The Dating Manual Unlike Any Other

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Hi, Heather.

Hi, Willa.

Heather Schwedelle, you are my colleague at Slate and you also regularly cover celebrities.

Yes, and I especially enjoy following their love lives.

On that note, did you see the news about Joshua Jackson from Dawson's Creek and Jodi Turner-Smith, the model and actress?

Jodi Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson are calling it quits.

Jodi has filed for divorce from the actor after four years of marriage.

Yeah, I always kind of liked them.

I did too.

And I noticed this one weird thing as I was reading all the comments under posts about them.

A lot of people were saying that they knew their marriage was doomed from the start.

How did they know that?

Apparently, Jodi Turner Smith was the one who proposed to Joshua Jackson, and according to all these commenters, that broke an unwritten rule of romance that the man should be the one to do that.

So they were never going to last.

Hmm, I don't know.

I don't know what I think about that.

I know, but it caught my attention because I've been thinking about one of the places where rules like this have been written down.

It's a best-selling dating manual from the mid-1990s.

And what is this dating manual called?

The Rules.

Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr.

Wright.

And what are some of the rules in the rules?

Well, one is don't laugh or talk too much.

Another is never accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday.

And of course, don't make the first move.

This is the 90s.

Isn't it okay for women to speak to man first?

Sure, but he won't love you.

He won't want to.

He won't chase you down the block.

It's not the 90s anymore, but the rules haven't really gone away.

You can laugh on a date.

You can talk, but who still pays for the first date?

And who's supposed to propose?

Yeah, all of these ideas are still just very in the water.

Right.

And I wanted to figure out why they've been so persistent.

So this might be a little forward of us, but we have a proposal for you, our listeners.

Would you drop everything and join us like right now to dig into the ongoing relevance of the rules?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

The dating manual, The Rules, was controversial from the day it was released.

Some people loved it and swore by it.

Others thought it was throwback hogwash that flew in the face of decades of feminist progress.

The resulting brouhaha turned the book into a phenomenon.

In this episode, Heather Schwedel is going to dive into the rules.

She's going to look at where they come from, how they got so popular, and why they've been so sticky, whether we like it or not.

So today on Decodering, the rules was retrograde, but was it good advice?

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This is electric performance redefined.

Heather's gonna take the lead.

The story of the rules begins when the writer Sherry Schneider was a young professional dating in New York City.

I had been to a Jewish matzo dance.

It was like a thousand people.

And I thought, tonight is my night.

How can I go wrong with a thousand people?

I didn't meet anybody that I liked.

Dating is always difficult, but in the early 90s, the ramifications of feminism, the sexual revolution, and AIDS made it feel uniquely so.

The old ways were out, but the new ones weren't clear.

Men were no longer solely in charge, but were women?

What did that mean for sex and marriage and even just who was supposed to ask whom out?

If I was at an event and no guy that I liked was talking to me first, I might approach someone and then it never worked out.

Sherry was floundering in this strange new world.

As she struggled with single life, she befriended a woman around her age, an accountant who was in the New York City dating scene too.

Her name was Ellen Fine.

She declined to speak with us for this episode.

But unlike Sherry, Ellen had a strategy.

She said, you know, there is a formula like never speak to a guy first, play hard to get.

This popular girl in high school told her about it.

Apparently, in high school, Ellen had known a pretty prom queen type, but she's not where the advice started.

Rather, Ellen said the prom queen had gotten the info from her grandmother, who around 1917 had more suitors and marriage proposals than she knew what to do with.

Basically, there are just some innate things that you must do when you're dating.

That's Ellen Fine on a 1990s TV show.

Initially, Sherry was as skeptical of dating advice from the 1910s as anyone might be.

And I thought, like, no way.

I thought, you know, feminism, we're supposed to do whatever we feel like.

And that should apply to men as well as careers and everything.

But what Sherry was doing wasn't working.

And it wasn't working for her friends either.

Ellen and I would meet girlfriends in the city once or twice a week for dinner.

And everybody, no matter what they did for a living, MBA lawyer, doctor, every single one that chased a guy or was too available got dumped.

And we just said, you know what, we have to write this down.

Nobody can remember anything.

And we don't have time to be on the phone all day telling people what to do.

So we just said, let's put it in book form.

So she and Ellen set out to codify this playing hard to get approach to turn it into a whole system with, you know, rules.

Ellen and I live near each other in the city and she came to my apartment once a week And we just talked for a couple of hours and we did like a chapter a week.

They ultimately came up with 35 different rules.

They include the rules you've already heard and a bunch of others besides.

Like number 18, don't expect a man to change or try to change him.

And number 31, don't discuss the rules with your therapist.

The overarching message was, don't chase a man.

Let him chase you.

These ideas were so out of fashion, so at odds with the gender politics of the 90s, that even when Sherry was deep into writing the book, she found it difficult to take her own advice, especially after she started seeing a man she really liked.

It was hard.

I was like, I can't believe I can't call him.

You see him once a week the first month, twice a week the second month, and then never more than three times a week for the whole relationship.

Labor Day weekend, I could only see him Saturday night.

I couldn't see him Sunday as well.

And he asked me to see him the next day, and I said, I can.

And he said, why?

And I said well I'm going to the gym and I have some errands to do and he said that's why you can't see me?

And he just shook his head and said okay.

But despite how unnatural it felt, she actually seemed to be getting somewhere.

I could tell it was working because on the second date he said that's when my brother proposed to his wife.

On the third date he mentioned nephews.

He was always bringing up marriage, family.

I was seeing the results every week.

Her doubts disappeared.

Her friends' romantic lives had improved.

Her co-writer Ellen Fine had gotten married.

And Sherry did too, to the guy she had turned down on Labor Day weekend.

As far as she was concerned, the rules worked, and she and Ellen wanted to take them out into the world.

We had no interest in fame.

We really just wanted to tell the single girl that was suffering that She shouldn't speak to a guy first, you know, that she shouldn't initiate a relationship because the guy has to make the first move.

So to understand the appeal of the rules and also the critique of it, I want to look a little closer at the manuscript Sherry and Ellen began shopping around town, starting with rule number one.

Be a creature unlike any other.

Now, when you hear this rule, you might think, okay, this book is beginning by encouraging women to have confidence, to embrace and celebrate who they are.

That's actually where Sherry says this rule comes from.

Sometimes women would talk to us and they had such low self-esteem, they didn't feel like they were good enough for a man or pretty enough for a man.

And I think one of us just said, you know what?

You know, like you're, you're a goddess.

You're a creature unlike any other.

But it turns out, being a creature unlike any other does not mean you are good enough or pretty enough as you are.

You have to look feminine.

You have to look, you know, desirable.

So long hair and hoop earrings and feminine, you know, not short hair or glasses.

No glasses.

Thin, feminine.

And as a person with curly hair, I take particular offense at their habit of recommending everyone wear their hair long and straight.

Being a creature unlike any other is really being exactly the creature women have long been expected to be with all the typical Eurocentric white beauty standards that go with it.

This kind of thing is all over the rules, an injunction that sounds pretty reasonable, but turns out to be very conservative.

Like rule number two, don't talk to a man first and don't ask him to dance.

In other words, let him come to you.

Again, I think there's a kernel of wisdom embedded here, and it's that you can't make someone be interested in you.

I don't think you snuff out that interest by saying hi first, but I don't think you should waste your time on someone who isn't showing interest in you.

But Sherry and Ellen are saying something more extreme.

To initiate with a man just goes against biology.

This is biological.

Biologically,

the truth that men love a challenge, that they are born to pursue, that they must pick you.

Now, in my experience on dating apps, rather than being born to pursue, men seem flummoxed by anything more challenging than swiping right.

But my anecdotal skepticism aside, what Sherry is using here is the language of evolutionary psychology to express a very old idea.

Men chase, women get chased, and this is not because of social convention.

It's because of nature.

This kind of biological just-so story suggests we can't blame anyone for how we date and mate, and we certainly can't change it.

It's also the kind of flawed logic that can easily lead to claims about why women aren't temperamentally fit to be leaders or even have full rights.

But romantic advice like this, aimed at heterosexual women and predicated on seeming certainty about how men and women just are,

is grounded in something.

It's just not biology.

It's history.

For centuries, courtship mostly took place in young women's homes, where it was a a given that they would be passive participants in the process.

Men did the work and women's families were present to chaperone and ensure everyone stuck to the appropriate script.

In the early 20th century, that began to change.

Women started working outside the home and spending more time in school.

Dating moved into public spaces, like movie theaters, restaurants, and dance halls.

Around this time, advice columnists warned women to downplay this relative empowerment.

They should behave as though men still had all the control over courtship.

The 1923 dating manual, The Philosophy of Love, gives a woman a whole host of things not to do, including, quote, show her eagerness or that she desires to hold a man in any way.

It was only in the 60s and 70s that dating advice for women started to change as a reflection of larger shifts in society.

Some of it just became sex advice.

Hold it.

That book.

Of course, Sex and the Single Girl, that titillating bestseller by Helen Gurley Brown.

And there were other books too, The Joy of Sex, Nice Girls Do, and How to Make Love to a Man.

And then there were other books like The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Dating that gave women permission to approach and flirt with men.

And in the Mii Decade, books like Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and Women Who Love Too Much, both written by psychologists, emphasized the importance of staying true to yourself, being transparent and authentic as you pursue the right kind of man.

The rules flew in the face of all of this, not by dispensing something actually new, but by going back to the past.

In the introduction, it explains that all the rules come from that popular girl's grandmother back in 1917.

And her advice would fit right into a dating guide from the 1920s or 30s, 40s, or 50s.

Don't meet him halfway or go Dutch on a date.

Don't rush into sex.

Stop dating him if he doesn't buy you a romantic gift for your birthday or Valentine's Day.

There was one thing about the rules that was new, its tone.

Sherry and Ellen's tough, straight-shooting style made all their advice seem campily modern and feminist in swagger, if not in content.

They sure sound empowered, whatever advice they're doling out.

This combination of modern packaging and old school advice would prove to be irresistible, though that wasn't immediately apparent.

It was impossible to get them any media in the beginning.

Tina Andriadis was the rules publicist at Warner Books, which published the book around Valentine's Day, 1995.

Despite the initial failure to make a splash, neither she nor Sherry nor Ellen were quite ready to give up on it.

They started setting up seminars.

Sherry and Ellen were just like, they were a good two-woman show.

I mean, they were really like authentic and they believed in his rules so much.

They would walk into a classroom full of women, grown women, lawyers and divorcees and career women who had been having trouble dating.

And they would just start taking questions.

They would not like

like sugarcoat anything.

So someone would raise their hand.

Okay, so I went out with this guy, second date, you know, he slept over.

Wait, he slept over, forget it, like move on.

Tina could see how their certainty appealed to the women at these seminars because it appealed to her too.

I remember once, like, I had this guy, and we went out a couple of times and he seemed good on paper.

And then she said, well, how'd the date end?

Because that was very important to the rules.

Had the date end.

I'm like, well, he didn't walk me home.

Forget it.

He doesn't love you.

I never forget that Ellen's like, he doesn't love you.

I was just like this 25-year-old publicist.

And I was like, oh my God, these guys are amazing.

They're going to find me a husband.

They're going to find everybody a husband.

And the world's going to be great.

When Tina noticed how captivated women were by the Sherry and Ellen show, she started inviting journalists to observe.

That's how NBC's Dateline ended up stopping by in 1996 and capturing this exchange between the duo and one of the attendees.

I am living with a man.

I pursued him.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

You're my man.

Do you care about me?

All this other stuff.

Has he ever brought up marriage?

No.

You want him to marry you, basically.

Yeah.

Then you have to move out.

Move out.

You have to move out.

Listening to this clip, I can understand Sherry and Alan's appeal.

They are just so certain.

They make dating seem simple.

Of course, it's not.

But the allure of the rules is that if you follow them, it could be.

All you have to do to land land a husband or avoid a devastating breakup is check all the boxes.

As journalists and everyday women attended the seminars and witnessed this kind of frank assurance, words started getting around.

They were doing more press, more people were coming to seminars, and sales were picking up.

And then, in July of 1996, After the book was released in mass market paperback, it paid off spectacularly when one of the most famous women in the world helped send the rules into the stratosphere.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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In the summer of 1996, Princess Diana was about to be officially divorced from Prince Charles.

Her love life was one of the British press's favorite topics, and she was rumored to be romantically involved with a rugby player.

The couple have apparently exchanged nicknames and intimate gifts.

It's also been alleged that Carling phoned Diana three to four times a day, some chats lasting for hours.

This all came to a head in early July when the rugby player's wife, herself a TV presenter, announced that she was sending Princess Diana a copy of a new dating book called The Rules, with one section highlighted.

Rule number 23.

Don't date a married man.

Sherry and Ellen happened to be in the UK as all of this was going on, and they saw the press frenzy firsthand.

We were leaving to go back to New York, and in the airport, every tabloid had the rules on its cover.

They realized their book could be all all over the American press, too.

We sent the article to page six.

It was just like the floodgates open, and everybody wanted to know what book Princess Di was sent, and everybody wanted to know why we were turning dating upside down.

The book started to really sell.

It hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list in October of 1996.

That same month, the authors were parodied on Saturday Night Live.

And here's a rule that always trips me up a little bit.

It really did screw me up.

Rule number 14, never date a married man.

Oh, never.

Why?

Because married men are already married.

Sure, SNL was mocking how reductive some of the rules were, but clearly a lot of readers were eager for just that.

Rules support groups sprang up all over the country.

Fans began calling themselves Rules Girls.

Sherry and Ellen started charging $250 an hour for consultations.

They sold merch.

You could buy a rules dating journal, a rules lipstick, and an anklet that said C-U-A-O, which is short for creature unlike any other.

The rules was everywhere.

Watch out, fellas.

The dating game just got a lot tougher.

Women out there are arming themselves with a bestseller.

Tips on how to play hard to get to get you to the altar.

It's called the rules.

The rules became a part of the zeitgeist in a way few books do, even popping up on Sex in the City.

when Charlotte defends its approach to Miranda.

You have to be, it's the only way to deal with men.

Oh, that's healthy.

Relationships are not about games.

They're about mature and honest communication.

Games are empowering.

If you know what you're doing, you can totally control the situation.

Ellen and Sherry were proto-influencers, brand creators, before we use those words.

And their book became something that also didn't have a name yet, a hate read.

So at what point did it start to feel like a backlash had arrived?

Oh, immediately.

Karen Carmatz Rudy was an editor who worked on the rules at Warner Books.

It's not even like a backlash, because a backlash would presume that a book came out and everybody was in favor of it.

There was instant controversy with this book.

People were right from the start

either in the camp of thinking it was great or in the camp of thinking it was horrible.

And both camps were crowded.

For every person who bought the book and a journal to go along with it, there was someone who disdained it as trashy, inane, conservative, best-selling crap.

There were op-eds about it and parody books and a lot of censure from feminists.

The head of the National Organization for Women disparaged it in an interview.

You can't speak to a man, she said, and you should hide your personality?

It seems anti-feminist and manipulative.

Men themselves caught wind that women were using the rules on them.

and many of them didn't like it.

Writing in the New York Times, Douglas Martin quipped that the book was written by two predators who parlayed their tricks into what they suggest may be heaven on earth, marriage in the suburbs.

But as with any contemporary hate read, all the ire just kept the rules right where it wanted to be, in the middle of the conversation.

And then in October of 1996, that conversation made it to the biggest stage of all.

The rules isn't just a book, it is a movement, honey.

Sherry and Ellen summited the Mount Everest of the publishing industry, the Oprah Winfrey Show.

And it was clear from the start of Sherry and Ellen's appearance on her daytime talk show, Oprah liked the book.

If you're looking for a man or you need a little help with the one you got, this may be the best advice on love you're going to get, girl.

For the first half of the episode, Oprah did her Oprah thing, one of the most famous women on the planet, interviewing the guests as a relatable audience stand-in with plenty of questions about dating.

Don't talk to a man first and don't ask him to dance.

Right, if you're at a party or a restaurant and a man doesn't come up to you that you think is cute, too bad.

Because we were.

So the moment's just gone.

It's past.

It's over.

If a man likes your looks, he'll come over to you.

And if he doesn't like your looks, down the line, it won't be very good for your relationship.

Really?

Really.

A woman can get, can become a CEO.

But maybe he will like your charming ways, your insight, your personality, your...

No, he has to like your looks first.

If he doesn't like the way you look, you can have the most wonderful insights and be the most wonderful person in the world.

He will move on eventually.

Okay.

In the second part of the episode, the show leaned into the controversy and welcomed a guest who hated the rules, a feminist writer and scholar named Regina Bereca.

It says, don't talk so much.

It also says, don't be funny.

It says, don't laugh too much.

You can laugh with your girlfriends, but you cannot laugh with a man.

You're not supposed to have a sense of humor.

Life is only possible if you have a sense of humor.

They were both from Long Island, and I am originally from Brooklyn on Long Island.

And so if you watch the program, we've become increasingly fishwives from Brooklyn and Long Island.

That's Regina today.

She is now a writer and English professor at the University of Connecticut.

I was astonished by the stuff that I heard on those pages.

It tells women what they're doing wrong, as if it's somehow all our fault, as opposed to, you know, 3,000 years of misogyny.

The most telling moment of the appearance came when Oprah asked Regina about an age-old warning, and the rules authors leapt into the fray too.

These women who jump into bed on the first date, I mean, it's what our mothers told us.

It doesn't work.

In the end, it doesn't work.

But neither does what our mothers did.

I mean, we have zooms over

30 years from what our mothers want to do.

Let me ask you a question.

I'm just presenting the point.

A mature woman should trust.

Regina is saying, I think a mature woman should trust her instincts.

This exchange is at the crux of the debate around the rules.

It was about what feminism had won for us and what it hadn't, what it couldn't.

Women had made advancements in the preceding 30 years.

And yet this was still a society and culture that dismissed Anita Hill, that objectified and teased Monica Lewinsky, one in which sexism was alive and well.

And what the rules was saying was, this is reality, so deal with it.

We can have our careers by being bold, but if we want husbands, we're going to have to fall back on age-old guidance, on the stuff that supposedly worked for our grandmas.

So accept that you will be called easy if you have sex on a first date, and don't do it.

How it should be and how it is is,

you know, we want to deal in reality.

But when feminists heard this, they were aghast.

How could the response to all the progress we'd made and to the fact of lingering sexism be to just throw up our hands and insist we go back in time time to make ourselves smaller, to suppress our desires, to hew to ancient rules.

The idea that you were supposed to be some kind of mysterious, exotic, invasive creature seemed to me to be

not only a dismissal of, but a dismantling of everything that women had been fighting for.

But some women didn't want to fight.

and they didn't have time to wait for things to change.

And the rules, in its way, took that predicament predicament on.

Inevitably, as the decade ended and the new millennia started, the rules would begin to lose steam.

Ellen Fine even got divorced, an event that came accompanied with all the expected tabloid schadenfreude and headlines like, rules writer didn't play it by the book.

In one interview, Ellen actually apologized.

She hadn't followed the rules.

I got laxed, she said.

My biggest mistake was that I was too tired for date night.

But despite the hullabaloo, one author's divorce couldn't kill the rules.

The passage of time couldn't kill the rules.

New best-selling advice books couldn't kill the rules.

And the introduction of a whole new online mode of dating couldn't kill the rules either.

Because it's possible that nothing can kill the rules.

We'll be right back.

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It's been almost 30 years since The Rules was published, and it's still kicking around.

It got an update for the age of texting and Facebook in 2013.

In September 2023, the authors released the Rules Handbook, a guide for creating lasting and loving relationships with a small California publishing company.

The two authors are still teaching classes and doing consultations, and Ellen is even remarried.

They remain as committed to the rules as ever.

Ellen and I believe in what we're doing, so it's not a problem.

I mean, you can wake me up in the middle of the night and debate the rules, and I'm like, no, when you really believe in something, you want to share it with the world.

So they're still sharing the rules, and people are still responding to them.

People like Alicia Williams, a speech pathologist in New Jersey.

Alicia comes from a religious background.

She didn't get a lot of relationship guidance and ended up getting married young to the first man she dated.

That didn't work out.

I did get married and we got divorced a few years later and I thought to myself, I have no idea what I'm doing.

I need some rules.

I literally need some rules.

I walked in the bookstore and I said, I would love some rules.

And I walked over to like the dating section and lo and behold, there was a a book literally called The Rules.

And I thought, well, this is just fate.

Alicia considers herself a progressive person, but the clarity of the rules resonated with her, especially when she started dating a man she liked.

They got on really well, but they drove around together a lot.

And he had this one habit that made her feel awkward.

He was really quiet on car rides.

But Alicia knew the rules backwards and forwards, and the book stated exactly what to do in this situation.

Sometimes men just want to drive in silence without saying a word.

Let them.

So she did, even though it was hard.

Sometimes I would sit there thinking, is he into me?

Well, I guess he is.

He has his hand on my knee.

So, you know, he's into me, but he's just not saying much.

He was into her.

They got married in 2018.

Alicia appreciated the rules so much that even before she got married, she became a certified rules coach.

This means she took one of Sherry and Ellen's courses and is now officially qualified, not to mention financially incentivized, to spread the gospel of the rules far and wide.

Alicia is hardly the only woman out there to have discovered the rules in the last decade.

If you go on Facebook, you can find groups with hundreds of members following the rules together.

And the rules lives on in other ways as well.

Listen to this video from Tinks, a popular TikTok creator, who frequently doles out dating advice to her 1.5 million followers.

She starts by telling them what not to do.

None of this when we hanging bullshit.

And if a guy asks you, hey, what are you doing tonight?

You're busy.

Even if your only plan was to sit home and watch Bravo and eat popcorn and ice cream.

And don't even think about accepting weekend plans after Wednesday.

Sounds pretty familiar, right?

When they first published the rules, Sherry and Ellen wrote down and codified, by their own admission, pre-existing advice that they were savvy enough to revive revive at a rare moment when it had fallen out of favor.

And it caught on again because, specific advice aside, it addressed a real conundrum.

Women had made all of these advances, and yet dating still sucked.

And as much as things have changed in the 30 years since, that has not.

Dating still sucks.

Online dating may have opened up a world of infinite possibility, but nearly every woman I know feels like it hasn't helped.

Just like it did in the early 1990s, everything feels more confusing than ever.

Sherry agrees and will tell you that's why the rules are more necessary than ever.

There's more technology, less mystery.

Like it used to be that you went on a date, you couldn't find out anything about each other.

Having said that, if you do the rules in every area, you can create mystery.

I know when I first got on dating apps, I wasn't sitting there flipping through the rules.

I only dimly knew of the book's existence.

But I also totally knew this kind of advice existed, in the way it's always existed.

And one of the things that quelled my anxiety was knowing that I could let the guys take the lead.

Let him talk to me, like rule number two says, or let him text me, like rule number five would say, if texting had existed in 1995.

If I scrutinize this, I can't defend it.

It doesn't seem at all fair or sensible that men should have to take the lead.

But also, I sure as hell don't want to do it.

It's a relief to follow the age-old heterosexual script, however lousy it is.

The comfort of slipping into these classic hetero-roles is the heart of the problem.

Our most intimate and personal relationships and attractions can be the last things to accept equality.

Think about another area where women are sometimes advised to be assertive, to act essentially like a man.

Salary negotiations.

We're often told that we aren't paid as much as men on average because we don't ask for higher salaries.

But this ignores that women aren't treated the same when we do ask.

People may say that they have no problem with a woman being forward or asking for what she wants, but do they call her aggressive and dismiss her in practice?

The Rules has advice on how to handle this double standard.

It says you can get around it by behaving how women used to.

Not because you're some Patsy, but because you're the one in control.

The Rules says letting a man take the lead isn't about being passive.

It's about her actively trying to find a man who will make an effort.

Something that, in my experience on apps, they so rarely do.

And it promises that if you follow the rules, you can get what you want, which in the middle of the dating quagmire can take a lot of optimism and fortitude to believe.

So I don't begrudge anyone who follows the rules.

They're not idealistic or romantic or how I want to be dating, but I see the kind of certitude they can bring people.

And so I find myself thinking about them, seeing them everywhere, noticing people still using them, wondering if I should, and hoping that one day I'll have forgotten how hard dating was and how much I once cared about some silly old rules.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Heather Schwedell.

And I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written and reported by Heather Schwedell.

Decodering is produced by Willip Haskin and Katie Shepard.

Derek John is executive producer.

Joel Meyer is senior editor producer and Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

We'd like to thank Benjamin Frisch, Rachel O'Neill, Penny Love, Heather Fane, Ellis Batuman, Laura Banks, Marlene Velasquez-Sedito, Lee Anderson, and Caroline Smith.

We also want to mention two sources that were really helpful in researching this piece.

Labor of Love by Moira Weigel and a paper called Shrinking Violets and Casper Milquetoasts by Patricia McDaniel.

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