is no substitute for the contribution that the shared work of raising children makes to the singular friendship and love of husband and wife. Precisely because of its central procreative mission, and, even more, because children are yours for a lifetime, this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person. Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from, but rather embraces wholeheartedly, the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition. Not by mistake did God create a woman – rather than a dialectic partner – to cure Adam’s aloneness; not by accident does the same biblical Hebrew verb mean both to know sexually and to know the truth – including the generative truth about the meaning of being man and woman.** For most people, therefore, marriage and procreation are at the heart of a serious and flourishing human life.
The earlier forms of courtship, leading men and women to the altar, rested on an understanding of the deeper truths about human sexuality, marriage, and the higher possibilities for human life. Courtship provided rituals for growing up, for making clear the meaning of one’s own human sexual nature, and for entering into the ceremonial and customary world of service and sanctification. Courtship disciplined sexual desire and romantic attraction, provided opportunities for mutual learning about one another’s character, fostered salutary illusions that inspired admiration and devotion, and, by locating wooer and wooed in their familial settings, taught the intergenerational meaning of erotic activity. It pointed the way to the answers to life’s biggest questions: Where are you going? Who is going with you? How – in what manner – are you both going to go?
The practices of today’s men and women do not accomplish these purposes, and they and their marriages, when they get around to them, are weaker as a result. There may be no going back to the earlier forms of courtship, but no one should be rejoicing over this fact. Anyone serious about “designing” new cultural forms to replace those that are now defunct must bear the burden of finding some alternative means of serving all these necessary goals.
Is a Revolution Needed?
Is the situation hopeless? One might see a bit of encouraging news in the great popularity – not just among those over fifty – of the recent Jane Austen movies, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma, and (on public television) the splendid BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. This is only a small ray of hope, but I believe that the renewed interest in Jane Austen reflects a dissatisfaction with the unromantic and amarital present, and a wish on the part of many twenty- and thirty-somethings to find their own equivalent of Elizabeth Bennet or Mr. Darcy (even without his Pemberly). The return of successful professional matchmaking services – I do not mean the innumerable “self-matching” services that fill pages of “personal” ads in our newspapers and magazines – is a further bit of good news.†† So too is the revival of explicit courtship practices among certain religious groups; young men are told by young women that they need their parents’ permission to come courting, and marriage alone is clearly the name of the game. And – if I may grasp at straws – one can even take a small bit of comfort from those who steadfastly refuse to marry, insofar as they do so because they recognize that marriage is too serious, too demanding, too audacious an adventure for their immature, irresponsible, and cowardly selves.
Frail reeds, indeed – probably not enough to save even a couple of courting water bugs. Real reform in the direction of sanity would require a restoration of cultural gravity about sex, marriage, and the life cycle. The restigmatization of illegitimacy and promiscuity would help. A reversal of recent antinatalist prejudices, implicit in the practice of abortion, and a correction of current antigenerative sex education would also help, as would the revalorization of marriage as both a personal and a cultural ideal. Parents of pubescent children could contribute to a truly humanizing sex education by elevating their erotic imagination, through exposure to an older and more edifying literature. Parents of college-bound young people, especially those with strong religious and family values, could direct their children to religiously affiliated colleges that attract like-minded people.
Even in deracinated and cosmopolitan universities like my own, faculty could legitimize the importance of courtship and marriage by offering courses on the subject, aimed at making the students more thoughtful about their own life-shaping choices. Even better, they could teach without ideological or methodological preoccupations the world’s great literature, elevating the longings and refining the sensibilities of their students and furnishing their souls with numerous examples of lives seriously led and loves faithfully followed. (The next chapter offers an illustration of using a great text in this way.) Religious institutions could provide earlier and better instruction for adolescents on the meaning of sex and marriage, as well as suitable opportunities for coreligionists to mix and, God willing, match. Without congregational or communal support, individual parents will generally be helpless before the onslaught of the popular culture.
Under present democratic conditions, with families not what they used to be, anything that contributes to promoting a lasting friendship between husband and wife should be cultivated. A budding couple today needs even better skills at reading character, and greater opportunities for showing it, than was necessary in a world that had lots of family members looking on. Paradoxically, encouragement of earlier marriage, and earlier childbearing, might in many cases be helpful – the young couple growing up together, as it were, before either partner could become jaded or distrustful from too much premarital experience, not only of “relationships” but of life. Postcollegiate career training for married women could be postponed until after the early motherhood years – perhaps even supported publicly by something like a GI Bill of Rights for mothers who had stayed home until their children reached school age.
But it would appear to require a revolution to restore the conditions most necessary for successful courtship: a desire in America’s youth for mature adulthood (which means for marriage and parenthood), an appreciation of the unique character of the marital bond, understood as linked to generation, and a restoration of sexual self-restraint generally and of female modesty in particular.
Frankly, I do not see how this last, most crucial prerequisite can be recovered, nor do I see how one can do sensibly without it. As Tocqueville rightly noted, it is women who are the teachers of mores; it is largely through the purity of her morals, self-regulated, that woman wields her influence, both before and after marriage. Men, as Rousseau put it, will always do what is pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their own considerable sexual power. Is there perhaps some nascent young feminist out there who would like to make her name great and who will seize the golden opportunity for advancing the truest interest of women (and men and children) by raising (again) the radical banner, “Not until you marry me”? And, while I’m dreaming, why not also, “Not without my parents’ blessings”?
* Readers removed from the college scene should revisit Allan Bloom’s profound analysis of relationships in The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Bloom was concerned with the effect of the new arrangements on the possibility for liberal education, not for marriage, my current concern.
† In years past, students identified with Hamlet because of his desire to make a difference in the world. Today, they identify with him because of his “broken home” – the death of his father and the too-hasty remarriage of his mother. Thus, to them it is no wonder that he, like them, has trouble in his “relationships.”
‡ Truth to tell, the reigning ideology often rules only people’s tongues, not their hearts. Many a young woman secretly hopes to meet and catch a gentleman, though
