Moira Weigel is a journalist and an academic and — until very recently — whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, The New Republic, and other publications. She's also someone who used to go on dates. (Weigel is married now, and she's not in one of those go-on-dates-with-others kinda marriages.) Weigel began researching the history of dating shortly before she started dating the man she would marry and the results of her research was just published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. Weigel agreed to answer a few questions in advance of her reading in Seattle tomorrow.

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When was dating invented?

The first people to "date" — to go out and look for romantic and sexual partners on their own — were the young Americans and recent immigrants who moved to cities looking for work around 1900. The expression "date," to "have a date" or "make a date" comes from the practice of writing down someone's name in your calendar or datebook. Unlike the Jane Austen characters who came before them, working girls in this era were busy! They had places to go, things to do.

Before the invention of dating, your parents and relatives or maybe another adult from your community, like a priest or rabbi or matchmaker would have set you up. And they would have supervised your relationship closely. Women basically weren't allowed to go out to male spaces like restaurants or bars. Certainly, not with a stranger. In fact, the first women who "made dates" were often arrested on prostitution charges. Authorities assumed that any woman going out to meet men was up to no good, and warned that dating was a first step on the slippery slope toward "white slave hell." That's right, white slave hell.

It was only after World War I as more and more women start going to college in the United States that dating starts to become middle class, and therefore respectable. Then getting asked out to a bar or restaurant becomes something to aspire to rather than a disgrace.

Do people still date? Don’t the kids just hookup or "Netflix & chill” these days?

The first thing that I learned when I started to research Labor of Love was that the invention of dating is the invention of the death of dating: As soon as young people, and young women in particular, start taking the initiative to go out and meet people the ways they want, you get their parents and other authority figures shrieking that they are not doing it right. So Netflix and Chill is different than dinner and a movie, yes. But dinner and a movie itself was a new and shocking phenomenon once. It wasn't all dinner and a movie from the dawn of time until the invention of Tinder.

I have seen many cases where casual hooking up progresses toward a formally acknowledged relationship, where people talk about dating or having a boyfriend or girlfriend. So I think the social institution of dating — and more importantly human sexual desire and love — remain alive and well.

How has technology — dating apps in particular — changed dating?

Dating apps have changed our dating lives in many of the same ways that they have changed the rest of our lives: They have made them both more flexible and more precarious. Now just like we can use our phones to find an AirBNB or an Uber we can use apps to find a partner anywhere, any time. They give us more options, which can be a great thing. But apps can create paralyzing illusions of infinite choice and coerce us into doing new kinds of work. It's like: Just answer three more OkCupid questions! How different is it from the annoying way you constantly get nudged by LinkedIn? These are literally the same protocols.

Basically the history of dating constantly changes in tandem with the economy. And the rise of the digital gig economy means that a lot of us are sexual freelancers now. Many dating relationships feel like unpaid internships. You don't know where it's going. But you might get a free lunch?

What’s your idea of a really bad date? A really good one?

Hm. It's hard to generalize, but I actually think that my favorite dates are dates that help you put a person in context. It is nice to see someone's life, whether this means meeting someone's friends, or simply doing something that they like to do — something that feels more personal or original than the coffee or drinks date job interview for sex standard fare. Especially if you're a straight woman, it's always nice to know that someone you are seeing is not a murderer. So doing some things with friends first can be a nice way to do that.

My least favorite dates were always the stuffy ones, the ones that felt too try-hard or as if they were trying to impress. Of course it's also no fun when you meet one of those spreadsheet people, one of those nerds —usually straight dudes — who think that they can use dating sites or apps to "optimize" their romantic and sexual options. I have literally known men to keep spreadsheets and do half a dozen coffee dates in a Saturday!

But to loop back to history I think that the truly worst dates in history must have been the ones where women got arrested. I mean, Netflix and chill may not be dinner and a movie, but it's a whole lot better than dinner and jail.

Moira Weigel reads from Labor of Love and takes questions tomorrow at 7 PM at Elliott Bay Books.