In the current wars over the state of American culture, few battlegrounds have seen more action than that of “family values”-sex, marriage and child-rearing. On one issue, there is even an emerging consensus that something is terribly wrong: 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 people are talking about tracking down “dead-beat dads” or re-opening orphanages or doing something to slow the rate of divorce-all remedies for marital failure-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.
Until what seems like only yesterday, young people were groomed for marriage, and the paths leading to it were culturally well set out, at least in outline. In polite society, at the beginning of this century, our grandfathers 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. Especially after the war, “going steady” was a regular feature of high school and college life; the age of marriage dropped considerably, and high school or college sweethearts often married right after, or even before, graduation. Finding a mate, no less than getting an education that would enable him to support her, was at least a tacit goal of many a male undergraduate; many a young woman, so the joke had it, went to college mainly for her MRS. degree.
In other respects, as well, the young remained attuned to the claims of “real life.” Opportunity was knocking, the world and adulthood beckoned, and most of us stepped forward into married life, readily, eagerly and, truth to tell, without much pondering. We were simply doing what our parents had done, indeed, what all our forebears had done.
Not so today. Now the vast majority goes to college, but very few go with the hope, or the wish, of finding a spouse. Many do not expect to find even a path to a career; they often require years of postgraduate “time off” to figure out what to do with themselves. Sexually active-in truth, hyperactive-they flop about from one relationship to another; to the bewildered eye of this 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 is equally good: They are given not to falling in love with one, but to scoring in bed with many. 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.
After college, the scene is even more bizarre: singles bars, personal “partner wanted” ads (almost never mentioning marriage as a goal), men practicing serial monogamy, 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 20s-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 30 comes and goes, they begin to let themselves hear their biological clocks ticking, and, if husbands continue to be lacking, single motherhood by the hand of science is now an option. Meanwhile, the bachelor herd continues its youthful prowl, with real life in suspended animation. Courtship, anyone? Don’t be absurd.
Recent Obstacles to Courtship
Anyone who seriously contemplates the present scene is filled with profound sadness. Our hearts go out not only to the children of failed or non-marriages but also to the lonely, disappointed, cynical, misguided or despondent people who are missing out on one of life’s greatest adventures and, through it, on 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 people frankly wish to turn back the clock and think a remoralization of society in matters erotic is possible. I, on the other hand, am deeply pessimistic, most of the time despairing of any improvement.
Anyone who thinks courtship can make a comeback must at least try to understand what he is up against. Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage: the sexual revolution; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced; great increases in geographic mobility, with loosened ties to extended family; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth not as a stage en route to adulthood but as “the time of our lives,” imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.
The change most immediately devastating for wooing is probably the sexual revolution. For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it? True, many men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure before marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. One no more wanted a loose woman for one’s partner than for one’s mother.
The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in displaying her well-banked affections. A virtue, as it were, made for courtship, modesty served at once as a source of attraction and a spur to manly ardor, a guard against a woman’s own desires, as well as a defense against unworthy suitors. A fine woman understood that giving her body (in earlier times, even her kiss) meant giving her heart, too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and lover forever.
Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates and their capacity to discover their own true longings and best interests. Easy and early sexual satisfaction makes love and real intimacy less, not more, likely-for both men and women. Everyone’s prospects for marriage were-are-sacrificed on the altar of pleasure now.
Crippled by Divorce
The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people argue, against the evidence, that children of divorce will marry better than their parents because they know the importance of choosing well. But the deck is stacked against them. Many of them are frightened of marriage, in whose likely permanence they simply do not believe. Worse, they are often maimed for love and intimacy. They have had no successful models to imitate; and their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents.
It is surely the fear of making a mistake in marriage that leads some people to undertake cohabitation, sometimes understood by the couple to be a “trial marriage.” It is far easier, so the argument goes, to get to know one another by cohabiting than by the artificial systems of courting or dating of yesteryear. But such arrangements, even when they eventuate in matrimony, are, precisely because they are a trial, not a trial of marriage. Marriage is not something one tries on for size, and then decides whether to keep; it is rather something one decides with a promise, and then bends every effort to keep.
That courtship has been severely damaged by feminist ideology goes almost without saying. Even leaving aside the radical attacks on traditional sex roles, on the worth of motherhood, and sometimes even on all males, the reconception of all relations between the sexes as relations based on power is simply deadly for love. Anyone who has ever loved or been loved knows the difference between love and the will to power, no matter what the cynics say. But the cynical new theories, and the resulting push toward androgyny, surely inhibit the growth of love.
On one side, there is greater female assertiveness and efforts at empowerment, with a need to deny all womanly dependence and the vulnerability that calls for the protection of strong and loving men, protection such men were once-and would still be-willing to provide. On the other side, we see the enfeeblement of men, who, contrary to the ruling ideology, are not likely to be better lovers, husbands or fathers if they, too, become feminists or fellow travelers.
On the contrary, many men now cynically exploit women’s demands for equal power by letting them look after themselves-pay their own way, hold their own doors, fight their own battles, travel after dark by themselves. These ever so sensitive males will defend not a woman’s honor but her right to learn the manly art of self-defense. Those increasingly rare men who are still inclined to be gentlemen must dissemble their generosity as submissiveness.
Leaving aside the love-poisoning doctrines of radical feminism, the otherwise welcome changes in women’s education and employment have also been problematic for courtship. True, better educated women can be more interesting and engaging partners for better educated men; and the possibility of genuine friendship between husband and wife-one that could survive the end of the child-rearing years-is, at least in principle, much more likely now that women have equal access to higher education. But everything depends on the spirit and the purpose of such education, and whether it makes and keeps a high place for private life.
The problem is not woman’s desire for meaningful work. It is rather the ordering of one’s loves.The difficulty is, finally, not work but careers, or, rather, careerism. Careerism, now an equal opportunity affliction, is surely no friend to love or marriage.
Not Ready for Adulthood
In previous generations, people chose to marry, but they were not compelled also to choose what marriage meant. Is it a sacrament, a covenant or a contract based on calculation of mutual advantage? Is it properly founded on eros, friendship or economic advantage? Is marriage a vehicle for personal fulfillment and private happiness, a vocation of mutual service or a task to love the one whom it has been given me to love?
Are marital vows still binding promises that both are duty-bound to keep or, rather, quaint expressions of current hopes and predictions that, should they be mistaken, can easily be nullified? Having already given their bodies to one another-not to speak of the previous others-how does one understand the link between marriage and conjugal fidelity? And what of that first purpose of marriage, procreation, for whose sake societies everywhere have instituted and safeguarded this institution?
This brings me to what is probably the deepest and most intractable obstacle to courtship and marriage: a set of cultural attitudes and sensibilities that obscure and even deny the fundamental difference between youth and adulthood. Marriage, especially when seen as the institution designed to provide for the next generation, is most definitely the business of adults, by which I mean, people who are serious about life, people who aspire to go outward and forward to embrace and to assume responsibility for the future.
The view of life as play has often characterized the young. But today this is not seen as a stage, to be outgrown as soon as possible. For their narcissistic absorption in themselves and in immediate pleasures and present experiences, our twentysomethings are not condemned but are even envied by many of their elders. Parents and children wear the same cool clothes, speak the same lingo, listen to the same music. Youth, not adulthood, is the cultural ideal. How many so-called grown-ups today agree with C. S. Lewis: “I envy youth its stomach, not its heart”?
Deeper Cultural Causes
So this is our situation. But just because it is of recent origin does not mean that it is reversible or even that it was avoidable. Indeed, virtually all of the social changes we have so recently experienced are the bittersweet fruits of the success of our modern democratic, enlightened society-celebrating equality, freedom and universal secularized education, and featuring prosperity, mobility and astonishing progress in science and technology. The dominant features of the American way of life are finally inhospitable to the stability of marriage and family life and to the mores that lead people self-consciously to marry.
Tocqueville already observed the unsettling implications of American individualism, each person seeking only in himself the reasons for things. The celebration of equality gradually undermines the authority of religion, tradition and custom and, within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons. A nation dedicated to safeguarding individual rights to liberty and the privately defined pursuit of happiness is, willy-nilly, preparing the way for the “liberation” of women; in the absence of cultural forces, such as traditional biblical religion, that defend sex-linked social roles, androgyny in education and employment is the most likely outcome.
Further, our approach to important moral issues in terms of the rights of individuals-e.g., abortion as belonging to a woman’s right over her own body, or procreation as governed by a right to reproduce-flies in the face of the necessarily social character of sexuality and marriage. The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights-bearing individuals will differ decisively from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as, say, unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply.
The Most Natural Obstacle
Not all the obstacles to courtship and marriage are cultural. At bottom, there is also the deeply ingrained, natural waywardness and unruliness of the human male. Sociobiologists were not the first to discover that males have a penchant for promiscuity and polygamy. Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women; lacking woman’s powerful and immediate link to life’s generative answer to mortality, men flee from the fear of death into heroic deeds, great quests or sheer distraction after distraction. For as long as American society kept strong its uneasy union between modern liberal political principles and Judeo-Christian moral and social beliefs, marriage and the family could be sustained. But the gender-neutral individualism of our political teaching has at last won the day, and the result has been male “liberation”-from domestication, from civility, from responsible self-command.
Ogden Nash had it right: “Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous; higamus hogamus, women monogamous.” To make naturally polygamous men accept the institution of monogamous marriage has been the work of centuries of Western civilization, with social sanctions, backed by religious teachings, as major instruments of the transformation, and with female modesty as the crucial civilizing device. As these mores and sanctions disappear, courtship gives way to seduction and possession, and men become again the sexually, familially and civically irresponsible creatures they are naturally always in danger of being. At the top, executives walk out on their families and take up with trophy wives. At the bottom, low-status males, utterly uncivilized by marriage, return to the fighting gangs, taking young women as prizes for their prowess. Rebarbarization is just around the corner. Courtship, anyone?
Why It Matters
Courtship may well be lost and gone forever. But, if so, we must recognize what we have lost and acknowledge the great price we shall pay in personal happiness, child welfare and civic peace. This should come as no surprise. For the new arrangements that constitute the cultural void created by the demise of courtship rest on serious and destructive errors regarding the human condition: about the meaning of human sexuality, about the nature of marriage, about what constitutes a fully human life.
Sexual desire, in humans as in animals, points to an end that is finally at odds with the self-serving individual: Sexuality means perishability and serves replacement. The salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die tell the universal story: Sex is bound up with death, to which it holds a partial answer in procreation. For a human being to treat sex as a desire like hunger-not to mention as sport-is then to live a deception.
This shallow understanding of sexuality is embodied in our current clamoring for “safe sex.” Sex is by its nature unsafe. To give oneself to another, body and soul, is hardly playing it safe. Sexuality is at its core profoundly “unsafe,” and it is only thanks to contraception that we are encouraged to forget its inherent “dangers.” Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own demise. “Safe sex” is the self-delusion of shallow souls.
It is for this reason that procreation remains at the core of a proper understanding of marriage. Mutual pleasure, service and esteem are, of course, part of the story, and a friendship of shared pursuits enhances any marriage. But it is precisely the common project of procreation that holds together what sexual differentiation sometimes threatens to drive apart.
Through children, a good common to both husband and wife, male and female achieve some genuine unification (beyond the mere sexual “union” that fails to do so): The two become one through sharing generous (not needy) love for this third being. Flesh of their flesh, the child is the parents’ own commingled being externalized, given a separate and persisting existence. Providing an opening to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed but also our names, our ways and our hopes that they will surpass us in goodness and happiness, children are a testament to the possibility of transcendence. It is as the supreme institution devoted to this renewal of human possibility that marriage finds its deepest meaning and highest function.
Marriage and procreation are therefore at the heart of a serious and flourishing human life, if not for everyone at least for the vast majority. For most of us life becomes truly serious when we become responsible for the lives of others for whose being in the world we have said, “We do.” It is fatherhood and motherhood that teach most of us what it took to bring us into our own adulthood. And it is the desire to give not only life but a good way of life to our children that opens us toward a serious concern for the true, the good and even the holy.
Earlier forms of courtship, leading couples to the altar, understood these deeper truths about human sexuality, marriage and the higher possibilities for human life. Courtship provided rituals of growing up, for making clear the meaning of one’s own human sexual nature and for entering into the ceremonial world of ritual and sanctification. 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.
What Is To Be Done?
Is the situation hopeless? One would like to be able to offer more encouraging news than the great popularity of the recent Jane Austen movies, which reflects a dissatisfaction with the unromantic and amarital present and a wish, on the part of many twenty- and thirtysomethings, that they, too, might find their Elizabeth Bennet or Mr. Darcy.
The return of successful professional matchmaking services is a further bit of good news. So, too, the revival of explicit courtship practices among certain religious groups; young men are told by young women that they need their father’s permission to come courting, and marriage alone is clearly the name of the game. One can even take a bit of comfort from those who shun the altar because they recognize that marriage is too serious, demanding and 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 anti-natalist prejudices, implicit in the practice of abortion, and a correction of current anti-generative sex education, would also help, as would the revalorization of marriage as a personal, as well as 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 those religiously affiliated colleges that attract like-minded people.
Even in secular universities like my own, faculty could legitimate 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, we could teach without ideological bias the world’s great literature, elevating the longings and refining the sensibilities of our students and furnishing their souls with numerous examples of lives seriously led and loves faithfully followed.
Religious institutions could provide earlier and better instruction for adolescents on the meaning of sex and marriage, as well as suitable opportunities for co-religionists to mix and, God willing, match. Absent such congregational and community support, individual parents will generally be helpless before the onslaught of the popular culture.
Anything that promotes 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 child-bearing, might in many cases be helpful, the young couple, as it were, growing up together before either partner becomes jaded or distrustful from too much pre-marital experience, not only of “relationships” but of life.
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, and it is largely through the purity of a woman’s morals, self-regulated, that she 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 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”?
