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Courtship charts
pathways to marriage. Its customs and rituals help
individuals negotiate the complex transition from
sexual attraction, through love, to lasting
marriage. It provides, for better or worse, the
moral and emotional education for married life. And
yet, courtship no longer occupies a vital place
within contemporary American culture; the word
itself now seems quaint and outdated. Social
historians such as Beth Bailey and Ellen Rothman
have documented the decay of courtship traditions
in twentieth-century America. Leon Kass has pointed
out that the erosion of courtship, coupled with
other worrisome trends in law, economics, and
technology, has destabilized the institution of
marriage.1 Today, the road to marriage is devoid of
clear markers and fraught with more accidents and
wrong turns.
The decline of
courtship may reflect broader cultural trends.
According to Anthony Giddens, one of Britain's most
distinguished sociologists, popular culture is
creating a new grammar of intimacy. In The
Transformation of Intimacy and, more recently, in
the prestigious Reith Lectures, Giddens argues that
we are moving from a marriage culture to a culture
that celebrates the "pure relationship." A "pure
relationship" is one that has been stripped of any
goal beyond the intrinsic emotional, psychological,
or sexual satisfaction it brings to the individuals
involved. In this new world of "relationships,"
marriage is placed on a level playing field with
all other long-term sexually intimate
relationships, with similar values and processes
governing their initiation, maintenance, and
dissolution. Accordingly, the concept of a special
pathway to marriage -- i.e., courtship -- tends to
be abandoned in favor of a more general discussion
of the dynamics of any close
relationship.
However, as the
consequences of family fragmentation have become
more apparent, there are signs of a renewed
interest in finding ways to strengthen marriage. A
large body of research shows that healthy marriages
protect the well-being of spouses and their
children, and that a number of significant social
costs are generated when marriages fail. This
renewed appreciation for marriage's importance may
be triggering some interest in the question of
courtship. In the popular realm, a number of new
books on courtship, both secular and religious,
have sold well. Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider's
popular 1996 book, The Rules, purports to teach
battle-scarred women a practical, no-nonsense
script for finding a fabulous husband. Joshua
Harris's 1997 Christian best-seller, I Kissed
Dating Good-Bye, urges young people to eschew
recreational dating and return to older
"scriptural" courtship practices. And Leon Kass and
Amy Kass's well-received anthology of readings on
courtship and marriage, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar,
offers readers wisdom on the nature of courtship
and marriage culled from 5,000 years of the Western
tradition. The success of these books indicates a
yearning among many young people for clearer and
more effective pathways to marriage than the
culture now provides. The spread of marriage
education, in both schools and religious
communities, also suggests that the case for
courtship is not completely closed.
But what does
contemporary scholarship have to say about the
courtship question? According to Norval Glenn, the
dean of American family sociologists, the study of
courtship is now "virtually moribund." Academics do
not appear particularly interested in discussing
pathways to marriage. There are, however, a number
of scholarly theories poking around into topics of
related interest: heterosexual attraction, mate
selection, pair bonding, and close relationships.
Three schools of scholarly thought merit attention:
exchange theory, sociobiology, and
close-relationship theory. While these approaches
contribute little to the study of courtship itself,
they do provide fascinating articulations of the
dominant ideologies guiding today's discourse on
heterosexual pair bonding.
The
commodification of courtship
The contemporary
cultural disarray over dating, courtship, and mate
selection reflects deep-seated historical
developments that have been the subject of
scholarly discussion for a few generations. The
transition to modernity and then to postmodernity
was accompanied by a diminishment of social
scripting of interpersonal relationships, including
sexual relationships, courtship, and marriage. Over
60 years ago, one of America's eminent
sociologists, Willard Waller, drew attention to the
modern shift away from the explicit standards for
mate selection that characterized more homogeneous
societies. The nature of the "bargaining process"
for heterosexual pair bonding was becoming
"confused" and "complex." Waller argued that the
modern emphasis on "marriage for love" was little
more than a mask for our cultural confusion over
the absence of more explicit communal guidelines
toward marriage.
Waller noted that
new types of bargains were being struck in the
courtship process, "bargains which have to do with
merely the conditions of association outside of
marriage." Over the course of the twentieth
century, dating and courtship patterns gradually
drifted into free-floating social space, devoid of
any meaningful connection to the goal of marriage.
Rising rates of premarital sexuality, cohabitation,
and out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s signaled
a decline in the cultural and social stature of
marriage as the unique repository of sexual life
and childbearing. These trends eroded the
traditional connection of courtship to
marriage.
Critical social
theorists such as Eva Illouz in Consuming the
Romantic Utopia and Beth Bailey in From Front Porch
to Back Seat have attempted to trace one important
aspect of this story, namely, the commodification
and commercialization of courtship practices in
modern capitalist economies. They argue that
nineteenth-century courtship practices lay within
the sphere of civil society: Churches, families,
kinship groups, and cultural communities largely
shaped courtship rites and practices. However,
twentieth-century courtship increasingly moved to
the beat of modern capitalism. Courtship was driven
out of the home and into the marketplace: Movie
theaters, automobiles, restaurants, dance halls,
and clubs, rather than homes, church halls, and
community celebrations, became the privileged
spaces for courtship activity. According to Bailey,
the language of the market came to dominate
academic theories of courtship and romance, as well
as popular culture:
As it
emerged in the twentieth century, courtship
largely was construed and understood in models
and metaphors of modern industrial capitalism.
The new system of courtship privileged
competition (and worried about how to control
it); it valued consumption; it presented an
economic model of scarcity and abundance as a
guide to personal affairs. The rules of the
market were consciously applied; the vocabulary
of economic exchange defined acts of
courtship.
But a systematic
application of economic theory to courtship had to
await the work of economist Gary Becker. It was
Becker and his school's special, but limited,
achievement to apply the tools of the economist to
the arena of love, and to do so, moreover, at the
very moment in history when the commodification of
courtship was largely completed. Exchange theory
explicitly assumes that acts of marriage, like
other acts, are the choices of rational selves.
"Persons marry," Becker wrote in his 1974 essay "A
Theory of Marriage," "when the utility expected
from the marriage exceeds the utility expected from
remaining single." In the self-contained world of
exchange theory, any desire, even the desire to
love and care for another human being, must be
shoved within the cramped confines of a person's
"utility function."
Exchange theory
views the passion and poetry of mate selection as
mere marketing strategies. The utility of a
marriage depends on the "commodities" produced by
the potential partner: standards of living,
quantity and quality of children, sexual
gratification, social status, and others. The
marriage market consists of three critical
components: supply, preferences, and resources. Men
and women actively looking for a spouse represent
the "supply." "Preferences" are the characteristics
men or women, as customers, look for in a spouse.
"Resources" are the various attributes that men and
women offer in order to gain those
preferences.
This "exchange
theory" model of courtship, the oldest of our three
expert stories, is by no means dead. The "marriage
market" model, with all its bland economic
vocabulary (supply and demand, preferences,
bargaining, exchange, and investment), continues to
influence some prominent discussions of mate
selection -- and still generates research into such
areas as the relationship between employment and
the marriageability of men.
For those
interested in marriage as a social institution, the
advantage of this perspective is that it still
views courtship as the pathway to marriage. But in
exchange theory, the marriage vow has been dumbed
down to a mere contract intended to serve the
narrow interests of the individuals investing in
the relationship. No-fault divorce laws make
marriage agreements far flimsier and more
vulnerable to shifting preferences than most
business contracts. Exchange theory nicely reflects
this cultural shift and spotlights the increasingly
utilitarian motivations that guide entrance into
these fragile marriage "deals."
Yet by assuming
that, by definition, individuals act as rational
consumers, "exchange theory" is of limited use in
understanding the social and interpersonal aspects
of courtship and marriage as institutions. It fails
to appreciate the irrational or unselfconscious
ideas that may move people to marriage and may keep
them in it long after a "rational consumer" would
have traded in their old clunky model for a jazzier
new one. Many of the essential features of love --
the longing for permanence, the desire to give
oneself to another -- must in the economists' story
of courtship be either submerged into "contract
theory" or dismissed altogether as irrational. For
a full understanding of how and why people marry,
we must look elsewhere.
It's
all in the genes
Sociobiology is one
of the most popular of the new theoretical
perspectives on courtship, marriage, and sexuality.
In the quest to unravel the convoluted scripts of
heterosexual bonding, sociobiology has emerged as
an attractive alternative, basing arguments on an
appeal to genes rather than morals. In contrast to
rational choice or exchange theories of courtship,
sociobiologists search for deeply rooted
evolutionary factors that govern sexual and
romantic preferences in mate selection.
Evolutionary
psychology maintains that males and females have
radically divergent sexual psychologies. Innate
evolutionary factors have conditioned women to
value and select men on the basis of their ability
to provide nourishment, protection, security, and
social status for themselves and their offspring.
Females seek "dominant males." Status signals such
as power, money, social position, intelligence,
education, skills, and the ability to father rank
high for women. Males, on the other hand, are
"hardwired" to seek sexual liaisons with women who
show signs of reproductive viability, such as
health, youth, and physical
attractiveness.
In this highly
charged and competitive world of courtship, male
and female interests are essentially
incommensurable, yielding divergent strategies and
counter-strategies of seduction. Females deceive
about their age and physical attractiveness; males
dissemble about their financial resources, career
prospects, and willingness to commit. Women deceive
and seduce cosmetically, men deceive and seduce
through ritualized displays of acquisition. Women
concentrate on dressing for dates, men concentrate
on planning and paying for dates.
Given these
courtship dynamics, sociobiology predicts the
emergence of a "marriage gradient" with women
"marrying up" and men "marrying down." This puts a
"marriage squeeze" on high-status women.
High-status males have an immense pool of potential
female mates from which to choose, but high-status
women seeking to "marry up" face a very restricted
pool of available males. The male tendency to
"marry down" tends further to sideline high-status
females. Feminists often disparage this pattern as
a patriarchal strategy aimed at female
subordination: Men socially entrench the
subordination of women by marrying down and ruling
over their younger and lower-status women. This
male strategy also contributes to the social
marginalization of high-achieving women.
Sociobiologists
smile at these expressions of moral outrage. From
their perspective, feminists are usually
high-status women with careers, resources, and
power; however, feminists predictably refuse to
"marry down." They are in the market for
"challenging" men -- a feminist euphemism for
"dominant males." In his 1998 book What Women Want,
What Men Want, John Townsend notes that the
feminist disparagement of "marrying- down" males
echoes the age-old rhetorical strategies of
high-status females, who typically denigrate
low-status female competitors while simultaneously
berating high-status males for daring to overlook
them.
These courtship
strategies have a profound impact on hierarchical
structuring of human societies. Male and female
mate preferences generate very different social
outcomes. The traits that men value (female youth,
health, and attractiveness) have relatively little
impact on social order, aside from the impetus they
give to the development of cosmetic and clothing
industries. But the traits that women value- --
status, productivity, dominance, resources -- fire
up the male "will to power." Men need to make a
difference in the world if they are to be noticed
by women. Mary Batten, author of Sexual Strategies:
How Females Choose Their Mates, argues that female
mating strategies play a major role in driving men
to compete for power and wealth, thereby fostering
in all human societies the "social dominance
orientation" of men.
Sociobiology offers
a rollicking comic spoof on the world of romance
and power. In the world of sociobiology, lovers are
bustling about, stumbling through their
relationships, deceiving one another, wooing and
warring with one another from very different, even
contradictory, scripts of love -- and yet, somehow,
when all is said and done, these mismatched lovers
land in bed together, men on top, cunningly trapped
by the inexorable logic of reproductive success.
Meanwhile, in the public sphere, men exhaust
themselves to succeed in the worlds of high finance
and global politics in order to be "attractive" to
the next pretty blond that happens to pass by. In
the words of Henry Kissinger: "Without an office,
you have no power, and I love power because it
attracts women."
Sociobiology also
offers an intellectual spin on the growing climate
of cynicism that pervades contemporary explorations
of marriage in literature, popular film, and music.
According to David Buss in The Evolution of Desire,
we must "lift our collective heads" out of the
romantic sands and recognize that heterosexual
relationships are about power, sex, property,
deceit, and control, rather than love, self-giving,
romance, and commitment. Sociobiology replaces the
tale of Cupid's arrows with a story of another
outside agent: our own impish genes, which
manipulate us and mock our purposes in their blind,
relentless search for survival and
replication.
Power
males
Some scholars
believe that sociobiology offers scientific support
for monogamous marriage. Townsend's colorful
exploration of evolutionary perspectives on mate
selection ends with a homiletic flourish on the
role evolution played in the development of the
stable monogamous marriage. Yet if we follow the
logic of maximum reproductive success to its
endpoint, we seem to find a case made for male
polygyny, not monogamy. To the extent that
sociobiology suggests or implies a particular
social-sexual order, dominant male polygyny, not
strict monogamy, may eventually emerge as its
central plank.
Townsend himself
has trouble shaking loose from the inner logic of
this position. "Men in position of power," he
admits, "tend to practice polygyny: legitimate
polygyny where it is allowed; functional polygyny
where it is not." Townsend notes that polygyny is
accepted in over 83 percent of human societies. He
concedes that Western societies have firmly
prohibited polygyny but argues that many elite
males are "in effect, polygynous." Divorce and
remarriage or a series of sexual partners are forms
of "serial polygyny." The illicit sexual
relationships that garnish the lives of many
high-status males are forms of "functional
polygyny." As sociobiology cleans the dust from our
evolutionary psychology, out springs an aggressive
and promiscuous male genie.
And today, male
elites command resources, technologies, and
services far beyond the wildest dreams of their
predecessors. They are able to sustain
relationships with a variety of women, as well as
make significant investments in their offspring.
Indeed, we may be in the midst of a subtle and
imperceptible drift toward some form of socially
acceptable concubinage for dominant males.
Sociobiology might accelerate this trend by making
the concept of polygyny appear to be a reasonable
accommodation to some of the more problematic
exigencies of dominant male psychology.
Sociobiology does
bring one crucial advantage to current debates. It
reconnects courtship with procreation, offering a
powerful exploration of the intrinsic connections
between sexuality, heterosexual bonding,
reproductive success, and investment in offspring.
And it provides a corrective to other theoretical
approaches, which tend to separate the question of
children and child-rearing from courtship and mate
selection. However, it is important to note that
according to sociobiology, sexual attraction per se
is not dependent on conscious awareness of the
linkage between attraction and procreation. This
linkage was forged in our distant evolutionary
past. Once the evolutionary hardwiring is in place,
men are instinctively attracted to young voluptuous
women, and women are instinctively attracted to
dominant males. They are not attracted because
physical beauty or social dominance signal
reproductive potential; they are just
attracted.
But what happens
when these ancient evolutionary drives are loosened
from their moorings in reproduction? What happens
when, aided by technology, we can weaken or
dissolve altogether the linkage between sex and
procreation? Sociobiologists assure us that our
drives are now genetically secure enough to
dispense with any direct concern with procreation.
In days of old, procreation was a critical fact in
the slow evolutionary hardwiring of heterosexual
attraction, but that work is done. The dynamics of
heterosexual attraction can now thrive in
freestanding forms. So where, in the final
sociobiological analysis, do children fit in? In
social terms, nowhere.
In sum, for all of
its explanatory power regarding the interactions
among sexual desire, procreation, and social
processes, sociobiology is unable to understand or
strengthen marriage as an institution. In the
current environment, sociobiology also reinforces
trends of dubious value. Its particular version of
sexual realism corresponds well to contemporary
cynicism about heterosexual love and marriage.
Sociobiology has a very modest interest in
marriage; if other arrangements can meet our
"evolutionary desires," sociobiology is more than
willing to consider them. There is also its barely
veiled celebration of dominance, exploitation, and
raw power. Insofar as sociobiology helps shape our
standards, it supports efforts to give dominant
males more latitude to make full use of their
resources in the realm of sexual pursuit. Finally,
sociobiology has a nice way of acknowledging
children for their unique contribution to the
evolution of our sexual drives, then politely
showing them the door.
Postmodern
courtship
One of the most
prominent perspectives in contemporary courtship
research is that of "close-relationships" theory.
In 1988, Steve Duck edited a major anthology,
Handbook of Personal Relations, which marked the
tenth anniversary of a new discipline, "the science
of close relationships." Current research in the
field continues at the "incredible rate" of
expansion that Duck celebrated in 1988. This work
has been spearheaded by a diverse group of scholars
who have formed professional associations, such as
the International Society for the Study of Personal
Relationships and the International Network on
Personal Relationships. They have also launched two
journals, the Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships and Personal Relationships, as well
as a number of major publication series, such as
the Sage Series on Close Relationships and Advances
in Personal Relationships. The field employs a
variety of research methodologies, from standard
social-science surveys to intensive one-on-one and
small-group interviews.
The dynamics of
initiating and developing close, sexually based
relationships are a major preoccupation of
close-relationship theory. Articles and monographs
cover a very wide range of topics: "falling in
love," romantic love, attachment patterns, "love
styles," interracial and interethnic dating,
physical attractiveness (body shape, health status,
hair length, height, voice intonation), age
preferences, jealousy, love triangles, dating
infidelity, fatal attractions, family-of-origin
influences, socioeconomic status, self-disclosure
processes, topic avoidance, deceit, nonverbal
signals, the use of humor, coping with peer and
parental criticism, relationship dissolution, and
romance grieving processes.
This complex body
of theories probing a baffling array of topics
might appear to resist general commentary and
review, but certain common themes do emerge:
Marriage is knocked off its pedestal, and its
purpose of child-rearing gets short shrift. And the
transcendent ideal of love is replaced by the "love
styles" of individual selves seeking sexual
satisfaction in episodic relationships. Courtship,
rather than leading to marriage, becomes just one
damn relationship after another.
Generic
brand relationships
Close-relationship
theorists argue that we need to bring a common
theoretical and methodological approach to the
study of all "sexually based primary
relationships." In their 1989 book The Sexual Bond:
Rethinking Families and Close Relationships, John
Scanzoni, Jay Teachman, and Linda Thompson argue
that alternative sexual life styles are not
"qualitatively other from what is known as the
benchmark conventional nuclear family." Courtship,
spousal, and familial relationships can and should
be "subsumed under the broader construct of close
or primary relationships."
In the taxonomy of
sexually based adult relationships, the existence
or nonexistence of a legally recognized bond, such
as marriage, is a secondary consideration. Marriage
is merely a de jure category, not an actual
scientific reality. Close-relationship theorists
argue that the family is "essentially a lay or
commonsense construct" rather than a meaningful
scientific model. The terms "family" and "families"
are "valid poetic and literary descriptions of
folk-culture reality" that may be of value in
"fostering communication among lay persons" about
the "slippery realities" of personal relationships.
However, such "lay" constructs distort and limit
scientific work on intimate adult relationships.
Scholars and professionals will "find it more
fruitful both practically and scientifically to
think and work in more general or generic terms --
specifically in terms of close or primary
relationships."
A close
relationship is "dyadic." It is an "interaction"
between two individuals that is characterized by
strong and coherent patterns of interdependence,
self-disclosure, exchange, investment, commitment,
and conflict. These dyadic bonds constitute an
interpersonal microcosm with their own unique
processes and dynamics. One side-effect of
redefining all relationships as inherently dyadic
is that it obscures the communal side of marriage.
The family itself fades away as a unit of analysis.
For close-relationship theorists, the only way to
understand the family is to break it down into
bidirectional dyadic pairs: husband-wife,
mother-child, father-child, or brother-sister
relationships.
In The Sexual Bond:
Rethinking Families and Close Relationships,
Scanzoni, Teachman, Thompson, and Karen Polonko
suggest that legal theorists should consider
expanding their thinking about sexually bonded
intimacy beyond the confines of the family to
include all "close relationships." The American Law
Institute recently proposed model legislation that
does just that, offering most cohabiting partners
with children many of the legal rights heretofore
reserved for married couples. The Canadian Bar
Association recently published a lengthy report,
Recognizing and Supporting Close Personal
Relationships Between Adults, which advocates
fundamental reforms of Canadian laws in the light
of close-relationship theory. It argues that the
law must now stress the "substance of
relationships" rather than favoring certain types
of "arrangements" such as marriage. Any
relationship marked by interdependence, mutuality,
intimacy, and endurance merits legal recognition.
The report contends that governments "should
recognize and support" all significant adult close
relationships so long as they are "neither
dysfunctional nor harmful."
If marriage and
family fade from view, so too do children.
Close-relationship theorists tend to ignore the
procreative dimension of sexual relationships. This
child-free understanding of courtship also shapes,
and often distorts, these theorists' view of social
reality. One would assume, for example, that our
society's high rates of teen pregnancy and unwed
childbearing would be relevant to the study of
contemporary heterosexual courtship. Yet these
trends receive scant attention in
close-relationship theory. Its narrow concentration
on the interpersonal dynamics of dyadic
relationships precludes any serious consideration
of the procreative dimension of heterosexual
coupling.
Yet children do
happen, and their arrival does, therefore, present
a theoretical quandary. Close-relationship
theorists respond to this problem by drawing
attention to the vexing impact of children on adult
close relationships. For example, Steve Duck
encourages us to abandon the traditional view of
children as "bundles of joy," and instead to
understand them as "one of the greatest stressors
of a relationship." According to Duck, the
transition to parenthood is "hazardous to
marriage," since it is typically accompanied by
sharp declines in relationship satisfaction. In a
popular rendition of close-relationship theory,
Partnering: A New Kind of Relationship, Hal and
Sidra Stone devote two chapters to the exploration
of obstacles to satisfactory dyadic relationships.
One chapter surveys a variety of potential threats
to relationships, such as drug addiction and
alcohol abuse; the other chapter focuses entirely
on children. The Stones argue that children pose
the major threat to "primary relationships" between
adults, since these relationships are "very
frequently ... destroyed by the presence of
children."
Love
under construction
In
close-relationship theory, relationships have no
teleology or common goal: not marriage, certainly,
not even love. In this view, love has no objective
existence; it is a construct of the individual, a
shifting metric by which each of us defines whether
or not relationships are "good enough" to continue.
Constructivism challenges the old "love and
marriage, horse and carriage" view. It notes that
some of the most exquisite forms of romantic love,
such as the courtly love tradition of the medieval
era, stood outside of conjugal and familial life,
and concludes that intimate dyadic love can
flourish in many freestanding forms.
The "love
researchers" of close-relationship theory attempt
to provide tools for measuring how people construct
and conceptualize love. This project turns our
attention away from any substantive exploration of
"real love" or "true love" (the phrases themselves
seem so quaint) to a consideration of "how" love is
"constructed" or "represented" by diverse
individuals or communities. Constructivism seems to
be our emerging cultural conclusion on the meaning
of love.
In The Psychology
of Love, John Alan Lee puts forward one of the most
thoroughly constructivistic views of love in
close-relationship theory. Lee states that he is
"not concerned with defining love itself" but with
helping lovers distinguish between different love
constructs. These "love styles" represent
"competing ideologies of love" that Lee culled from
an extensive study of Western literature and
philosophy. His "constructive typology" consists of
six types of love, which, he cautions his readers,
are far from exhaustive. Eros is passionate love.
Erotic lovers seek intimate sexual and emotional
involvement. Ludus is flirtatious; love is a game.
Ludus lovers avoid commitment or self-disclosure.
Storge is companionate love or friendship. Mania is
an obsessive love that is intense, explosive,
jealous, and possessive. Agape is an altruistic and
self-giving love based more on will than emotion.
Pragma is a utilitarian love concerned with a
sensible match that will effectively meet the
social and emotion needs of each
partner.
The key word is
"style." There are "love styles" just as there are
"life styles." The differences between lovers
consist only of different "styles" of loving, "each
valid according to each person's taste." In this
view, love styles can be constantly adjusted and
changed, since they are grounded in no external or
objective standards but instead in the subjective
satisfactions of the "customers." One might find a
particular love style (or love-styler)
"dissatisfying," so, John Lee asks, "why not
change?"
The value of
various constructed styles of love is pegged to
levels of subjective satisfaction. Yet there is
considerable debate over the standards for
measuring satisfaction. Is it a matter of the
partners' subjective feelings about their
relationship (how the relationship feels)? Or is it
about their actual relationship behavior (how it
works)? In their contribution to the volume
Satisfaction in Close Relationships, Susan and
Clyde Hendricks distance themselves from attempts
to offer more objective criteria of relationship
success. They maintain that close-relationship
theory is "fixed on people's subjective, affective
experiencing of their own happiness and contentment
with their close relationship."
The essay by Larry
Erbert and Steve Duck in the same volume insists on
the importance of "subjective evaluation by each
relational partner": "Satisfaction measures are not
designed as objective assessments of relational
interaction, but as measures of the attitudes and
feelings of the relational partners." The authors
argue for a "dialectical theory of relationship
satisfaction" that challenges and deconstructs the
"ideal type" implicit in most measures of
satisfaction. They contend that these measurements
conceal an ideological bias favoring stability over
change, reliability over uncertainty, togetherness
over individuality, and agreement over conflict.
These valuations also entrench "a rigid structural
prison that serves to limit the validation of other
types of relationships." By instead emphasizing
subjective feelings and dispositions, these
theorists hope to validate more fluid and variable
relationships.
All
about me
And how are we to
understand the "self" that close relationships are
intended to serve, satisfy, and enhance? Julia Wood
and Steve Duck insist that we can no longer view
the "identity" of the self as "enclosed in a stable
core." Instead, "selves are recognized as
contingent, forming and reforming within diverse
relationships and circumstances." The self only
assumes identity "in response to others." According
to Kenneth Gergen and Regina Walter, relationships
are the "ontological prior," by which they mean
that "the individual is essentially an extension of
relationship." Thus the grounding of identity in
our society, once secured by morality and religion,
has shrunk down to the small circles of shifting
close relationships in which selves seek
recognition and meaning through intimacies with
"significant others."
For Gergen, the
modern "saturated self" is essentially a "pastiche
personality" that is continually constructed,
deconstructed, and reconstructed in diverse social
contexts. Since the self is constantly "fashioned"
and then refashioned within processes of social
interchange, the individual does not have an
"autobiography" in which, for example, courtship
may represent one chapter in a coherent life story.
Instead, we now have "sociobiographies," in which
diverse relationships constantly help to construct,
deconstruct, and reconstruct personal identity. For
Julia Wood and Steve Duck, this "relational self"
is a "teeming mass of potentialities, any of which
may be realized in particular moments and none of
which is invariant over time and
context."
In this view, close
relationships are significant only insofar as they
generate worlds of meaning that enrich and enhance
the self. Close-relationship theorists develop
models to chart the "self-enhancement" component in
close relationships, and argue that these
relationships are "one especially satisfying,
useful, and human means of expanding the self
through including each other in the self."
Close-relationship advocates Elaine and Arthur Aron
cite the ancient Upanisadic axiom that "all love is
directed toward the Self." Even in loving, the self
is still profoundly self-referential.
Microwave
relationships
In
close-relationship theory, romantic relationships
are said to constitute the "formation stage" of
sexually based relationships. For these theorists,
courtship does not point toward a specific end,
such as stable, successful marriage. The intense,
fluid, exploratory world of courtship-as-romance --
not courtship leading to marriage -- is the
paradigm for all sexually intimate relationships,
including marriage.
And so marriage
lands finally in a very curious spot. Instead of
courtship being defined by the goal of marriage,
marriage is defined by the dynamics of courtship.
Close-relationship theory agrees with the old
cosmetics advertisement slogan: The test of a good
marriage is its capacity to maintain the "thrill of
courtship." The phrase "You would never know they
are married" becomes the highest praise for
conjugal love. Of course, intense courtship cannot
be sustained forever. But it may be precisely the
necessarily limited duration of courtship that
makes this bond so fascinating to
close-relationship theorists. Close-relationship
theory tends to focus particularly on "initiation"
and "disengagement," since these are "particularly
striking phases" of intimate relationships. It
tends to pass over the dreary world of
"relationship maintenance" (marriage).
The relational self
is supremely adapted to an endless ebb and flow of
romantic encounters and liaisons. In the
post-modern world, "Purpose is replaced with
pastiche." Relationships are pastiche, marriage is
purpose. Gergen and Walter exclaim the wonders of
intense, but fragile, romances. These passionate
liaisons are "joint creations" that offer
accelerating, mutually generated forms of
"reverberating activity" -- "my pleasure increases
as I experience your pleasure, yours increasing as
a result of mine, mine increasing further because
of yours, and so on."
Gergen argues that
courtship now refers to an ongoing process that
involves the formation of many different sexually
bonded relationships throughout life. He defines
these interactions as "microwave relationships" --
cooked up fast, served, and consumed. The layers of
emotional residue left by the multiple passages
through episodic relationships are not lamented but
celebrated: "The pace of relationships is hurried,
and processes of unfolding that once required
months or years may be accomplished in days or
weeks ... The single person may experience not a
handful of courtship relationships in a life time
but dozens."
In this postmodern
world, stability, domesticity, and fidelity evoke
little interest. Relational life is episodic,
consisting of closures of old relationships to make
way for self-disclosing new intimacies.
Flat
and dull
A research model
primarily aimed at understanding the internal
dynamics of close, sexually intimate relationships
is obviously ill-equipped to understand marriage or
what leads to marriage. Yet times change. The new
world imagined by close- relationship theory --
essentially a world of serial coupling -- is, more
and more with each passing day, the world in which
we live. Close-relationship theory is thus an
articulation of an increasingly popular, and
perhaps soon dominant, ideology of personal
relationships.
In Couples: Scenes
from the Inside, Sally Cline argues that we are in
the midst of a "relationship revolution." In this
new world, five ideas stand out. First, the
distinction between marriage and other intimate
partnerships is all but eliminated. Courting
couples are now said simply to be "in a
relationship," which puts them in the same generic
category as married couples, subject to the same
norms and processes of relationship quality,
maintenance, and dissolution. Second, while the
need for basic human attachment and intimacy must
still be satisfied, we now privately choose the
specific "love styles" with which we gratify those
needs. Third, the new world is only big enough for
the dyad, the couple. Children are essentially
screened out. Despite complaints about the
narrowness of the old nuclear family, the world of
"close relationships" is far narrower, and also far
more boring. Fourth, the new dyadic relationships
are measured not by their capacity to foster
traditional virtues such as courage or
self-sacrifice, but solely by their capacity to
satisfy what the self views as its needs. All
externally based criteria for what is needed, or
for what might constitute satisfaction, are
banished; all standards become radically
subjective. Finally, the openness, emotional
intensity, and relative brevity of courtship are
the very traits that make it superior to marriage
as an expression of, and as a way of understanding,
relationships. Consequently, romantic relationships
replace marriage as life's main arena for the
discovery of personal meaning.
In the end,
close-relationship theory reduces courtship and
marriage to the loving interactions of
ever-changing dyad partners. This shift may be the
soft underbelly of contemporary theory and
practice. For when the dust of this revolution
settles, only "relationships" remain -- thin and
shadowy vestiges of formerly powerful vocations.
Despite postmodern celebrations of uncertain
futures and new-found freedoms, the road ahead
seems flatter and less interesting. Don't bother to
fasten your seat belts.
Courtship,
culture, and postmodernity
Today's three most
influential schools of academic thought on
courtship -- exchange theory, sociobiology, and
close-relationship theory -- do provide some useful
insights. But these insights are fragmentary and
quite limited. Exchange theory illuminates our
growing capacity to understand marriage in
essentially utilitarian terms. This approach has
predictive power, insofar as our actual marrying
behavior increasingly conforms to the expectations
of the theory. Sociobiology exemplifies our
cultural fatigue with idealistic views of romance.
Its emphasis on the irrational nature of sexual
desire and conflict nourishes contemporary
cynicism. Its harsh realism further erodes those
moral and religious ideals which, for earlier
generations, sought to elevate sexual desire into
lasting marital love.
Close-relationship
theory illuminates our growing tendency to blur the
distinctions between marriage and other
relationships. Its theoretical insights ring true
precisely to the extent that marriage itself is
increasingly diluted and reduced to the fluidity
and plasticity of just another "relationship." In
short, the older understanding of marriage as
covenantal, life-long, genealogical,
self-sacrificial, and child-centered is gradually
being replaced by an understanding of marriage as
merely another dyadic intimate relationship. To the
extent that this operation succeeds,
close-relationship theory will resonate ever more
clearly with our actual personal and social
experiences.
And yet, while the
models of courtship generated by these schools of
thought illuminate certain current realities, they
blind us to others. Marriage retains a central
importance in American culture, both practically
and as an ideal. While nonmarital sex and
childbearing are much more common, it is also true
that about 90 percent of Americans marry, and
Americans of all ages and social classes continue
to list a "happy marriage" as vital to their lives.
Scholars would do us all a great service if they
would rediscover their interest in marriage and the
pathways leading to it. Marriage is not just a
close relationship, or a sexual barter, or a
consumer good. Illuminating these distinctions will
require theoretical models that begin, above all,
with curiosity about what marriage is.
This is not a plea
for homespun "family values" and virtues. "Family
values" discourse may actually contribute to our
cultural apathy about marriage by obscuring the
more radical, startling, and unsettling
characteristics of monogamous marriage. Marriage is
an erotic bond that bridges the fundamental sexual
divide within the human species. It is an
intersexual coupling, but it is not just about
self-enhancing satisfaction; it is a procreative
bond that generates human life. It resonates
through the poetry, religion, art, myth, and
symbols of the human spirit. Marriage embraces the
life, the passions, the beauty, the journeys, the
betrayals, the dreams, and, ultimately, the death
of the other. A symptom of the curious flatness of
our postmodern sexual culture is its growing
inability to perceive the elemental depths and
power of this primordial human bond.
1 "The End of
Courtship," The Public Interest, Number 126,
Winter 1997.
Daniel
Cere is director of the Newman Institute
of Catholic Studies at McGill University. His essay
is based on a report prepared for the Institute for
American Values, where he is an affiliate scholar.
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