Why It Matters
Given the enormous new social impediments to courtship and marriage, and given also that they are firmly and deeply rooted in the cultural soil of modernity, not to say human nature itself, one might simply decide to declare the cause lost. Indeed, many people would be only too glad to do so. For they condemn the old ways as repressive, inegalitarian, sexist, patriarchal, boring, artificial, and unnecessary. Some urge us to go with the flow, while others hopefully believe that new modes and orders will emerge, well suited to our new conditions of liberation and equality: just as new cultural meanings are today being “constructed” for sexuality and gender, so too new cultural definitions can be invented for “marriage,” “paternity and maternity,” and “family.” Nothing truly important will be lost – so the argument goes.
New arrangements can perhaps be fashioned. As Raskolnikov put it (and he should know), “Man gets used to everything, the beast!” But it is simply wrong to say that nothing important will be lost; indeed, many things of great importance have already been lost, and, as I have indicated, at tremendous cost 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 and dating rest on serious and destructive errors regarding the human condition: errors about the meaning of human sexuality, errors about the nature of marriage, errors about what constitutes a fully human life.
Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals, points to an end that is partly hidden from, and ultimately at odds with, the self-serving individual: Sexuality as such 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. This truth the salmon and the other animals practice blindly; only the human being can understand what it means. As we learn powerfully from the story of the Garden of Eden, our humanization is coincident with sexual self-consciousness, with the recognition of our sexual nakedness and all that it implies: shame at our needy incompleteness, unruly self-division, and finitude; awe before the eternal; hope in the self-transcending possibilities of children and a relationship to the divine.2 For a human being to treat sex as a desire like hunger – not to mention as sport – is to live a deception.
How shallow an understanding of sexuality is embodied in our current clamoring for “safe sex.” Sex is by its nature unsafe. All interpersonal relations are necessarily risky and serious ones especially so. 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.” These go beyond the hazards of venereal disease, a reminder and a symbol of the high stakes involved, and beyond the risks of pregnancy and the pains and dangers of childbirth. To repeat, sexuality itself means mortality – equally for both man and woman. 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 and mutual service between husband and wife are, of course, part of the story. So too are mutual admiration and esteem, especially where the partners are deserving. A friendship of shared pursuits and pastimes enhances any marriage, all the more so when the joint activities exercise deeper human capacities. 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 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 as good. Flesh of their flesh, the child is the parents’ own commingled being externalized, and given a separate and persisting existence; unification is enhanced also by their commingled work of rearing. 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. Gender duality and sexual desire, which first draws our love upward and outside of ourselves, finally provide for the partial overcoming of the confinement and limitation of perishable embodiment altogether. It is as the supreme institution devoted to this renewal of human possibility that marriage finds its deepest meaning and highest function.
There 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