Dispatches of love and debauchery from the 1918 flu pandemic

For almost a year now, single people looking for love have had to navigate a — yes, I’m going to say it — unprecedented dating landscape. With methods of meeting new people whittled down essentially to apps, it’s difficult to imagine what surviving a pandemic without this technology would be like. 

We know, however, that people have survived pandemics without modern technology, many in fact. The most recent pandemic that’s comparable to the COVID pandemic is the 1918 Spanish influenza, and I set out to find what dating before and and after that pandemic was like.

Here’s the rub: No one knows exactly. Or at least, none of the many historians I sought out could point me to any overarching trends. 

We thankfully do have glimpses — newspaper clippings, anecdotes — of what dating and love was like back then. In some ways, it was a lot like it is now: People were given certain rules and broke them, or at least circumvented them. 

Laura Spinney, journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, gave the example to NPR of people risking the flu to attend Charlie Chaplin’s latest movie. Sound familiar?

In terms of courting, marriage classifieds served as the dating apps of their time. In a 1919 clip from the newspaper archives on the genealogy platform MyHeritage, lonely maidens and widows searched for a suitable match amidst the pandemic:

Nitay Elboym, senior researcher at MyHeritage, told Mashable that classifieds like these existed prior to the flu, though, and certainly after.

So why, unlike with so many other major historical events, is there not much information on people’s post-1918 romantic life?

We’re still ‘clutching at straws’ for answers

I asked historians from universities across the U.S. and scoured the internet for other 1918 experts to discuss mid- and post-influenza romance, but I received the same response over and over: Great question, but I can’t help you. 

Spinney was able to give me some insight as to why.

When trying to glean people’s emotions and thought patterns, historians need letters, diaries — primary sources that detail their inner states. There are some first-hand accounts from the time that describe what I’m looking for (accounts of love and courting) but according to Spinney, they’re rare and patchy. 

“People’s lives were, in many cases, about survival,” Spinney said in an interview with Mashable. As the flu ravaged communities around the world, so did World War I. People weren’t exactly focused on romance. 

Furthermore, people didn’t talk about their emotions the way they do today. We know there was widespread trauma, Spinney said, but it’s difficult to obtain data on this wave of depression — or melancholia, as they referred to it back then — because people didn’t come forward. There’s some data about asylum admissions but historians say it’s “the tip of the iceberg,” Spinney noted. People just wouldn’t have spoken to doctors about depression. 

The dual trauma of the war and the pandemic also makes it difficult to discern the distinct impacts of the two. “We’re fairly safe in saying that people’s lives were turned upside down in many parts of the world,” Spinney said, “but it was an unusual time because there was this pandemic and the war, so it’s difficult disentangling the effects of those two.”

“We’re fairly safe in saying that people’s lives were turned upside down in many parts of the world.”

There’s another key difference between the 1918 pandemic and today’s: who was most susceptible to the virus. Today, the elderly are the most vulnerable to the coronavirus (though young people have fallen gravely ill as well). In 1918, some of the most vulnerable were between 20 and 40 — the prime years for starting and growing a family. 

The loss of those people meant the loss of a family’s primary wage earner, of parents and spouses. These deaths coupled with a lack of a social safety net, as Spinney put it, destroyed the lives of those left behind. Children were orphaned, people became desolate. Romance was not at the top of most people’s minds.

These are just a few of the reasons why it’s difficult to pin down what “dating” and other aspects of recreational life were like at the time. “It’s really intangible, and you’re always clutching at straws,” said Spinney. 

But all is not lost. “You certainly do get [vivid] glimpses,” Spinney said, of aspects of life, love and marriage included. 

Anecdotes from the 1918 influenza

One of the most well-known stories from the period is Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, after which Spinney named her book. Porter was a journalist in Denver who caught the flu; her black hair fell out and grew back white, Spinney wrote in her book. Porter survived and wrote this semi-autobiographical story about a drama critic named Miranda, who falls in love with a soldier named Adam.

Miranda falls ill with the flu and Adam cares for her. She slips in and out of delirium but, like Porter, survives. After “quite a while,” assumed to be months, Miranda wakes up in a hospital to discover she’s recovering. Adam, however, died of the influenza in an overseas camp hospital — after probably contracting it from Miranda. The story ends with Miranda heartbroken.

One partner dying of the flu and the other surviving wasn’t uncommon in 1918. Spinney described a real-life example she wrote about in Pale Rider. Two Swedes named Nils and Clara married in 1918, but Clara died less than a year later of the flu. Nils remarried six years later to Clara’s best friend, Engla. 

“His destiny was switched onto another track,” said Spinney.

His family and descendants didn’t know about his first wife until 1982, when Nils’s grandson found letters exchanged between Nils and Clara. “He wasn’t able to destroy [the letters],” Spinney told me. “He carried on with this alternative life.”

A strive for normalcy

While some people carried on with “alternate” lives, others tried to maintain a sense of normalcy, similar to what we’re seeing right now.

Just as some utilize plastic “hugging walls” to simulate closeness with loved ones today, newspaper clippings show that those in 1918 didn’t do much different. New York City Commissioner of Health at the time, Royal S. Copeland, advised people against kissing except through handkerchiefs. Going even further, Elboym told Mashable, a newspaper advertised a new invention called a kissing screen. It was “presented as a netting covered with an antiseptic guaranteed to kill all germs,” said Elboym.

In a dovetailing of tragedies, Cincinnati Mayor John Galvin told returning WWI soldiers in 1919: “We will now give you an opportunity to kiss your sisters. There’s no ‘Anti Kissing’ ordinance and if there was, the Mayor is not disposed of at this time to think it would be enforced.” Galvin turned a blind eye, Elboym explained, to 800 soldiers coming home and potentially exposing others (and being exposed themselves). 

Black weddings and a demonic Carnival

Spinney said the flu spurred on a “global game of musical chairs,” where lives, communities, and societies were reshuffled. Another phenomenon she mentioned was the Jewish tradition of a black wedding, meant to ward off disease. Two people who were considered marginal by society, such as beggars, would be married in a cemetery. Then, there was a huge feast and celebration, and the community would raise money for the couple. 

Black weddings were performed in Odessa, in then-Russia and now Ukraine. “It was already considered blasphemous by that time,” said Spinney, “but as an indication of how afraid people were, they got permission to do it from the chief rabbi and from the city authorities.” 

These weddings weren’t unique to Europe, though: There are reports of black weddings in North America as well, such as in Winnipeg and New York City. 

The theme for Rio de Janeiro’s 1919 Carnival had a similar bleak tone: divine punishment. More people attended the festival than ever before, and while details are blurry, Spinney and historians know it devolved into debauchery. 

“Something strange happened at that Carnival,” said Spinney. “It’s as if all the usual inhibitions or the usual rules just went out. It’s hard to interpret what that means.” In Pale Rider, Spinney cited Ricardo Augusto dos Santos’s writings on that Carnival:

Carnival began and overnight, customs and modesty became old, obsolete, spectral… Folk started to do things, think things, feel unheard-of and even demonic things.

Indeed, there were reports of “deflowering” and rapes in the city. There was a baby boom in Rio nine months after Carnival, and those babies were called “sons of the flu.” 

“One way of thinking about it, as shocking as that is, is this kind of expression of a life force,” said Spinney. “People were so terrified and tired of death. This kind of thing came over them. It’s quite hard to imagine the atmosphere, or what it was that gripped them.”

There are reports of baby booms in other locations too, such as in Norway and India, as Spinney wrote in Pale Rider. Given the devastation of both the flu and World War I — not to mention the Great Depression, which would happen only nine years after the tail end of the flu — there wasn’t nearly a baby boom in the U.S. as there was after World War II. 

What parallels can we draw between 1918 and 2020?

According to Spinney, it’s still difficult to grasp what the full human experience was in the wake of the 1918 influenza. This is a detriment both in terms of knowing our history and learning from it. 

If there’s any positive here, it’s that the coronavirus pandemic has shined a new light on 1918. New information can come out of this, Spinney hopes. “One of the interesting things about this pandemic is that it’s forced people to think and talk about 1918 again,” she said. “There’s probably many more personal archives still to come out.”

“People going into their attics and unearthing chests full of family letters to try to understand how their families lived,” Spinney continued.

We don’t know what dating, or other aspects of life, will look like in the years after COVID. We can’t really look to the post-1918 period as a blueprint, either. Access to these glimpses of life during the influenza pandemic however, show that humanity hasn’t changed much in a century: We still yearned for love, and we still wanted to kiss — even if was through a mesh screen.