After Civility – Elizabeth Grace Matthew

Why are there so few men in the restaurants, bars, and coffee shops where the women like to recreate? This is the question posed by Rachel Drucker, 54, in the recent New York Times “Modern Love” column, Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. Drucker is a veteran of the 1990s sex positivity who worked for Playboy and its “affiliated hardcore properties,” and has plenty of experiences and exes to her name. She implores men to re-engage women like her as friends and lovers. 

Perhaps the saddest, most evocative lines of her lament are these: “There was a time, not so long ago, when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast. When the act of staying the night didn’t announce a relationship, just a willingness to be human for a few more hours.” 

If we think of sexual mores like a Goldilocks story, Drucker feels that she and her contemporaries came of age when everything was “just right.” The implied interpretation of events goes something like this: In the olden times, a relationship (or, in very olden times, an engagement or even a marriage) was a prerequisite for sharing a bed overnight. Today, with easy access to pornography and male resentment of women’s empowerment, people have lost interest in “be[ing] human.” It’s apparently too much even to ask a man to show up to dinner before asking to come upstairs. 

Where, a bewildered Drucker wonders, did the happy medium of her own experiences go? What happened to the casual sex that nevertheless entailed an intimate decency, which to some extent belied and delimited its “casual” moniker? 

That “happy medium,” however, never existed as such. It was a composite, transitional reality: the lingering fumes of the old rules and mores alongside the lived insistence on no rules or mores at all. So long as traditionalist sexual morality was widely accepted as legitimate, even if not widely practiced, those that flouted its dictates still did so with at least the plausible claim of covert discretion. But when the last fumes of traditionalism died out, the precarious norms Drucker remembers with such fondness disappeared as well. 

Today, in relation to phenomena ranging from sex and dating, to marriage and family formation, to sociality itself, there is an erosion of what so recently felt like unimpeachable standards. Perhaps, it turns out, those fumes of the old ways were responsible for the continuance of our baseline humanity, both personal and societal. Perhaps a post-patriarchal, post-religious, post-institutional world turns out to be a post-human world as well.

Mommy Wars No More

In the season six Sex and the City episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), perpetually single protagonist Carrie Bradshaw is dismayed that someone absconded from a party with her $485 stilettos. She is even more frustrated when the party host, a married mother of three, not only fails to reimburse her for the loss but also “shames” her, calling it “crazy” to spend $485 on designer shoes—ones that, in fact, she used to wear herself before she had what she calls “a real life,” intimating that Carrie’s unmarried, childless existence is less worthy of respect and deference than her own. 

Carrie, fuming, recounts indignantly to her friend Charlotte that she has bought this very friend an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, not to mention traveling for her wedding. She has spent, in total, “over $2300 celebrating her choices.” Charlotte tries to offer context: “But those were gifts … if you got married, or had a child, she would spend the same on you.” Carrie responds: “And if I don’t ever get married or have a child, then, what, I get Bubkis? … If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you. … I’m thrilled to give you gifts, to celebrate your life; I just think it stinks that single people are left out of it.” 

What Carrie fails to recognize is that we give such gifts not to celebrate these individuals’ morally neutral “life choices,” but rather to honor marriage and childbirth as laudable and societally desirable. If they are no longer seen that way, it is only a matter of time before not just the norms of dating (which emerged as a prequel to marriage and family) but also the broader norms of treating other people with reciprocal dignity erode as well. After all, the very notion of giving gifts to celebrate milestones like marriage and childbirth is, at bottom, a statement about our shared investment in the institutions to which we all, whether married or not, owe our societal stability. To personalize this reality in a resentful, individual way, as Carrie does, is to grossly underestimate the fragility of society itself. 

Like Carrie, Drucker wanted to be able to break all the old rules—and facilitate others doing so. What she, like many of us, does not understand is this: Discarded norms do not remain forever in their diminished place so that we can continue to break them, secure in the certainty that there will always be something, however remote, to push back upon. On the contrary, mores are difficult to form—but quite easy to break. 

Both the precipitous decline in fertility rates that everyone across the political spectrum now acknowledges as an impending crisis, and the melancholy of straight women who find men receding en masse from shared social and sexual life with actual, living women, can be understood as the unsurprising productions of a society that does not celebrate marriage and family as uniquely important institutions. 

Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

When adulthood was still considered, socially and professionally, to some degree inextricable from romantic partnership—that is, when perpetual singleness still raised eyebrows if not wagged tongues—we had more dates, leading to more marriages and more children. The erstwhile ability of 50-something single women to engage men as dinner companions cannot be separated from that broad social ecology. 

Yes, these one-time norms involved trade-offs. In an era that all but mandated matrimony, single women tended not to have the kinds of stable, well-established lives that today make tying the knot seem, to many, a next-generation Carrie Bradshaw, like a raw deal. Women in earlier eras also, more often than many conservatives want to admit, settled for terrible marriages. No one wants to go back to that. 

Many people, however, like Drucker, harbor great nostalgia for a time when we treated each other with basic decency. What they fail to recognize is that reciprocal decorum is not natural, but socially constructed. The old norms, for all their admitted limitations, institutionalized treating each other better than we default to treating each other without any norms at all. In Drucker’s youth, people largely flouted those old norms de jure while retaining their spirit de facto. While they may have conceived of themselves as rebels who discarded all the old mores, the truth is that they owed everything to the fumes of the very scripts that they saw themselves as having discarded. 

Today, by contrast, we have in fact adopted the nonchalant, “you do you” premise of Carrie’s screed—even while we still purchase (a diminishing number of) wedding presents. One predictable result of this total eradication of erstwhile norms is the dearth of men in the spaces where Drucker and her friends recreate. Another sad consequence is the devolution of our social decency more broadly. 

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if No One Comes

In a recent essay titled “Go Where You’re Invited,” speaker and author Katherine Martinko highlights a viral video from therapist and author Esther Perel, in which Perel responds with insight to the now near-ubiquitous phenomenon of invitees to a social event canceling at the last minute. Mulling over the endless echoes in the comments on Perel’s video, along with her own experiences being cancelled on, Martinko offers: “It appears we’re living in a time when people don’t hesitate to bail on their friends for reasons that range from justifiable to absurd. This reveals an appalling lack of etiquette that gives zero consideration to what it takes to host an event of any kind.” Indeed, we are; and indeed, it does. 

Socially responsible millennials find it difficult to count on friends showing up to a planned gathering for the same broad reason that our single or divorced aunt can’t get a guy to invite her to dinner: The rules, judgments, and premises that produced the norm—in this case, showing up where you say you will—are long gone. 

Yes, technology has facilitated this decline in erstwhile etiquette. Just like the pill made commitment-free sex a lot less risky at baseline, texting made sending an invitation to a bunch of people much easier. Thus, as Perel points out, the people on the receiving end of an invitation often think they aren’t particularly important or central to the gathering. So, they don’t bother to respond, or they respond but feel no shame about cancelling at the last minute. Additionally, the ubiquity, ease, and breadth of at-home leisure—delivered food, streamed television and movies, and so on—means that going out is no longer necessary for entertainment. 

Nevertheless, the moral, ideological, and psychological aspects of this seismic social shift from a default of conscientiousness to a default of casualness cannot be discounted. 

Not so long ago, we had expectations of friends that reflected a bygone era of formalized, reciprocal sociality. Yes, the calling cards described in Jane Austen novels have been a remnant of the distant past for some time, as have the dance cards that persisted into the early twentieth century. But the commitment, courtesy, and reciprocity that those measures institutionalized persisted until quite recently, even in their absence. 

Of course, there have always been flakes, freeloaders, and idiosyncratic types who do not reliably follow mutually understood social expectations. But when those norms are nonetheless followed by enough people to remain expectations—and when those who don’t follow them as norms therefore pay some price—there remains a shared recognition that others’ time and attention have implicit and agreed-upon value. 

But today, the de facto adherence to the spirit of those old rules around social etiquette has disappeared, just like the rules themselves did a century-plus ago. So, everyone is free to accept the invitation but bail if something better comes along or if she “needs a break.” No one, however, wants to be on the other end of this new normal. 

As our growing crisis of loneliness shows, it simply does not work like that. Wanting to avoid social accountability but have access to social community is the equivalent of working in the porn industry and wondering where all the thoughtful dinner conversationalists went. 

Civilization, and its attendant civilized treatment of one another, it seems, takes a long time to build and no time at all to destroy. 

Many of us mourn the absence of niceties like acknowledging receipt of a gift and thanking the giver, feeling obligated to invite someone to one’s home after being invited to hers, or responding to invitations and then showing up when and where you say you will. But in order to understand the depth and breadth of what’s really going on here—rather than narrowly saying “the individual friend who didn’t thank me is rude” or “the individual guys who aren’t texting me back are jerks”—we have to recognize that these shared expectations of politeness and dignity were never inborn settings, but products of first de jure and then de facto socialization. 

Which is now gone—and by our own hand.

The ubiquitous self-care industry is chock full of reassurance that “it’s okay to say no,” and cautions against reflexively saying yes, and admonitions to “put yourself first.” Now, full disclosure: I would benefit greatly from a modest mindset shift in this direction, and so would many of the other highly attentive, responsible women in my friend set. Yes, many of us, myself included, are eldest daughters, and it shows. And yes, if we did not surge quite so reflexively to familial and communal responsibility, many of us would be healthier and probably also happier. 

Yet most of us operate the way we do because we are aware on some level that we live in a world that has defenestrated the collective institutions, mores, and social graces that once held people together. Those of us who understand this can throw our hands up at the absence of the institutions, mores, and graces that once existed to facilitate and institutionalize treating one another with warmth and dignity—or we can attempt to preserve, revitalize, and embody them. 

We who make the latter choice tend to find one another. And we tend to evince public respect for (even if we don’t privately follow) the rules and norms that undergird those institutions, mores, and graces to which we owe our own and myriad others’ lack of loneliness. 

My advice to Drucker and her friends, if I may be so bold: Get off the dating apps, join a religious or service organization that attracts 50-somethings, and say “yes” to both the volunteer opportunities and the rules. 

My hope—and my hunch—is that some dinner invitations from men worth a “yes” won’t be far behind.