A picture of what dating looked like in the 1950s

A pretty interesting article in dating in the 50s. Found this after looking for opinions on whether dating has become harder over time and not finding anything satisfactory. Even then, I'm still not entirely sure if this article is particularly trustworthy.

Here's a few snippets from the article:

Young adults were in a rush to get married in the 1950s. Brett Harvey reported in The Fifties: A Woman's Oral History that "the median marriage age dropped from 24.3 to 22.6 for men [during the decade], and from 21.5 to 20.4 for women."

Today, just 20 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960, according to the Pew Research Center.

In the 1950s, dating protocol had men in charge. It was considered improper for a woman to approach a man about going out on a date.

As one young man wrote to Seventeen magazine back in 1959: "Once he meets a girl—and becomes interested in her—a boy must indulge in a sly, artful practice called pursuit."

I found this bit particularly interesting, because "men should date women and do their best to impress them" and "women should be subordinate to men" seems like a massive contradiction and a question I had in my mind was "why didn't men force/pressure women into dating them in the past?" It appears the answer was that people didn't perceive being on the receiving end of any given relationship proposition as being the one with deciding power, something which just isn't the way it's seen today, for pretty clear reasons IMO.

Just one complaint however:

Fewer married couples got divorced.

Though marriage rates were higher in decades past, divorce rates were lower.

I don't think that was a voluntary choice people could just choose whenever in the past.