How To Date Like It's 1958

An advice column from a vintage women’s magazine recently resurfaced, dishing out pearls of wisdom on how to nab a husband. Disillusioned by digital dating, Courtney Thompson steps back in time to give the retro rules a try

- Courtney Thompson

My therapist was talking about a game. Seated on the plush cream sofa in her office, eyes damp and stinging, I didn’t get what her gaming hobby had to do with me.

“You see, Courtney, I enjoy playing and talking to the people I game with, but when it’s over, I can put it away and not let it affect my life,” she said. “Because the world I enter when I game, it isn’t real.”

There it was.

Unlike my therapist, I’m not a gamer … per se. Depending on how you look at it, the game I play is far more treacherous: I use dating apps.

I am what you’d call a veteran of online dating. I signed up to OkCupid, swiped on Tinder, messaged on Bumble, made prompts on Hinge, flirted with Feeld and was even accepted by the celeb-favourite and exclusive Raya. The online dating boom coincided with my graduation from high school and relocation to the city, meaning the vast majority of my love life has played out digitally. I eventually got bored of the traditional dating app options and discovered that platforms such as Instagram were also potential avenues for romantic connection.

None of this is revelatory; Meg and Tom were falling in love over email in 1998, catfishing was a phenomenon worth its own television show in 2012, and a 2019 Stanford study confirmed online dating is now the most popular way people find partners. But 2020 took our reliance on digital forms of connection to a whole new level, as we were forced inside and starved of real-life social interaction. In December, Hinge reported that since the pandemic took hold, one in three users have felt a greater sense of urgency about finding someone.