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 with men are supposed to be impermanent.” Female student: “Casual sex with men is a great improvement, because, by getting the sex thing out of the way, it is now possible to be friends with men as it never was before.” After that class, I felt like tossing in the towel and never going back.
But my wife, cooler and wiser, knew not to despair. “Not to worry. They are just blowing smoke. We’ll do what we always do: put good readings in front of them and discuss them as if they really mattered. You’ll see. They are better than they know.” And so for the next ten weeks we read and talked about, for example, the Garden of Eden story, the coupling of Ares and Aphrodite, Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium, C.S.Lewis on Eros, and the courtships of Darcy and Elizabeth (Pride and Prejudice), Emile and Sophie (Rousseau’s Emile), and Orlando and Rosalind (As You Like It).
Surprisingly, perhaps the most helpful reading turned out to be Erasmus’s “Courtship: A Colloquy” (written in 1523), a compressed dramatic enactment in which Erasmus depicts not so much what was happening in his day as what he thought should happen.3 It provides a useful mirror in which we can see the deficiencies of our present situation and, at the same time, look for basic principles of courtship that might still be necessary and desirable today. By reviewing and commenting here on major portions of the colloquy, we seek to show by example how pondering old texts can contribute to the search for positive manners and mores, especially in an age where none are available.
On first or even second reading, “Courtship: A Colloquy” will no doubt strike most modern readers as quaint or irrelevant, at best. We hope to demonstrate why it can and should be taken seriously, not because it offers a pattern readily importable to modern times – it doesn’t – but because it addresses, whether we recognize them or not, what are still the most important issues: (1) How to transform brutish sexual appetite into human loving? (2) How to make a manly man interested in marriage and (when they arrive) attached to his children? (3) How to help a woman negotiate between her erotic desires and her concern for progeny? (4) How to enable men to find and win, how to enable women to select and hold the right one for lasting marriage? (5) How to locate the relations of men and women in the larger contexts of human life – familial, political, religious? More up-to-date mores and manners that do not come to terms with these issues will not get the job done. The colloquy should command our attention also because it illustrates what may be the central truth about sexual manners and mores: it is women who control and teach mores.
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Pamphilus and Maria meet in the evening in the vicinity of Maria’s family home, probably neither by prior arrangement nor entirely by chance. Pamphilus (whose name means “all-loving” or “loving all”) appears at first to be a foolish, moonstruck lover, quite beside himself in love. Although it later will emerge that he is willing to marry, Pamphilus is eager to win Maria (named after the Virgin) here and now, and he presses his suit – in speech and manner – after the conventions of love poetry. Maria, by contrast, appears from the start to be utterly sensible and self-possessed; witty, sharp, and charming, she almost immediately assumes control. She will direct the conversation from the conventions of love poetry to the conventions of marriage. The beginning establishes both the tone and the starting points of the courtship. (Readers are encouraged to read the dialogue aloud, and dramatically.)
PAMPHILUS: Hello – you cruel, hardhearted, unrelenting creature!
MARIA: Hello yourself, Pamphilus, as often and as much as you like, and by whatever name you please. But sometimes I think you’ve