Moira Weigel: Absolutely. Starting in the 1890s and 1900s, a huge number of young Americans began moving to cities and a huge number of women in particular began working outside of homes—their own homes, or homes where they might have worked as governesses or maids. Previously, courtship rituals had taken place in private places, almost always chaperoned by relatives or other authority figures. If you were well off, the scenario might have looked like a Jane Austen or George Eliot novel. If you were working class, you might have met prospective partners at a factory dance or a church social.

But as women entered the workforce and hit the city streets, they gained new freedom to mix with men. Think what a big deal it is when one new man shows up in Middlemarch. Then, think how many men a woman who worked as a waitress in a busy restaurant might have met every single day. It must have been thrilling! Of course, this freedom brought new responsibility too. Your mother and aunts would no longer take care of courtship for you.

Lam: Has this social ritual been tied to work ever since? Both for women and for men?

Weigel: Yes, I would say that dating has been tied both to work and to the consumer economy ever since it was invented—in a number of different ways.

Perhaps the most obvious is that what people do on dates changes as the economy changes. So around 1900, the best date a girl working at Lord & Taylor’s in New York could have imagined might have been to go to Coney Island. As movie theaters got more and more popular, going to the movies became a classic date.

Practically speaking, the rhythms of our workdays change the ways we meet one another. In an era when most people had jobs that clocked in and out at regular times—old-fashioned 9-to-5s—it made sense to ask someone, “So, I’ll pick you up at six?” Now, in an era of flextime and freelancing we might be more likely to text a lover “u up?”

Often, trend pieces describe this kind of change as indicative of a decline of civilization—or, at least, of romance. But I believe that it follows logically from changes in labor patterns.

Lam: In the book, you mention that a booming economy led to the democratization of dating. Can you elaborate on that?

Weigel: One really interesting thing about the history of dating is that it starts out as a solidly working-class phenomenon. The working women I was describing earlier had more freedom to meet men on their own than middle-class women, still confined to their family parlors, did. But in many cases they also had to try to go out with men because their wages were so low that they could not afford hot food regularly otherwise—not to mention entertainment.

In fact, through the 1910s, you see Progressive do-gooders and police who believe that women who “make dates” with men to go to a bar or a restaurant are simply doing sex work. And the line between “straight” dating and sex work—I believe—always was and remains blurry. However, in the later 1910s and 1920s you start to see relatively wealthy people—the flappers and fussers we still read about in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels—imitating working-class ways. And as vastly more middle-class women start going to college in the 1920s, dating becomes thoroughly mainstream.