For Valentine's Day: Consider Courtship -McManus

[owner-smartmarriages]

from: Smart Marriages

January 27, 2000
Column #961
Advance for Jan. 29, 2000
(first of a two-part series)
FOR VALENTINE'S DAY: CONSIDER COURTSHIP 
by Mike McManus
    As Valentine's Day approaches, if you are single, do you find 
yourself 
asking life's biggest questions: "Where am I going? Who is going with me? 
 
How will I find my life partner, and know that he or she is the one? 
Should 
we live together first to find out?" 
    There are nearly 50 million never-married American adults -- more 
than 
ever before, because they don't have good answers to these questions. In 
college, millions live in dorms with both genders, with manifold 
opportunities for quick sex, what they call "hooking up."
    Fortunately, Leon and Amy Kass, married nearly 40 years, and 
professors 
at the University of Chicago for 25 years, have written an inspiring new 
book 
called "Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar:  Readings on Courting and Marrying."  
It is 
an anthology of the best writing ever about wooing and winning a life 
mate.  
Instead of Seinfeld and Ally McBeal, it offers Shakespeare's "Romeo and 
Juliet," the Bible's "Song of Songs," from Tolstoy's "War and Peace, the 
courtship of Emile and Sophie." 
    "We invite people to ponder why Adam and Eve, when their eyes were 
opened, covered their nakedness," says Amy Kass. "Can modesty transform 
lust 
into love?  What does Socrates mean when he says that love is of 
immortality; 
or Kierkegaard mean when he says that absolute faith in marriage is the 
only 
attribute that makes a man lovable? Why does C.S. Lewis think that Eros 
cannot deliver what it promises without the promises of marriage?
    "What does Robert Frost mean in suggesting to his daughter and her 
groom, 
    "Two such as you with such a master speed/Cannot be parted nor be 
swept 
away/
    From one another once you are agreed/That life is only life 
forevermore, 
    Together wing to wing and oar to oar."
    Leon Kass, calls their book and new college course, "a superior kind 
of 
sex education. Present sex education is stripped of the context of love 
and 
lasting marriage. We've found a way to educate  hearts and minds without 
preaching. The imagination allows students to identify with characters 
they 
don't meet on the street, who can move their hearts and souls to a finer, 
higher, truer understanding."
    As Amy Kass put it at a seminar hosted by the American Enterprise 
Institute, "We think the time is ripe for a sexual counter-revolution and 
a 
renewal in love that leads to marriage. More and more people, especially 
young women, are owning up to their personal unhappiness with, and are 
looking for alternatives to, the hook-up culture." 
    However, when asked how students are reacting to this rich diet on 
courtship, Leon Kass said, "Their reactions are mixed. There has been no 
active rebellion, no wild and ideological reactions. They are taking it 
seriously. But some of their sensibilities are odd. The class had a hard 
time 
understanding what shame has to do with nakedness. One said, `Why should 
you 
be embarrassed about being naked?'"
    Other student opinions are pitiful: "The thought of living with the 
same 
person for 50 years is simply incredible."  :"We are not supposed to get 
married until we are 28, so we know from the beginning of all our sexual 
relationships that they are supposed to be impermanent." 
    However, the Kasses believe that beneath this unromantic, 
self-protecting 
cynicism, young people really do have longings for wholeness, intimacy 
and 
fidelity - longings that they do not yet realize could be satisfied by 
marrying well." 
    They assert that women have power to demand courtship. "Men make 
advances, women should offer resistance plus the promise of yielding 
should 
the man prove worthy," said Amy Kass: "This a woman does not because she 
is 
sexually repressed, but because it is marriage she is after - not 
hookups, 
brief affairs, or even a long-term relationship. If women as a group 
exercise 
more sexual self-restraint and eschew cohabitation, men will be compelled 
to 
court them."
    David Blankenhorn, President of the Institute for American Values, is 
delighted that "middle-aged academics, are telling the world that they 
have 
uncovered a new cure-all wonder drug for young people who want to find 
true 
love.  Amy and Leon have reinserted courtship into our national 
conversation 
on sexuality, love and marriage in this rich book full of beauty, truth 
and 
wisdom."
    But Blankenhorn is alarmed by the withdrawal of parents giving 
guidance 
to their adult children. "This generation of adults lives in 
unprecedented 
ignorance about the mate selection behavior of their own children. This 
book 
calls on parents who have abdicated their responsibility "to reflect on 
what 
we might do to change things."  
    Why not give the book to your unmarried children?
    END TXT  © Copyright Michael J. McManus 2000.



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