Class, culture, and politics: Why some relationships still stumble over differences in modern dating. Photo / Stefania Rosini, Netflix, 2024
Class, culture, and politics: Why some relationships still stumble over differences in modern dating. Photo / Stefania Rosini, Netflix, 2024
It seems a curiously old-fashioned idea that childhood, schooling, religion or one’s family could dictate who you end up with
There’s a hit new show on Netflix that everyone’s talking about; or at least every girlfriend I’ve talked to in the past week or so. It’s called NobodyWants This and you may well have seen it but, if not, it’s about a “hot rabbi” who dates a gentile and the challenges they face as a result.
From his family, from her family, from his temple, from society in general. “You’re never going to end up with my son,” his mother whispers sadistically to the girlfriend, after an excruciating introductory lunch to which the girlfriend brought a charcuterie platter because she thought prosciutto was beef.
Will they? Won’t they? I don’t want to give you any spoilers. Watch it, because it’s funny and very easy to tear through the 10, half-hour episodes, although some of the Jewish characters are enormously stereotyped, which has sparked flak for the writer, Erin Foster, who converted before she married her husband.
I watched it with particular interest because my ex-boyfriend recently cited my “world” as the reason he was breaking up with me. “We inhabit different worlds,” he said, in our final, sad conversation.
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In Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, Kristen Bell plays Joanne, who has to decide if she'll convert to Judaism for her new relationship with Noah, a rabbi, played by Adam Brody. Photo / Adam Rose, Netflix, 2024
He didn’t like that I wrote about “posh” matters. I tried to remonstrate that it’s all tongue-in-cheek and, also, I live in a maisonette in Crystal Palace, hardly a stately home, but no dice. He’d decided we were too different. Not quite a rabbi and a gentile but, still, that seemed to be that.
How much does background matter, these days, when it comes to dating? The concept makes my nose wrinkle. It’s a curiously old-fashioned idea, isn’t it, in these meritocratic times that anything so “irrelevant” as childhood, schooling, religion or one’s family could dictate who you end up with?
None of my serious relationships have been with anyone particularly “posh”. One ex was a brilliant comedian who made jokes about his working-class upbringing, and my family having a coat of arms, while he had to share a coat with his sister growing up, and another about keeping their telly upstairs in a bedroom so the license inspectors couldn’t spy that they owned one through the ground-floor window.
Fictional romances like Bridgerton explore class divides that mirror real-life dating dilemmas. Photo / Supplied, Netflix
Another ex was an American academic. Actually, the time I felt most fish-out-of-water was when I briefly dated someone very lovely, but who spent most of his days winter shooting. A posh boy who had lots of shooting pals, and I struggled because that scene didn’t feel very me.
When I mentioned my recent break-up here a couple of weeks ago, a kind reader emailed with advice. “Friends of friends need to act now and introduce you to an older, oven-ready man,” she counselled. “Also, you need a chap from a similar background. You know that makes sense.” This, at least, made me laugh.
“This one was 53!” I replied, to which the kind reader replied, “Just the background to nail now”. Except this one didn’t seem to have a hugely different background — he grew up in Henley, sounded like me, and talked of buying a ruin somewhere in Europe where we could spend increasing chunks of the year.
But he, obviously, felt that something (was it the coat of arms over my front door? Only kidding, I keep that in the downstairs loo) made us incompatible.
Most people now would assert that values matter more than background. If you share a similar outlook on life, on what you want, on how you want to raise children and so on, then that’s the main thing. It’s about where you want to go, rather than where you’ve been. These days, you can grow up in Birmingham and go to the local comp, then fall in love with an Old Etonian from just outside Great Tew.
Why not? Actually, hang on, I think that’s the plot to one of my novels. Opposites attract and all that. If you’re a decent human being, you’re a decent human being irrespective of whether you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or your family doesn’t even own a spoon.
Except I wonder whether class warfare is making this more fraught than it should be. “You shouldn’t go out with me if you vote Tory,” thunder numerous dating app profiles, because the implication is that if you vote Tory, you’re a posh baby-eater. I’ve recently watched the first three episodes of Rivals, the brilliant adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1980s bonkbuster, landing on Disney+ next week.
Romance in that crosses all sorts of class boundaries — a self-made millionaire develops a crush on a posh housewife; Lord Baddingham, a chippy, grammar school sort, married a very grand lady who likes opera and her dogs, but is seeing an American TV executive behind her back; Tory minister Rupert Campbell-Black sleeps with, well, everyone. He seems to operate an equal opportunities policy, to be fair.
Technically, nearly 30 years later, we’ve all moved on. Backgrounds are rarely worth mentioning, right? It seems almost embarrassing to bring any difference up, quaint and Victorian. At the wedding between the Old Etonian from just outside Great Tew and his bride, who grew up in Birmingham, someone awful in church may snigger at the “for richer, for poorer” line, and a snotty relative may make some comment about her side not wearing morning suits, but, otherwise, everyone behaves normally.
But difference — whether class, religion, race or other — is still something that many people will be aware of even though it’s considered distasteful or awkward to talk about. So we don’t tend to any more, until suddenly we have to. “We inhabit different worlds,” is a line which now strikes me as unkind at best, a few weeks later. Imagine if I’d been the one from Birmingham and he’d loftily declared that, like a character from a Gaskell novel.
I’m currently, ironically, reading Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party for my very meritocratic Crystal Palace book club. Not my choice but beautifully written. It’s set on the eve of World War One and, after dinner one evening, a female character writes to another of a potential suitor for her daughter. “Would he do for your Agnes, do you suppose? He is the eldest son and there is coal beneath the park.”
So what I’m really wondering now is, are arranged marriages really that bad? I don’t think I’d mind a bit of coal beneath a nice big park.
