Like, that\u2019s an important point w/r/t the \u201950s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn\u2019t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn\u2019t start in the \u201960s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.
National magazines , the equivalent of today\u2019s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.
And think about it, the imagery of \u201cgoing steady\u201d, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that\u2019s something over and above \u201cdating\u201d, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, \u201cparking\u201d on Lover\u2019s Lane.
“Going steady” was what we\u2019d call dating now because “dating” was what we\u2019d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn\u2019t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.
You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy \u201950s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that \u201cand we\u2019re having sex\u201d is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that\u2019s to say she was sleeping around. That\u2019s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.
(and on that note I should specify that by \u201csleeping around\u201d I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)
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