politically incorrect or simply unknown to her. In my wife’s course on Henry James’s The Bostonians, the class’s most strident feminist, who had all term denounced patriarchy and male hegemonism, honestly confessed in the last class that she wished she could meet a Basil Ransom who would carry her off. But the way to her heart is blocked by her prickly opinions and by the dominant ethos.
§ This is not to say that the sole meaning of sexuality is procreative; understood as lovemaking, sexual union is also a means of expressing mutual love and the desire for a union of souls. Making love need lose none of its tenderness after the childbearing years are past. Yet the procreative possibility embedded in eros cannot be expunged without distorting its meaning.
** I recognize that there are happily monogamous marriages that remain childless, some by choice, others by bad luck, and that some people will feel the pull of and yield to a higher calling, be it art, philosophy, or the celibate priesthood, seeking or serving some other transcendent voice. But the former often feel cheated by their childlessness, frequently going to extraordinary lengths to conceive or adopt a child. A childless and grandchild-less old age is a sadness and a deprivation, even where it is a price willingly paid by couples who deliberately do not procreate. And for those who elect not to marry, they at least face the meaning of the choice forgone. They do not reject, but rather affirm, the trajectory of a human life, whose boundaries are given by necessity, and our animal nature, whose higher yearnings and aspirations are made possible in large part because we recognize our neediness and insufficiency. But until very recently the aging self-proclaimed bachelor was the butt of many jokes, mildly censured for his self-indulgent and carefree, not to say profligate, ways, and for his unwillingness to repay the gift of life and nurture by giving life and nurturing in return. No matter how successful he was in business or profession, he could not avoid some taint of immaturity.
†† The burgeoning use of Internet dating and matchmaking services deserves a separate treatment of its own, which I offer in Chapter Four.
ANYONE INTERESTED in improving relations between men and women today and tomorrow must proceed by taking a page from yesterday, for today’s tale regarding manhood and womanhood is, alas, too brief and hardly edifying. Our sexual harassment police do emphatically prescribe how not to behave toward the opposite sex, as they multiply taboos on speech and gesture. But outside of certain strongly religious communities, we have no clearly defined positive mores and manners that teach men how to be men in relation to women, and women how to be women in relation to men – or, for that matter, how to be gentlemen and ladies. What instruction there is for relations between the sexes is largely gender-neutral: respect the other person’s freedom; avoid sexist speech and unwanted advances; be sincere, sensitive, and caring. The common designations for pairings-off are neutered and unerotic: people have a relationship, not a romance, with a partner or a significant other, not a lover or a beloved. Never mind “hooking up,” which looks upon casual sex as the joining of cattle cars. In our increasingly androgynous age, our sexual speech and mores are designed to fit all couples, homo- and heterosexual, and all manners of intimacy, serious or frivolous.
Though maleness and femaleness are natural facts, manhood and womanhood are, in fashionable opinion, culturally constructed norms, at least to some degree. It is no accident that the meaning of being a man or being a woman has been radically transformed in a society that celebrates freedom and equality, encourages individualism and autonomy, rejects tradition, practices contraception and abortion, sees marriage as a lifestyle, provides the same education and promotes the same careers for men and women, homogenizes fathers and mothers in the neutered work of “parenting,” denies vulnerability and dependence, keeps mortality out of sight, and raises its children without any sense of duty or obligation to future generations. As I argued in the last chapter, the roots of these cultural ideas and practices lie deeper than the sexual revolution, feminism, and the Sixties, and it is naive to think that we can easily reverse their influence with some newly designed mores and manners, like the return of ballroom dancing or single-sex dormitories or romantic ballads, welcome though these changes might be. Truth to tell, most of us would not want to roll back the clock even if we could, and we certainly don’t want to abandon modern liberal democratic society, equal opportunities for women, or the easier ways of life made possible by the scientific-technological project. This means that even conservatives are looking for reform on the cheap, a revival of good sense and decency in relations between the sexes without sacrificing any of the privileges and luxuries of modern life. We strongly suspect this is impossible.
But even if no one can prescribe a good remedy, we are no longer in denial about whether the patient is sick. In the last few decades we have witnessed the rise of discontent, mainly among women, with the present arrangements between the sexes. Many women, and some men, are revolted by the hookup culture and are looking for alternatives: they want real intimacy, they want enduring relationships, they want marriage. Best-selling advice books for durable relationships, books on modesty, campus projects like “Take Back the Date” and the “Love and Fidelity Network,” and the rising popularity of marriage-oriented Internet matching services (examined in the next chapter) are important signs that many people – again, especially women – are eager for lasting relationships with the opposite sex based on romance and mutual respect, fidelity and friendship. Whether they know it or not, what they want is a revival of some form of courtship, with established modes of speech and deed whose goal is marriage.
Anyone interested in developing new mores and manners pointing toward marriage needs to understand what these mores once were, and, even more, what they were trying to achieve. In addition, young people need to acquire the sensibilities, tastes, and skills in reading character that can help them find and judge prospective mates – something they once gained from the study of fine literature and which they can never hope to learn from watching Seinfeld or Sex and the City or Two and a Half Men. To explore the now lost practices of courtship and to encourage the relevant sensibilities, in 1996 we offered a (by invitation only) seminar on the subject at the University of Chicago. We were moved to do so after two decades of observing, with growing sadness, the frustrations and disappointments of our students and former students as they passed through the decade of their twenties (and for some, far into their thirties) failing to find the life partner they longed for or the private happiness that is based on lasting intimacy. The success of our seminar, in which we read and discussed selections mostly from old books, inspired us to prepare an anthology of readings on courting and marrying, designed to help people of marriageable age become more thoughtful about what they are and should be doing. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, published in 2000, became the basis for a publicly offered undergraduate course we taught at Chicago in the spring of that year. We were hoping to revive a higher kind of sex education, an education of heart and mind for lasting marital happiness.
We knew that we faced a formidable challenge – a couple of aging dinosaurs discussing sex, love, courting and marrying with a bunch of hairy mammals young enough to have been our grandchildren. And after hearing their opinions in the first class, I was convinced that the enterprise was pure folly. Male student: “The idea of being married to the same woman for twenty-five years is preposterous.” (We had then been married almost thirty-nine years.) Female student: “We know that we are not supposed to get married until we are at least twenty-eight, so all of our current relationships
