The Victorians ruined your friendships
The Victorians ruined your friendships
Changes in attitudes about family, and in the economy, during the 1800s have made it harder for people to make friends today.
Have you wondered why you don’t have more friends? Blame the Victorians.
So I had a whole post on childcare ready to go for this week. But then when I started discussing this newsletter with people, friendship kept coming up again and again. So instead of childcare, today I want explore some of the foundations of modern friendship and loneliness.
These are big topics that I’ll explore in future posts as well1. But for now, I want to look at how a couple of things that happened a long time ago really complicated our lives today. Specifically, shifts in the way people thought about affection during the late 1800s (ie the Victorian period, for you non-English majors) relegated friendships to a kind of second class status. And at the same time, changes in the economy laid the groundwork for vast numbers of people to eventually live alone. It took a long time for these shifts to bear fruit, but now they are and the fruit is rotten.
Victorians focused affection on the family, not friends
At the dawn of the 19th century, people had strong emotional connections with both family and friends. In fact, according to historian Stephanie Coontz, people at the time didn’t strongly differentiate between the kind of love they might have for a romantic partner and their love for a friend. In 1828, Webster’s dictionary even defined love as “affection of the mind”2 — hardly a phrase that screams romance.
These kinds of views meant that “intense friendships with a person of the same sex were common and raised no eyebrows”3. Men, for example, were expected to represent their families to the outside world, and as a result would spend a significant amount of time in that world doing things like dining out with associates. Newlyweds would spend their post-wedding period visiting family or, when honeymoons became fashionable, actually took friends and family along with them. Letters between friends — penned by both men and women — used intense, almost romantic language to describe their affection for each other.
Obviously the early 1800s were not an exemplary time for gender equality. But the point I’m making here is that affection was more evenly distributed between friends and family, and that social life could rival family life.
As the 19th century progressed, however, there was a “narrowing of affection.” People gradually came to believe the domestic sphere of their lives was the most important, and that it was ideally where they’d get their “greatest satisfactions” in life 4. This impacted everyone, but historian Josh Tosh has noted that by elevating home and domesticity, men in particular were cut of from other men5.
Of course people still had friends as these changes were happening, but social life took a backseat to domestic life. And it still does6.
This puts tremendous pressure on relationships. Last year, for instance, therapist Esther Perel pointed out on NPR7 that today we expect romantic partners to do, well, everything:
So we come to one person and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity. But give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it’s a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.
I’m reminded here of how many weddings I’ve been to in which the vows mention the spouses being “best friends.”
It’s great to be friends with your spouse, but historically “spouse” and “friend” were two different jobs. And asking one person to do two different jobs is, well, a lot to ask. Imagine, for example, if you were hired to be a school teacher, but then the school also asked you to simultaneously be the principle, janitor and volleyball coach. You’d probably be stretched so thin you’d do a bad job in every role. But that’s how we think of friendship and marriage today.
Suggesting that life’s greatest satisfaction should come through marriage, and that spouses are the source of our greatest friendships, also leaves out everyone who doesn’t have a spouse. Which brings us to the second big change of the 1800s:
More and more people are living alone thanks to the rise of wage labor
For thousands of years people in the West lived in what historians sometimes call “corporate families”8 9. So, think of a family farm where multiple generations are working together for their shared economic survival. People in these kinds of arrangements might not get an hourly wage, but they potentially share in whatever profits the enterprise might generate10 11.
This kind of multigenerational arrangement was common in the US up until the mid 1800s, when jobs in places like offices and factories became more readily available and more people started earning specific wages for a specific amount of work. Wage labor had been on the rise for several centuries12, but industrialization gave it a shot of adrenaline.
For a while, this was awesome. If your parents sucked, you didn’t have to wait to inherit the farm. Instead, you could ditch them and go become Bartleby the Scrivener in the big city.
This led directly to the explosion in popularity of male breadwinner families, which by 1920 had replaced multigenerational families as the dominant form in the US13. In other words, wage labor played a huge and vital role in creating the nuclear family as we think of it today.
But almost as soon as wage labor won out, it was in trouble. By 1973, real wages for American men had peaked. Then, from that point until 2013, they declined 26 percent when adjusted for inflation. Women’s wages didn’t peak until 2004, but by 2013 they too were making less than they had been in 1973.
These declining wages reshaped living arrangements; male-breadwinner households peaked by 1940 and remained in the majority through 196014, but eventually lost their dominant position to duel-income households15 and then also more recently to single-person households.
The Leave it to Beaver idea of the family was a fleeting thing.
The rise of single-person households in the US is remarkable. At the dawn of the 20th century, fewer than 6% of households were made up of one person. But by 2013, that number had grown to 28%. That made single-person households the second most common type of household in the US. In places with older populations, the percentages are sometimes much higher16. There has never been a historical period with so many people living by themselves.
There’s nothing wrong with living alone, of course. I know plenty of people who love it. To each their own.
But it’s conspicuous that single-person households became so much more common at the same time that the US is experiencing a “loneliness epidemic”17. Today, two out of five Americans indicate their relationships are not meaningful and one in five report they feel lonely or socially isolated18.
There’s a mountain of research19 that dissects the connection between single-person households and loneliness. I’m not going to get into all of that here, but suffice it to say that there does appear to be a relationship.
The important thing to keep in mind is that none of this would have been possible without the economic changes of prior centuries. Wage labor turned multigenerational families into nuclear ones, but the freedom (or more cynically, the burden) to work for wages eventually opened the door to more people living without the social and emotional support network they traditionally relied on. And ultimately, some historians have directly pointed to the rise of capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries as contributing to the rise of loneliness20.
It’s not all bad news
While these trends are a bummer, there’s something I find very reassuring about knowing this history. Yes, the world isn’t perfect right now, but at least some of the problems out there are very recent. Human history spans 10,000 or so years, but the modern idea of the nuclear family is kind of less than 150 years old. Most humans have lived in some other type of arrangement, which means we probably could too if we wanted.
I’m particularly interested in how our housing market has physically spread us out. It’s harder to make friends in the suburbs, for example, because there are fewer people available with whom to you can have serendipitous relationships.
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 184
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 184
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 166
A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Josh Tosh. 2007. Page 5.
This is obviously an extremely abridged version of what happened. If you want to dig into the socio-economic landscape of the 1800s, check out the sources in this works cited section. Other useful resources that I’ve been reading recently include Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England by Lisa Wilson and The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich.
“Building Resilient Relationships.” NPR. February 11, 2020.
The Family in the Western World. Beatrice Gottlieb. 1993. Page 7
Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family. Richard Saller. 1996. Page 81-84
“Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015”. Steven Ruggles. Demography. December 2015.
Corporate families routinely included non-relative servants, laborers (and in some societies slaves). The way these different figures were (or weren’t) compensated varied, but the point here is that the general concept transcends any particular time period or location, and was relatively common in the western world up until the industrial revolution. It remains common in other parts of the world.
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 136
“Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015”. Steven Ruggles. 2015. Demography. December 2015. Page 1800
“Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015”. Steven Ruggles. December 2015. Page 1809
“The rise of the single-person household.” George Masnick. May 20, 2015.
“The History of Loneliness.” Jill Lepore. The New Yorker. April 6, 2020.
“The Loneliness Epidemic”. Health Resources and Services Administration. January 2019
“Social Isolation, Loneliness, and Living Alone: Identifying the Risks for Public Health.” Eric Klinenberg. Am J Public Health. 2016 May; 106(5): 786–787.
A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion. Fay Bound Alberti. 2019.
This is all fascinating info! And I'm sure this is not the only thing we can blame the Victorians for...