What's Love Got to Do With It?
by Jenny Maas

I think Rhett Butler meant it when he told Scarlett O'Hara, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." About love that is. And apparently he wasn't the only one standing behind the famous ending of 1939's Gone With The Wind, one of the most epic romances in cinematic history. According to surveys administered to college students since the 1930s, the majority of students did not find love to be the most important quality in a relationship. Though the Depression Era was a bleak time, love came to life in many different entertainment mediums, mainly with couples like Rhett and Scarlet on the silver screen and usually as a means to distract from the harsh world outside. Yet the survey results indicate that these fantastical tales seemed to have little romanticizing affect on the mindsets of their viewers.

But despite the current amount of media in favor of promoting lust rather than love, the 2008 results of the same college student survey, conducted by University of Iowa sociologists Christine Whelan and Christie Boxer, showed that love is now the number one ideal quality in a relationship. Presumably, these blatant changes in preference come from something other than media influence.

The survey of 1,100 undergraduates from the University of Iowa, the University of Washington, the University of Virginia and Penn State University required participants to rank 18 characteristics they desire in a partner between "irrelevant" and "essential." A recent study of the survey's results by Whelan and Boxer showed that whereas men once sought "a dependable, kind lady who had skills in the kitchen" and put more emphasis on chastity than intelligence; and women once longed for "emotional stability, dependable character and ambition," both sexes now favor love over all other qualities. And because the media is not the manipulating factor it would appear that the cause is something else: more free time.

I'm not saying we're lazy. I have seen some busy college students. But we do that to ourselves. We choose to take Arabic, world religions, chemistry, and jazz study in one semester. Our 1930s counterparts were much busier, simply because they had to be.

Those college students were probably more concerned with the stock market than whether they should switch majors because pre-med was just "too hard." They had jobs, not because they wanted to buy trendy clothes, but because they were most likely paying for college themselves and supporting their family in some way. Because they were busy out of necessity and we are out of choice, it is much easier for us to blow off responsibilities in favor of a little romance.

We most likely have more time to spend looking for a sweetie than they did. Maybe it just wasn't a concern for our 1930s counterparts because time had to be spent on other things. It was more important to find a man who could support you than one who made your heart race because your first concern was survival. It was more "practical" to find a woman who could take care of your house and children than who made you weak in the knees-you had to have some reassurance your offspring would be well taken care of despite the economy.

During the 1930s, a couple could rarely go to the movies. But when they had a moment to spend together, and some money to spare, they could live vicariously through characters like Rhett and Scarlett. We are lucky that we have time to sit around and wait for years to find "the one."

However, the University of Iowa survey showed that men now rank "good financial prospect" at No.12, while in 1939 it was No. 17. Though this could reflect the major changes in women's contributions to the household income, I also take that number jump as a sign of the way the economy is headed. If modern men are more concerned with a "good financial prospect" than depression-era men were, I may have to go pre-med to lure a husband and listen to my kids criticize my loveless marriage. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.