By the seventies I was already a married lady, so I watched the decade’s courtships the way you watch a parade, from the curb, with strong opinions about the costumes. My baby sister lived it. She came home from dates with windburn from the back of somebody’s motorcycle, grass stains on her bell-bottoms, and stories that made our mother reach for the rosary she kept for emergencies.
Most of these photographs exist because the Environmental Protection Agency, of all places, sent photographers across the country between 1972 and 1977 for a project called DOCUMERICA. The assignment was to cover pollution and document the land, but those photographers kept noticing everyday life along the way, sweethearts included, and thank goodness they did, because nobody else was pointing a camera at the roller rink in New Ulm, Minnesota.
So come along. Whether you did your courting in a dune buggy or under a lighted dance floor, I’d wager at least one of these feels like a page from your own scrapbook.
1. Stepping out in style
Start here, because nobody ever dressed for a date like this again. His suit is powder blue, three pieces, with lapels you could land a paper airplane on and a black velvet bow tie the size of a small bird. She’s in tomato red with a white picture hat, white platform sandals, and a handbag to match the shoes. Stepping out meant exactly that in 1975: the two of you appeared together, looking like a matched set of playing cards, and the sidewalk did the rest.
Did you know? The computer wanted to set you up
Computer dating arrived long before anyone swiped anything. Operation Match was pairing college students by punch card back in 1965, three dollars for your list of names, and by 1976 a Los Angeles company called Great Expectations was taping video dating profiles. The equipment filled a room, the hair was feathered, and the nerves were exactly the same.
2. An afternoon on the river
Nobody needed tickets or a reservation for this one. In the Texas Hill Country in May of 1973, a date could be a whole afternoon on a cedar root above the Frio River, her in a cherry-print halter she likely sewed herself, him in the shirt he wore when he wanted to look like he hadn’t tried. Look at how they’re looking at each other. Every generation is sure it invented that look, and every photograph like this one proves otherwise.
3. Picking leaves from her hair
The same riverbank, a little later in the afternoon. He’s picking leaves out of her hair, she’s pretending to mind, and the photographer had the good manners to catch it and keep moving. If a boy ever did this for you, you remember it better than you remember your own graduation.
4. The Frisbee date
A 1973 courtship could run all afternoon on a Frisbee from the five-and-dime. He’s steadying her across the rocks along Lake Michigan, she’s barefoot with her sandals abandoned somewhere behind her, and she’s wearing a floppy hat, because in 1973 somebody in every couple was wearing a floppy hat. He kept hold of the Frisbee with his other hand, so his priorities were in good order.
5. Two ten-speeds and a lake
This was the great bike boom, when ten-speeds sold so fast that for a couple of years bicycles outsold automobiles in this country. These two pedaled around Fourth Lake in the Adirondacks and stopped where the view earned it. There’s no radio along, no telephone for another twenty years, and nothing to do but talk to each other. They appear to be managing just fine.
6. The joyride
Somebody built this dune buggy out of a prayer and somebody else’s old chassis, and his girl climbed right in. No windshield, no doors, and her hair doing what all our hair did at forty miles an hour. A good share of seventies dating was a boy showing off a machine and a girl deciding how impressed to act. Judging by his grin, she said something kind.
7. A Sunday stroll
Before a date became an event with tickets, it was often just a walk. Here they are arm in arm past the awnings on Chicago’s South Side, dressed too nicely for errands, moving too slowly to be going anywhere in particular. A walk gave you time. You could reach the end of the block and already know whether there’d be a second walk.
Price check: date night, 1975
A movie ticket averaged $2.05, so the show cost the two of you $4.10. Big Macs afterward ran about 65 cents apiece, and the gallon of gas that got you there and home again was 57 cents. Call the whole evening seven dollars, flowers extra. The nervousness came free.
8. A night at the fair
The fair after dark belonged to couples. The Ferris wheel is turning behind these two, the game booths are hollering for quarters, and they’re doing the midway walk everybody did, close enough that your hands kept finding each other, slow enough to be seen doing it. If he won you a stuffed animal on that midway, I’d bet money it sat on a bed or a shelf for the next ten years.
9. All skate, couples only
Every rink had the moment when the lights came down, the music went soft, and the man on the microphone said the two words the whole evening had been building toward: couples only. This girl in her red corduroys has just taken somebody’s hand, you can see it right at the edge of the picture, and off they went for twenty laps of not quite talking. Plenty of marriages in this country began with a couples skate, and I’ve yet to hear anyone prove otherwise.
10. Saturday night at the ballroom
In the small towns, the ballroom rolled right on through the seventies as if nobody had told it the times were changing. This is Polka Days at the Gibbon Ballroom in Minnesota, with three generations sharing one floor: young couples out on dates, their parents showing them up, and the band playing to all of them at once. You danced with your date, then with her mother, then with your own, and somehow everyone went home happy.
11. Then came disco
By 1977 the date had moved onto a lighted floor. This is a Washington, D.C. club called The Plum in October of that year, two months before Saturday Night Fever ever reached a theater, which means every dancer in this picture came by those moves honestly. Study the young man in the middle, flares in full sail, belt buckle catching the light. The photograph is silent, and you can still just about hear the bass line coming up through the floorboards.
By the numbers: sweethearts of the seventies
- 20.8 and 23.2 — the median ages of a first-time bride and groom in 1970, says the Census Bureau. By 1980 they had climbed to 22.0 and 24.7. All that courting led somewhere, and it got there quickly.
- 1965 — the year The Dating Game first went on the air. Chuck Barris’s blind-date show kept coming back in one version or another into 1980.
- Over 4,000 — drive-in theaters at their late-fifties peak, and drive-ins by the thousand were still lighting up American summer nights deep into the seventies.
12. The goodbye kiss
Long-distance love ran on the railroad and the long-distance line. This is the platform at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station in 1974, one last kiss before the Metroliner pulled out. After this came letters, and the Sunday night call when the rates went down. Some couples had a trick: when you arrived, you placed a person-to-person call home asking for yourself. Nobody accepted the charges, nobody paid a dime, and the message still got through: arrived safe, love you.
13. Young love finds a riverbank
And when the afternoon wound down, there was this, which needs no explaining from me. The cutoffs and the leather sandals put the year at 1973, but young love on a riverbank looks about the same in any decade you’d care to name.
Your turn
Now then, I’ve shown you mine. Where did your dates happen in the seventies? The rink, the midway, the front seat at the drive-in, a dance floor with lights coming up through it? Did you marry the person in the photograph that just appeared in your head? Tell us in the comments below. We keep the good stories, and we’d rather have yours than anybody’s.
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