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 the forms that might help her do so are either 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