you marry me?” The rules for what men could say were tailored to avoid prematurely triggering women’s susceptibilities—considering how swayable we are by male attention, and how quick we are to imagine love as soon as we see admiration, and marriage as soon as we find love—just as the standards for women’s dress were tailored to avoid prematurely pushing men’s buttons.
¹³

With the really “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”
¹⁴
members of the male sex excluded from the field, there was a pretty good chance that a social life built around assembly balls and similar entertainments would give you
the opportunity to fall in love at your leisure. And, if you were taking care of the responsibilities of a Jane Austen heroine—looking for happiness, using those skeleton keys to guys’ characters, discerning men’s intentions, paying attention to the rules, and so forth—you could manage to fall in love with somebody that you would be happy with for the rest of your life.

It was the most pleasant way of arranging marriages ever invented. Not to mention the most dignified. Young women got to choose for themselves; they were no longer at the mercy of parents and guardians. But they didn’t simply let themselves be buffeted about on the tide of their emotions, either. You went about the process rationally, as well as feelingly. You got to have all the thrills of falling in love, but without the tragic repercussions. Jane Austen heroines aren’t irresponsible Juliets—still children whose parents make all the adult decisions for them. They notice the kinds of things that parents or traditional matchmakers notice about men, as well as the things that girls with crushes think about. As a matter of fact, Jane Austen heroines care most about a whole set of things that immature girls and their jaded, materialistic parents are
both
inclined to overlook—the very most important things about the man when it comes to their future happiness.
¹⁵
The virtue of this system was that it allowed women to arrange their own marriages by falling in love—as long as they did their best to let themselves fall in love only when falling in love was likely to lead to “rational happiness.”

But what good is any of this to us?
We
can’t go to assembly balls. It would be quite a trick to exclude the men who don’t follow rules of propriety from our social circle. And if we assume “I love you” means “will you marry me?” we need our heads examined.

How can we expect to have the same opportunities, living as we do in an era where Jane Austen-style courtship has been forgotten? How can we get just close enough to a guy to see if he might be a good mate, without getting too close to see him clearly? Unless we’re willing go along with modern love on the installment plan—however unsatisfactory it may be—how can we even let a man know that we might be interested? Do we simply have to settle for being Mrs. Clays, Maria Bertrams, and Lydia Bennets? Is it impossible to be an Elizabeth Bennet in the twenty-first century?

Well, first of all, let’s examine our assumptions.
Are
we all living in a hookups-are-the-only-way-to-get-started world? And if we are, do we have to?

You know how Alfred Kinsey’s studies paved the way for the sexual revolution in the sixties by busting up the sexually repressive myths of the straitlaced fifties? People read “scientific” evidence that a lot more sex of all kinds was going on than they had thought, and barriers came down. It’s since emerged that Kinsey’s research was worse than seriously flawed.
¹⁶
And that’s over and above the inherent methodological problem. Any survey of people’s sexual habits is inevitably going to get more data from people who are willing to tell strangers about their sex lives than from people who aren’t—which might just possibly tend to skew such studies in the direction of the more sexually experienced and adventurous. But there’s no doubt that Kinsey struck a nerve. He and the sexologists who followed him had enormous influence. For one thing, they provided scientific authority for something a lot of people at the time had reason to suspect from their own experience—that the 1950s myths about sex were often quite different from the sexual reality people were living. The ideal wasn’t as close to reality as they’d been assuming. Not everybody back then really waited for marriage. Not every married person was faithful. Not everybody was interested only in the opposite sex.

I thought of the impact Kinsey & Co. had when I saw stories about a recent U.S. government study involving a survey of 13,500 people. A headline reporting the research expressed shock that there really are some virgins out there; more than a quarter of the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds reported never having had sex. But the even more striking statistic was the numbers of “lifetime partners” for both sexes. It’s just five for men and only
three
for women.
¹⁷

If those results are even close to accurate,
¹⁸
then either there are a heck of a lot
fewer
Carrie Bradshaws and Samantha Joneses out there than you would think, and love lives like the ones on
Sex and the City
are in a real minority—or else, balancing them out in the statistics, there are a heck of a lot
more
women who sleep with only two, or even only with one guy, in their whole life than you’d ever guess. If a lot of us are like Andie MacDowell’s character in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, able to count thirty-odd sex
partners—and many women do “have a high number”—then there must also be more of us with a very “low number” than you’d ever, ever guess. Why is that so surprising? Because it goes against the sexual myths of
our
day, just as Kinsey went against the myths of his. Contemporary “science” on this subject would seem to suggest that sexual experience isn’t as widespread as we assume.

I put “science” in quotes because it seems so absurd to expect that you can achieve anything like scientific accuracy by asking people questions about their sexual history.
¹⁹
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle already ought to be turned up to eleven when it comes to the social sciences—and maybe to twelve or thirteen when they attempt to study human sexuality. Still, survey results like these are at least some kind of indication
²⁰
that a significant proportion of women today are already further removed from the hookup-or-bust environment than you might think, and closer to Jane Austen’s world.

Now a lot of us do meet men in contexts where everyone’s expectations are very un-Jane Austen. Those venues—bars, some kinds of singles groups, parties in many social circles—make meeting men easy in one sense. But, interestingly, that’s because of an advantage that those contexts
share
with Jane Austen’s assembly balls. When you’re at a bar, everybody knows that other people there are “looking.” It’s easy to signal interest without making anyone uncomfortable
²¹
or damaging other kinds of relationships. You can’t so easily embarrass yourself by letting a guy know you’re open to a romantic encounter, the way you might with a guy at work. Unfortunately, what the bar-style kind of venue
doesn’t
have is the other half of the Jane Austen-era formula. It’s not so easy to get just intimate enough with a man to see him close up, without getting so close that you lose your perspective.

But there are other contexts where you can meet guys. Let’s take a look at two venues that already exist, either of which is probably a better setting for a Jane Austen heroine today than the bar or party scene: one that’s really old-fashioned, and another that’s quite new. And let’s start with the old first.
The really old venue (older than Jane Austen, in fact) for finding a man is one we’ve looked at already. You guessed it: church. Okay, don’t groan and shut the book quite yet. First of all, church, considered from this angle, has changed a lot since Samuel Richardson’s day. Now, if a guy sees you there and likes you, he no longer admires you from a distance and sends his friends to ask your father about meeting you.

But seriously, I might never have considered church-going in quite this light—as a viable alternative to bar-hopping—if I hadn’t seen a long comment at one of those “pickup artist” websites, actually comparing the different kinds of dating experiences that bars and churches offer.
²²
The rather smarmy fellow who wrote the comment had apparently resorted to church in pursuit of a new and different kind of pickup experience. What he found was that the rules of the game were different in that different context. At the church, he was pursuing women who didn’t believe in sex before marriage. Under pressure from him, not all of them seem to have stuck to their resolution.
²³
But the speed and quality of the relationships was quite different from the ones with the women he met in bars. At church, he had to get to know them first. The expectations were different, the progress of the physical relationships, and possibly of the woman’s attachment, was slower. The relationships weren’t Jane Austen-heroine-quality. But they sounded quite a bit closer to it than what he was sharing (if you can call it sharing) with the women he met in bars. And just think how much better those women he met at church might have done if they hadn’t had the extraordinary bad luck to meet the guy who happened to be at their church just to see how he could apply “Game” there.

The lessons we can take away from his experience? Even in the most sanctified setting, you will find men of bad character—use Jane Austen’s skeleton keys! But also, there are nooks and crannies out there that the hookup culture hasn’t pervaded. In one of those contexts, your Jane Austen-heroine-style desire to get close enough to guys, but not too close, might be easier to indulge. But remember, the distance a Jane Austen heroine maintains is not just about sex. Even if you never sleep with the guy—even if you never touch him—you’re not being a Jane Austen heroine if you let yourself become emotionally glued to him before he’s serious about you.

“Church” doesn’t have to mean the regular worship service with the long sermon on Sunday morning, either (though Sunday morning church has changed quite a lot since Richardson’s day, too). There are religious groups specifically for young singles in every city that has a bar scene. And in many of them, you’re going to have an easier time keeping the kind of distance Jane Austen heroines make such good use of.
²⁴
C. S. Lewis warned that people “who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”
²⁵
Fair enough. On the other hand, my cousin Michael used to tell his friends, when they were all in the new-parents phase of family life, that there are worse reasons to start going back to church than for the sake of your kids. You can say the same thing about going to church to find your Jane Austen hero—there are much worse reasons to be there.