Marriage brokerage and personal ads
One of the first attested marriage advertisements was published in 1692 in the Athenian Mercury, an early British periodical (Cocks, 2015). Such advertisements were to remain rare until the second half of the nineteenth century, when “spouse wanted” ads became a staple of some newspapers in the English-speaking world, particularly the popular dailies of London and New York. Cheaper newspapers of mass circulation flourished as a result of the industrialization of publishing and population growth in urban centers. The dailies – typically, tabloids known as “the penny press” – were financed largely through advertising, which included classifieds. The personal columns soon began running matrimonial ads. The New York Herald, the largest daily newspaper in the United States at the time, published its first marriage ads in 1855 and was followed by the New York Times in 1860 (Epstein, 2010).
Similar advertisements flourished at the same time in London but, as historian Harry G. Cooks points out, “respectable papers like the Times or Morning Chronicle refused to carry matrimonial ads, thereby encouraging the development of a specialist press devoted solely to publishing them” (Cocks, 2015, p. 22). In Great Britain as in France, these “matrimonial papers” were closely linked to marriage brokerage, which spread around Europe in the nineteenth century (see Figure 1.1). Primarily the matrimonial agencies offered their services to a bourgeois clientele, taking commission on the dowry in cases of successful matches, but the papers (feuilles d’annonces in French) allowed them to reach a broader and more socially diverse public (Gaillard, 2017).
Figure 1.1. Front page of The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser (February, 1877)
While the development of newspaper publishing provided the material possibility to circulate classified advertisements, the impetus for mediatized matchmaking came from the social transformations of the nineteenth century. Industrialization and urbanization saw young people move away from their original environment and sever their ties to family- and neighborhood-based social networks, where they would traditionally find a spouse (Cocks, 2013, 2015). Matchmaking services allowed access to new potential partners, especially for those without the right social connections (Gaillard, 2020). However, the personal ads were also very much a product of the nineteenth century matrimonial system. In her doctoral research on French marriage brokerage and personal ads, Claire-Lise Gaillard stresses that, at the end of the nineteenth century, social status, possessions, properties, and dowry were more commonly mentioned in advertisements than the search for love and affection. Marriage was not simply a personal matter but a family concern. It is worth noticing that, at that time, almost a third of the ads published in France were written by parents on the lookout for a spouse for their daughters. Finding a suitable “match” was of utter importance, and the desired social attributes were therefore clearly articulated (Gaillard, 2020).
Contemporaries did not see the emergence of this new business in a favourable light. While ads and agencies were shaped by traditional matrimonial norms, they also clashed with codes of romantic love that had grown strong during the century – for instance that of “companionate marriage,” the ideal that “marriage should be based on the true love and mutual affection of marital partners rather than on family ties and parental negotiations” (Phegley, 2013, p. 130). The new matchmaking services came under attack on both sides of the Atlantic as newspapers, novels, and plays either mocked their vulgarity or condemned their negative impact, in terms not unlike those directed today against dating sites and apps. In fact the two most lively debates of the nineteenth century are strikingly similar to how online dating is framed today.
The appearance of matrimonial advertisements and agencies was first caught in a nineteenth-century debate about falling marriage rates. Contemporary observers raised concerns about the growing number of unmarried persons, which affected how the new matchmaking services were perceived. A common understanding was that in modern society young men and women were having increasing difficulty in finding a spouse, and therefore turned to professional intermediaries. The publishers of matrimonial ads often drew on this idea: when addressing their readers, they evoked the growing prevalence of singles and promoted their services as a solution to the problem.
Among the serious causes of the shortage of marriages, we do not hesitate to point out the difficulties and embarrassment experienced by most people, of either sex, who wish to marry – not only to seek, but also to find, meet, and get to know their one and only. […] In this frenzied century – with so many varied pleasures, constant labors, and important business of multiple sorts that must be dealt with at the same time, at full steam – many men whose position requires that they marry promptly enjoy neither the time nor the circumstances to seek and find a wife. (La Gazette du Mariage, July 15, 1882)
The publishers of matrimonial ads often stressed the difficulties of meeting someone in a “frenzied” society characterized by the intensification of economic and social life and by a perceived acceleration of time. Young people were thought to be too busy or simply inapt to find a spouse, and marriage was consequently considered to be in crisis (Epstein, 2010; Cocks, 2013). Interestingly, this was actually not the case at all. At the end of the nineteenth century marriage rates were not falling in Europe but were rather stable over time, or even increasing (Hajnal, 1953). What was taken for a fact was in reality a false assumption, spurred by fears that marriage could be in decline (Cocks, 2013).
Today we witness a similar phenomenon. When explaining the popularity of online dating, journalists, bloggers, and essayists almost systematically refer to the rising rates of singlehood. People are perceived as having difficulties, not only with encountering potential partners, but also with committing to stable relationships. Ironically, from this point of view, our hyperconnected world, in which communication is undoubtedly faster and more effortless than ever before, has made interaction and relationship building more complicated than they were in the past. But, once again, empirical data tend to invalidate this pervasive idea. It is true that more people are single in the 2020s than in the 1970s, but this is not due to a hypothetical difficulty in forming couples. Relationship rates are not falling: just as many people form couples today as they did a few decades ago (Manning et al., 2014; Bouchet-Valat, 2015), the difference is rather that they break up more often than before (see chapter 6). That is, it is just as difficult today as it was yesterday to find empirically the supposed crisis of couple formation. What is easy to find, however, is the seemingly timeless fear that marriage and love are under threat and about to disappear. This fear often makes matchmaking services into scapegoats. This is the fate of Tinder today, just as it was the fate of Matrimonial News more than a hundred years ago.
The old commodification debate
A second debate with a long history is the one on the commercialization of love and marriage. In the nineteenth century, publishers of personal ads and matrimonial agencies were accused of turning marriage into a money-making business. Popular outcry in the United States demanded a ban on matrimonial advertisements (Epstein, 2010), while jurists in France challenged both the legality and the morality of marriage brokerage, and public opinion was alarmed by the stream of criminal cases involving marriage agencies (Gaillard, 2017). At the same time, indignant articles published