Has SMS and the Internet Ruined Love?
David Brooks says yes:
It also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment. Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner.
The internet predates my dating experience, but I was packing up some books at my dad’s house last weekend and came across my copy of Brett Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction. Here’s his depiction of the the “sanctified . . . choice of an erotic partner” in 1985, when Brooks was 24 and there was no SMS or World Wide Web:
Dire Straits or maybe it was Talking Heads were playing downstairs and she was blind drunk and even though she knew this was like sheer madness she couldn’t stop it or do anything else. She passed out and when she came to, she tried to take off her bra but was still too drunk and he had already started fucking her but he didn’t know she was a virgin and it hurt (not that badly, only a little bit of sharp pain, but not as bad as she had been taught to expect, but not exactly pleasant either) and that’s when she heard another voice in the room, moaning, and she remembers the weight on the bed shifting and realizing that this person on top of her was not the N.Y.U. film student guy but someone else. It was pitch dark in the room and she could feel two pairs of knees on either side of her and she didn’t even want to know what was going on above her. All she knew, all that seemed certain, was that she felt nauseous and her head kept banging against the wall.
Now, clearly, there was more to social life in 1985 than this. But still, there it was. Or consider Mad Men’s depiction of dating and marriage—very different from a contemporary situation. But better?
59 Responses to “Has SMS and the Internet Ruined Love?”
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November 3rd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
You would certainly hope there was more to social life in the 1980s than raping women.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Brooks should go read Genesis’s description of dating. use Crumb’s version – the pictures help make it clear what things were really like, back in the good ol days.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Maybe David Brooks misses date rape, Yglesias. Maybe “she felt nauseous and her head kept banging against the wall” is what he meant by “poetry.” Different strokes.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Just cause Bobo is being shallow and stupid doesn’t mean you should follow his lead. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but sex and relationships depicted in fiction are not evidence of dating life from that era.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Dude. Really? Perhaps put the Rules of Attraction passage below the fold with a “trigger warning”? Describing a rape on the homepage is an iffy at best thing to do.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Just more conservative fear of the zippless diddle–I’m sure most of the research for that column was done one-handed.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
It’s a strange trait of conservatives that they take the cozy, romanticized view of life they had as children and rather than place that vision in the context of a maturing mind, they instead ascribe it to be reflective of the age as a whole.
Not as good as Mom used to bake… Indeed it never was.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
I’m pretty much of the “Nintendo generation”, grew up with technology and comfortable with it.
I find the technophobia that has risen in columns by commenters and “pundits” the last couple of years to be disturbing. There is merit to some of their arguments and we really must evaluate the epochal changes that have been going on in human civilization in the last thirty years.
There is no doubt that this is changing human relationships, maybe for the better but also for the worse in some aspects. But I can’t help to think that a good part of the concern is just bit of old cranky “we did it better in my day” resistance to change on the part of people who didn’t grow up with PCs and cell phones.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Wow….I’m glad someone read this column, because I saw it in the paper this morning and couldn’t even get through a skim.
Please, middle-aged yuppie, tell me how to properly be young! It’s so difficult trying to figure out my reality on my own…
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Forget my last post, I forgot that this is David Brooks we’re talking about. Any social commentary he writes is just intellectualized crankiness and “we did it better in 1955″.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
What David Brooks knows about medieval chivalry and Petrarchan poetic conventions wouldn’t fill his high school girlfriend’s navel. Give me a break.
Pretend to know the history of something and then condemn current practices based on zero expertise or examples.
How the HELL do op-ed writers get their jobs? Quit school early?
Does he know there are universities?
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
That is such a silly article. This is the heart of it:
The dynamic Brooks describes doesn’t actually require a particular technology, and in fact can be carried out in any decent-sized crowd. And I guarantee that dynamic has been going on in ballrooms and taverns and town squares and so forth for as long as there have been such places. And yes, even drive-ins (see Brooks’s Happy Days reference).
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Brooks acknowledges that people who submit their sexual diaries to a publication aren’t representative of the median. I’m going to go way out on a limb and suggest that people who are in the position of constantly juggling multiple available sexual partners and weighing them against each other aren’t representative of the median person out there trying to find either a short term fling or a long term partner.
Aside from that, it’s the same weirdly argued underproven avalanche of hidden questionable assumptions that I expect from Brooks’ off-the-cuff social commentary. Which I guess is better than his attempts to comment on philosophy.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Every time I read one of these pieces by David Brooks I have to force myself to remember that he is a year younger than I am.
I came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the halcion days before AIDs. Oddly enough, young people were having casual sex then. Some people used personal ads in alternative newspapers to seek out their very specific needs. Others went to bars or down the hall of their college dorms or at their work places and found partners with whom to satisfy their desires or seek sex, romance, and/or love with. Although I was often addled, I feel pretty confident in saying that it wasn’t a world in which we all felt governed by the politesse of courtly love (not to be confused with Courtney Love, who was a small child at the time).
Mr. Brooks gets the vapors over things that were part and parcel of the world of his peers — we didn’t have the convenience of cell phones and craigslist — but some of us managed to get laid nonetheless. And we were generally pretty fucking happy about it.
Having said that, however, I would be remiss in not admonishing young Mr. Yglesias that Bret Easton Ellis is not a historian and his take on life doesn’t typically bear all that much resemblance to the world that most of us knew.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Gawd, come to think of it, wasn’t Fonzie the ultimate comparison shopper at Arnold’s?
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Oh, David Brooks is a jackass. The choice of an erotic partner was at one point determined by how many goats a daughter could fetch her father on the “open market.” Not that contemporary romantic life doesn’t leave much to be desired, but so does courtly love and so does Bruce Springsteen (one might say the essence of love is that it leaves something to be desired). Brooks is just a vulture who chews up so-called cultural phenomena and spits out boring columns.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Here’s an idea: let’s just ignore David Brooks. He rarely says anything right and never says anything interesting. Bothering to engage him simply validates the opinions of the Times executives who thought his presence on the op-ed page would generate buzz. (Not even Times execs could have been shallow enough to want him on the op-ed page because they thought he was any good.) When people stopped bothering to criticize William Irvingson Kristol, the Times ropped him after his contract expired. I’m hoping for something similar with Douthat. It may be too late with Brooks, but we can always try.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
“The internet predates my dating experience”
The generation gap… it burns!
I’m old enough to recall an era when relationships involved attempting to meet people in public places at designated times with no means of contacting them to change the plans, hour-long phone conversations about nothing, and occasional flowery, poetic letters which were typically burned after breaking up.
The fundamentals remain the same. The ritual burning of love letters and photographs has been replaced by email deletion and Facebook defriending, which are much less cathartic, but otherwise modern technology has been a modest upgrade.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
It is all coming back to me–Fonzie actually had a bunch of girlfriends’ numbers written on the wall next to the payphone in his “office” (the men’s bathroom).
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
One thing is for sure: they don’t write these things-ain’t-what-they-used-to-be gripes nearly as well as they used to.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Portnoy Brooks was an over-the-hill horndog at 15. If anyone believes his wistful, neo-Victorian yearning for the past represents his true feelings about courtship and romance – I’ve got a used Trojan you can buy for $2.49.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
But I can’t help to think that a good part of the concern is just bit of old cranky “we did it better in my day” resistance to change on the part of people who didn’t grow up with PCs and cell phones.
Absolutely correct. However — wait 10 years. You’ll begin to understand the impulse.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
I believe the proper phrase is “used French letter”.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
The attempt to insinuate that America used to be a purer, more innocent country seems to be just as old as America is, and that innocent country seems to have existed at roughly the time when the commentator in question was a young child. Of course, in real life, the 1950s were a horrifying time, characterized by the sinking suspicion that humankind was about to annihilate itself with nuclear weapons.
Lots of people were committing adultery and having anonymous sex in the 1950s, as one can glean from the works of Jack Kerouac. But Brooks, as a conservative, is bound by two fundamentally contradictory strains of rightist thought here. Number one: he believes that human nature can’t be changed, which means that efforts to improve peoples’ lives will fail somehow. This is Buckley’s “Imanentize the eschaton”, basically the center of the conservative argument against the Great Society. Number two: he believes that America is fundamentally an innocent country that was, at some point, corrupted by some sort of incipient liberalism that destroyed its moral compass. Of course, it seems to me impossible to believe both of these things. If human nature doesn’t change, then, um, how could it change? And if you can model a society that keeps people from, say, hooking up with strangers, why can’t you create one that eliminates poverty? Ultimately, one doesn’t have to tug too hard on the threads of conservatism before the whole thing falls apart as a coherent worldview–in reality, it was 7/10 actual anticommunism and 3/10 just pandering to reactionaries from the beginning. And that really hasn’t changed too much.
Oh, and by the way, the movie of The Rules of Attraction was far superior to the book, in my opinion. Something of a minor masterpiece as a film, but rather a sloppy book.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Pining for a bygone Golden Age is pretty much the ur-conservative narrative, or was before they fixated on the flip side — wallowing in their inchoate rage against those perceived to have soiled their perfect gauzy happy mom n’ apple pie memories.
But what Brooks is really pissed about here is what all of us old farts are pissed about (and aroused by) when we read about taut-skinned, unattached, affluent and free young people getting play like we never did, or imagine we never did — he’s old, the world has passed him by and none of those beautiful twentysomethings wants to text him for a booty call, share a stall or take a hike on the Appalachian trail.
Lou Reed, the Bard of Brooklyn, covered all this and more on “Sex with your parents”
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Medieval chivalry? Uh, wasn’t there rampant prostitution in this era? You think anybody hassled the knights when they had their way with the kitchen staff? I mean, we didn’t hassle Strom Thurmond, I don’t know why we’d expect it to be any better in the age of divine right.
Seriously, at least the people at the Renaissance Faire know they’re playing at make-believe. That what they’re doing is utopian game-playing, not historical re-enactment.
God, Brooks is so stupid.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
I am always bothered by examples of human real-life behavior based on works of fiction, whether books, films, or televiusion shows. Um, they’re fictional–imagined. I think that makes them not particularly compelling examples. But that’s just me.
Yes, social interactions and conventions change. Yep. They sure do. But the larger point is that the big things in Reality World have NEVER changed. People have been raping, fumbling their way to some sort of drunk unthinking intercourse, cheating on their spouses and SOs, makin’ it with a fellow teenager wherever they can find a private enough space, stiffly following outmoded social conventions that may not allow any intercourse at all, rutting with the wife/husband in married bliss, ALL THOSE THINGS–for millions of years.
Phones and the Interwebs don’t matter a bit.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Anyone who thinks “medieval chivalry” was an “act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment” has read one too many fairy tales. Unless of course you’re idea of romance is arranged marriages, rape, witch hunts, and guillotines.
No offense to all you guys out there, but I’m not a bit surprised that a man wrote this piece.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
David Brooks: so hilariously wrong I can’t possible look away.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Well, this is a really bad set of reactions to a mildly interesting column. Matt’s suggestion that rape is chosen is just ugly and is beneath him. The rest seem to be confused about what Brooks takes to be his current project, which is explaining the need for a set of social conventions that reflect the way young people live and interact today. The inherited conventions don’t work, he thinks, because, for a variety of reasons (from contraception to increased returns to educational investment to earlier physical maturity to rejection of traditional views of the purposes of sex) sex and marriage have been delinked. But that, he says, doesn’t necessitate abandoning social convention, just updating and revising them, providing a way “to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment” in particular. He’s written a few articles on the topic, and this is the latest. I think it’s an intersting topic, which isn’t to say that I necessarily agree with Brooks, or that I think this is a particularly good article. In fact, I think that Brooks underestimates the differences between “people who send in sex diaries to magazines” and “average Americans”. And I think he hasn’t really thought hard about–and certainly hasn’t live–the technological changes he describes. But that’s a lot different from saying he’s pining for the past. He isn’t.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Why on earth does Brooks think texting is inconsistent with poetry? Isn’t it more rather likely that poets have just the exactly the kind of qualities necessary to express themselves well within the confines of a text message?
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Shorter David Brooks: “Sex without love is an empty experience.”
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/sex_without_love_is_an_empty_experience-but-as/177449.html
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
1. When Brooks is good he’s very, very good, and when he’s bad he’s horrid.
2. The Ellis passage you quote includes an “N.Y.U. film student” as a character. You should never read a book with such a character. The same goes for books that include graduate students. Or 20-something New Yorkers for that matter.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Why on earth does Brooks think texting is inconsistent with poetry? Isn’t it more rather likely that poets have just the exactly the kind of qualities necessary to express themselves well within the confines of a text message?
Well, poetry is a method of verbal communication which is highly constrained by limitations of form, and thus conciseness and brevity of description are highly prized…whereas texting is nothing of the sort.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:29 pm
But Thomas, Brooks is also saying that since the Middle Ages, we’ve treated love and romance as “a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.” And he’s also implying we’ve lost that approach. Many of us on this post find that ludicrous. He’s talking about the past as if it were a fairy tale, all of us characters in a play. When really the “moral system” that has guided our approach to love and romance up until now has included acceptance of the most horrific behaviors, including rape and incest. The Middle Ages wasn’t Lancelot courting Guinevere (in fact quite the opposite) and the 80s wasn’t all about screwing in the backseat to Bruce Springsteen love anthems. And while I’m at it, the 2000s aren’t all about SMS messages.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Holy shit I just learned from this post that I’m the same age as David Brooks. How depressing.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Technology!
What I want to know is, how did people go out before the age of ATMs and debit cards? Did you have to say to yourself, before a bender, “I am going to go on a huge bender this weekend,” and cash out your whole paycheck? If not, how did you still have money for booze on Saturday night?
I suspect the lack of easy access to cash accounts for the fact that, prior to the 80s, people spent all that time sitting on front porches, wearing suits, discussing Sartre, etc.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
That Rules of Attraction outtake is proof that the best thing about writers in their twenties is that they eventually turn thirty – or forty perhaps. Regardless, that book stunk.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I guess the label that suits me best is reactionary utopian. I want to go back to a better world that never quite existed.
- Joseph Sobran
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Having said that, however, I would be remiss in not admonishing young Mr. Yglesias that Bret Easton Ellis is not a historian and his take on life doesn’t typically bear all that much resemblance to the world that most of us knew.
Sure, but I’m pretty sure the point that there were rapists and rape victims at college parties in the 1980s is historically accurate.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:11 pm
truly. Droit de seigneur was a transcendent, spiritual tradition. if only we could return to such simple times.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
BGinCHI Says: What David Brooks knows about medieval chivalry and Petrarchan poetic conventions wouldn’t fill his high school girlfriend’s navel.
LOL!! I almost peed my pants! Brooks is an idiot.
Is their a Mrs. Brooks? Did he court her with his poetic stylings or just bonk her on the head with a club and drag her back to his cave?
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Brett Easton Ellis?? You might as well consult Andrew Sullivan on the subject of heterosexual courtship in the 2000s.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:59 pm
I am always bothered by examples of human real-life behavior based on works of fiction, whether books, films, or televiusion shows. Um, they’re fictional–imagined. I think that makes them not particularly compelling examples. But that’s just me.
It may just be you, but it’s a little stupid.
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:04 pm
No, just your grammar.
“Has SMS and the Internet Ruined Love”
^^^^^
“Has”? Really???
Next time try conjugating your verbs, like so:
“Have SMS and the Internet Ruined Love”
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Right. Men were “liberated”, women were not. People were always having abortions or trapping men into unwanted marriages. Women who had thoughts, ambition, or libido were considered unattractive, masculine, and/or “bad”. Ava Garder was criticized in Time magazine for having “thick ankles. Unattached women from fourteen up were fair game, including sometimes for their own relatives. It was not so nice.
On the other hand, the internet nowadays is so fascinating that young people seem to have little time for love, physical or otherwise.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:30 pm
What I want to know is, how did people go out before the age of ATMs and debit cards?
Bars used to extend credit.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:20 am
In the days of chivalry and high ideals a knight would write refined and longing sonnets to his unattainable lady, whom he loved from afar (because said lady was married to the knight’s liege lord, probably) and jolly “Pastorelles” about the peasant girls he had had his way with along the country wayside. But I don’t suppose David Brooks learned that (or much else) in his political science class.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:37 am
Exactly what harold says. The whole idea of chivalry and courtly love was the separation of marriage and love. High-class people were married to join estates, make alliances etc.; then they played romantic games with people they weren’t married to.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:56 am
My decade long survey data culled from observing thousands of young people interacting in a social setting reveals these trends: Woman are now the players, the credit card is ruinous, cell phones are sucking peoples brains away, both sexes are inherently decent, way more accepting, far less romantic, and without question, much more likely to be, hardcore cynics and realists on matters of life, and love.
Are things better? I would say, on the whole, yes, simply due to the acceptance factor. But, there have been some serious, quantum level trade offs. Some can be mitigated or corrected, the others cannot.
The genie is out of the bottle, and it turns out, he is a rather ambivalent fellow.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:16 am
horseball Says:
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Brett Easton Ellis?? You might as well consult Andrew Sullivan on the subject of heterosexual courtship in the 2000s.
LOL. I thought something similar when I saw this post. I Guess we should just be glad Matt didn’t choose a sexual encounter from “Less than Zero” or “American Psycho”…
November 4th, 2009 at 8:05 am
If Brooks would have consulted his fellow Times columnist, Ross Douthat, he would have learned that chivalry and transcendence still play a large role in the courtship/mating rituals of young conservatives.
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”
November 4th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Cleek, you should probably have read the first paragraph of the article you linked to:
“Droit de seigneur (French pronunciation: [dʀwa d(ə) sɛɲœʀ], “the lord’s right”, same as latin “Jus primae noctis”) is a term now popularly used to describe an alleged legal right allowing the lord of an estate to take the virginity of the estate’s virgins. Little or no historical evidence has been unearthed from the Middle Ages to support the idea that it ever actually existed.“
November 4th, 2009 at 10:02 am
[...] of the few good things you can say about David Brooks’ thesis that SMS has ruined love is that relative to your average “things were better back in the day” crank old man [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Droit de seigneur
I bet you can find genetic evidence that something very like it existed, to judge from Gerald Brennan’s ethnography of a Spanish village.
Maybe it should be called “droit over the female servants”.
There is plenty of evidence from song, story, folklore and ethnography that masters fathered children on their female servants and then found husbands for them, or not (and frequently the master and his wife stood as Godparents to the resulting offspring, who remained in the household).
In the American south something similar went on — without the softening Spanish factors of standing as Godparents – or arranging convenient marriages — and everyone knew it. Look at Thomas Jefferson’s family. (Though he seems to have arranged some kind of education or training for his children).
November 4th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Oh, and by the way, the movie of The Rules of Attraction was far superior to the book, in my opinion.
Oh, you were doing so well before this. The Rules of Attraction is quite possibly the shittiest movie ever made, ever. (The brilliant two and a half minute Europe montage excepted of course.)
November 4th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
[...] few bloggers have taken issue with Brook’s analysis. Matthew Yglesias writes that love really hasn’t changed that much, and in the ways it has changed has not [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
medieval chivalry and prostitution…
I think that they had it all: chivalry, courtesans, serf girls and other chattel. There was also plenty of romantic love, as young women married to old rich men were wooed by men with more charms than means. Try to read Decameron.
Allegedly, while Columbus and other explorers brought pox and other diseases to which Amerindians had no resistance, he brought syphilis back to the Old World. It took Europe by storm, and several dynasties went extinct (Tudors and Jagellons come to mind).
I have no idea about post-AIDS levels of romance and promiscuity, perhaps we will never reach the levels of universal copulation achieved in late Middle Ages. In them good old days you could not woo girls by sending them any texts as they were illiterate more often than not. Personal contact ruled.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:47 am
I have found contrary happening because its really connecting people when they can’t meet in person.