Courtship
IN THE ONGOING WARS over the state of American culture, few battlegrounds have seen more action than that of “family values” – sex, marriage, and childrearing. Passions run high about sexual harassment, condom distribution in schools, pornography, abortion, gay marriage, and other efforts to alter the definition of “a family.” Many people are distressed over the record-high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, marital infidelity, and premarital promiscuity. On some issues, there is even an emerging consensus that something is terribly wrong: Though they may differ on what is to be done, people on both the left and the right have come to regard the breakup of marriage as a leading cause of the neglect, indeed, the psychic and moral maiming of America’s children.
But while various people are talking about tracking down “deadbeat dads” or reestablishing orphanages or doing something to slow the rate of divorce – all remedies for marital failure – very little attention is being paid to what makes for marital success. Still less are we attending to the ways and mores of entering into marriage, that is, to wooing or courtship.
There is, of course, good reason for this neglect. The very terms – “wooing,” “courting,” “suitors” – are archaic; and if the words barely exist anymore, it is because the phenomena have all but disappeared. Today there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony. This is true not just for the lower classes. Even – indeed, especially – the elite, who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage. There are still exceptions to be found, say, in closed religious communities or among new immigrants from parts of the world that still practice arranged marriage. But for most of America’s middle- and upper-class youth – the privileged and college-educated – there are no known social paths, explicit or even tacit, directed toward marriage. People still get married, though later, more hesitantly, and, by and large, less successfully. People still get married in churches and synagogues, though often with ceremonies of their own creation. For the great majority, though, the way to the altar is uncharted: It’s every couple on its own, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled upon it by accident.
Then and Now
Things were not always like this; in fact, one suspects things were never like this, not here, not anywhere. In this respect as in so many others, we live in utterly novel and unprecedented times. Until what seems like only yesterday, young people were groomed for marriage, and the paths leading to it were culturally set out, at least roughly. Our grandfathers, in polite society, came a-calling and a-wooing at the homes of our grandmothers, under conditions set by the woman, operating from strength on her own turf. A generation later, courting couples began to go out on “dates,” in public and increasingly on the man’s terms, given that he had the income to pay for dinner and dancing. To be sure, some people “played the field,” and dating on college campuses in the prewar years became a matter more of proving popularity than of proving suitability for marriage. But “going steady” was a regular feature of high-school and college life, especially after the war, when the age of marriage dropped considerably, and high-school or college sweethearts often married right after graduation, or even before. Finding a mate, no less than getting an education that would enable him to support her, was at least an unstated goal of many a male undergraduate; many a young woman, so the joke had it, went to college mainly for her MRS. degree, a charge whose truth was proof against libel for legions of college coeds well into the 1960s.1
In other respects as well, the young remained culturally attached to the claims of “real life.” Though times were good, fresh memory kept alive the poverty of the Great Depression and the deaths and dislocations of the war; necessity and the urgencies of life were not out of sight, even for fortunate youth. Opportunity was knocking, the world and adulthood were beckoning, and most of us stepped forward into married life, readily, eagerly, and, truth to tell, without much pondering. We were simply doing – some sooner, some later – what our parents had done, indeed, what all our forebears had done.
Not so today. Now the vast majority go to college, but very few – women or men – go with the hope, or even the wish, of finding a marriage partner. Many do not expect to find there even a path to a career; they often require several years of postgraduate “time off” to figure out what they are going to do with themselves. Sexually active – indeed, hyperactive – they flop about from one relationship to another. To the bewildered eye of this admittedly much-too-old but still-romantic observer, they manage to appear all at once casual and carefree and grim and humorless about getting along with the opposite sex. The young men, nervous predators, act as if any woman were equally good; they are given not to falling in love with one, but to scoring in bed with many. And in this sporting attitude they are now matched by some female trophy hunters.
But most young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused. Hoping for something more, they are not enjoying their hard-won sexual liberation as much as liberation theory says they should.* Forget about wooing; today’s collegians do not even make dates or other forward-looking commitments to see one another. In this, as in so many other ways, they reveal their blindness to the passing of time and its meaning. Those very few who couple off seriously and get married upon graduation, as their parents did, are looked upon as freaks.
After college, the scene is even more remarkable and bizarre: singles bars, personal “partner wanted” ads (almost never mentioning marriage as a goal), men practicing serial monogamy (or what someone has aptly renamed “rotating polygamy”), women chronically disappointed in the failure of men to “commit.” For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties – their most fertile years – neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands, unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not; resenting the personal price they pay for their worldly independence, they nevertheless try to put a good face on things and take refuge in work or feminist ideology. As age thirty comes and goes, they begin to allow themselves to hear their biological clock ticking, and, if husbands continue to be lacking, single motherhood by the hand of science is now an option. Meanwhile, the bachelor herd continue their youthful prowl, with real life in suspended animation, living out what Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor of City Journal, has called a “postmodern postadolescence.”
Those women and men who get lucky enter into what the personal ads call LTRs – long-term relationships – sometimes cohabiting, sometimes not, usually to discover how short an LTR can be. When, after a series of such affairs, marriage happens to them, they enter upon it guardedly and suspiciously, with prenuptial agreements, no common surname, and separate bank accounts.
Courtship, anyone? Don’t be ridiculous.
Recent Obstacles to Courtship
Anyone who seriously contemplates the present scene is – or should be – filled with profound sadness, all the more so if he or she knows the profound satisfactions of a successful marriage. Our hearts go out not only to the children of failed marriages or of nonmarriage – to those betrayed by their parents’ divorce and to those deliberately brought into the world as bastards – but also to the lonely, disappointed, cynical, misguided, or despondent people who are missing out on one of life’s greatest adventures, which brings with it many of life’s deepest experiences, insights, and joys. We watch our sons and daughters, our friends’ children, and our students bumble along from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next, wishing we could help. Few things lead us to curse “o tempore, o mores” more than recognizing our impotence to do anything either about our own young people’s dilemmas or about these melancholy times.
Some conservatives frankly wish to turn back
