It’s basic fact that the evil tendrils of capitalism wrap themselves around every aspect of human society, and dating and relationships are no exception. The fact that private companies are monetizing the feeling of love by charging outrageously expensive monthly fees for dating websites is another example of capitalism preying on desperate people. One thing i wanna make clear is that i am not some far-right incel who believes that there should be some “government sponsored partner/spouse” bullshit, but the monetization of the need for human relationships by private companies has made me want to give up dating as a whole until we can achieve post-revolutionary society.
Which makes me wonder, once we reach a post-revolutionary society how do you think dating and relationships up to and including marriage would function. Also would you willing to date a non-communist, personally i would not want to date a non-communist.
I’m not really sure how it would pan out. This isn’t usually the kind of thing one would think about, but it is interesting. I do recall reading a couple of papers about sex in the DDR, however, which went into great detail about pretty much everything related to sex: sexual satisfaction, comfort, feelings of security and stability, etc., and it was compared to their western counterparts. Basically, women in the DDR were, on average (I can’t remember the specific demographics), more satisfied with their partner, and less restricted in terms of the nuclear family model. Women also felt more independent and liberated in their daily lives through higher wages, stable jobs, economic movement, less work, daycare, healthcare, and education. All of these factors echoed one’s life in every respect, which naturally influenced how women went about dating and choosing partners. I remember a particularly funny bit where a group of drunken men were complaining about how East German women were so hard to get and complained that they “had to be interesting” to get a girl. The horror!
Tangentially related, there was a trend of nudism called the FKK. Wikipedia says that it experienced a revival in the east “possibly because of a more secular cultural development,” but that same article it sourced (which I used in my paper) goes into much greater detail about social ideas surrounding nudism being a conduit for socialism via healthy, natural bodies. Likewise, it wasn’t some perverse trend of middle-aged men or rebellious teens, rather, it was entire families going for a trip to the beach in the nude, which the wiki decides to not include for context (I wonder why?). It was, for the most part, non sexual, as it was more seen as a way of connecting to nature and cleansing the body from the dirty city (physically, spiritually, what have you). Also, one would think that a nudist trend would invite less than ideal hygienic conditions, but it was actually the opposite, for reasons I addressed earlier. Once Germany reunified, it comes as no surprise to see that the social restrictions on nudism came from the western half. Of course the FKK wasn’t some national habit, but it wasn’t exactly a minority group either, so we can summarize that relationships in the DDR were less prudish to some extent.
While these don’t answer your question directly, through history we can get a sense of how it could look based on how it looked then through representative examples. I managed to find the title of one, but I can’t access it anymore since universities love to act inclusive and caring until you graduate. If you / anyone reading has university access, feel free to read it, but for those who don’t, it might be included in Herzog’s larger work here Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History
Herzog, Dagmar. “Post Coitum Trist Est…? Sexual Politics and Cultures in Postunification Germany.” German Politics and Society 28 no, 1 (2010): 111–40.
Likewise, check out Victor Grossman for an interesting perspective of a westerner who defected to the east. This is a biography, but there are mentions of daily life, family structures, etc. littered throughout which could relate to your question.
Grossman, Victor. A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019.
Jacobin, I know, but this isn’t a bad article:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/women-better-sex-under-socialism-review
This was very interesting, thanks!
I mostly hate Jacobin for attacking other people online, like the Historic.ly podcast by Esha, recently.
That said: they are some of the few that cover the economic conditions of the working class and publish stuff in book form about recent labor disputes. To be fair, that isn’t say much and it should be expected of most leftists and especially most communists anyways.