Sometimes social class can make a difference. Growing numbers of working-class Americans are eschewing marriage and having children outside of marriage. In a 2013 study conducted by researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia, working-class respondents cited low wages and a lack of job security as the primary reasons for these changes.

But a high average salary doesn’t necessarily mean stable relationships. A 2013 report called “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” observed that young adults have gone from seeing marriage as a “cornerstone” of adult life to its “capstone,” something you enter only after you complete your education and attain professional stability. Until then, you may be better off swiping through Tinder.

Still, for all of the challenges, it’s worth noting that the gig economy has also brought some much-needed flexibility to dating and relationships. Young women today face less pressure to build their lives around marriage and childbearing than their mothers or grandmothers did. If you are gay or lesbian or if you want a relationship that is not monogamous you are likely to meet less resistance than you might have in the past. Still, as the work of dating has become increasingly flexible, it has also become increasingly precarious.

DATING itself is a recent invention. It developed when young people began moving to cities and women began working outside private homes. By 1900, 44 percent of single American women worked. Previously, courtship had taken place under adult supervision, in private places: a parlor, a factory dance or church social. But once women started going out and earning wages, they had more freedom over where and how they met prospective mates. Because men vastly out-earned women, they typically paid for entertainment.

Today, we refer to a man inviting a woman to dinner as “traditional.” At first it was scandalous: A woman who arranged to meet a man at a bar or restaurant could find herself interrogated by a vice commission. In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex.

By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.” Popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix warned in 1939 that going steady was an “insane folly.” But by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off. Today, the economy is transforming courtship yet again. But the changes aren’t only practical. The economy shapes our feelings and values as well as our behaviors.