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Courtship
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on February 2, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
As a parent and a minister, I wonder what advise I have to give young
people about courtship and dating. Courtship is the often painful process of
seeking the affections of another person, usually with the hope of marriage or
at least living together. It is the subject of more books, television, shows
and movies then I can count. When I meet couples to talk about their wedding,
I ask them how they met. When I meet families to plan a memorial service, if
there is a surviving partner I ask how the couple met.
The answer people often give is that they met at work. One article claimed
that 40 percent of all couples first met at work. Although I could not track
down a reliable source for this statistic, it does appear that many couples
met a work. This was the case in my own life. Leslie and I met at a church
conference. School is also a common first meeting place for couples. Several
older couples, who met in the 1930s or 1940s or 1950s, have told me that they
met at dances. Some met at dances held at All Souls Unitarian Church in the
1940s or 50s.
Today churches and synagogues have few dances. Instead younger singles
groups are more likely to go on a hike or a ski trip together. Older singles
take trips to the movies or to the theater together. Some religious
communities offer structured activities for singles to meet each other. One
example is something called speed dating.
Speed dating evenings might occur in a church basement or a Jewish
community center. The organizers guarantee each person a seven-minute
conversation with each person of the opposite sex attending the event. After
the seven minutes together each person checks a box on a card indicating "yes"
they would like to see this person again, or "no" they would not. The men and
women give these cards to the organizers. If you check "yes" and the other
person also checked "yes, " the organizers will call each of you within
forty-eight hours to exchange phone numbers.
The internet is the newest and fastest growing way to meet a partner. "Match.com",
"Yahoo Personals", and "udate.com" are the biggest online dating services.
According to the New York Times, during December, 26 million people
visited these online dating sites. Online personals became the largest
paid-content category on the Internet in the third quarter of 2002, with $87
million in sales.
Purely for sermon research purposes, I visited each site looking for single
women my age living in or near my zip code. Each web site displayed photos and
descriptions of several interesting women. However, perhaps because I have
always been a shy person, I could not imagine myself as a single person,
contacting a woman this way. Furthermore, people can lie about their height,
their weight, and their age. They may be fifty-five and send in a photo of
when they were thirty-five. Most importantly, according to Marketdata
Enterprises, 30 percent of the people using the online dating services are
married. So single people need to surf carefully.
A best-selling book on dating right now is called Body Language Secrets.
It claims that most of us give off clues to what we are thinking by the
gestures we make with our bodies. According to the book a man can tell if a
woman is really interested in him by her body language. Looking at a man’s
gestures, a woman can quickly determine if a man is "a potential Mr. Right or
lurking Mr. Hyde." I understand the desire to size up a man or a woman in a
few seconds by looking at their body language. However, in my own experience,
I have found that the only way I can find out if I can trust a person is
through trial and error. This takes time.
The process of courtship among humans varies from culture to culture and
from one generation to another. In America we hear stories about how in the 19th
century courting men would visit a young woman’s home on a Sunday afternoon.
The young man would bring flowers and have tea and conversation with the
family. I do not know how predominate this style of courtship was.
Genealogical evidence suggests that in the 19th century about half
of all women in America were pregnant when they got married. This suggests
that courtship activities went beyond drinking tea.
A few years ago the psychologist Dr. C.A. Tripp wrote about courtship in
his book The Homosexual Matrix. He argued that in both heterosexual and
homosexual relationships courtship involves the raising and lowering of
barriers. Dr. Tripp wrote that flirting involves stimulating attentions,
occasionally blocked by resistance. In early courtship, the interest of both
potential mates is fanned by moments of obliviousness to each other
interspersed with attentiveness. The development of the relationship is not a
continual stream of interest but as an alternating process of savory contact
broken by fleeting interruptions. Hurdles that must be vaulted make the mate
more attractive, provided the resistance is not discouragingly high. When an
attractive person is first seen, the resistance may be in the problem of
starting a conversation. After the conversation begins other social
impediments, such as a partner’s hesitancies become the next hurdle. As each
new level of intimacy is overcome, the process of resistance and engagement
moves on, and the relationship develops, as long as the hurdles are not too
high. This process of raising and lowering barriers may have evolved as a way
of assuring that a mate who overcame the hurdles would be more likely to stay
in the relationship and raise the children.
The theme of raising and lowering barriers in courtship is so predominate
in our culture that many popular plays, movies and television shows are based
on this idea. Romeo and Juliet had to overcome the barrier of the balcony and
their feuding families.
Think of the popular romance movies of the past few years, Such as Annie
Hall, or Pretty Woman or When Harry Met Sally or
Sleepless in Seattle. They all tell a similar story. One person is
attracted to another person. He or she makes an approach and is rejected. The
rejected person changes his or her mind and shows interest. They develop a
beginning friendship. Something happens and one of them raises the barrier
breaking off the relationship. The courtship continues with one person sending
letters, or flowers, or candy. Eventually the two get back together. Then they
break up again. This process continues for the two-hour drama until at the end
the couple moves in together, gets married, breaks up or (as in the cased of
Romeo and Juliet) die. In TV situation comedies, this courtship process of
getting together and breaking up can be drawn out for years. The popular show
"Friends" is an example.
So the process of courtship is one of raising and lowering barriers. But
why are people attracted to particular persons? Why that man and not another?
Why that woman and not her friend? Sociologists, psychologists and biologists
are all studying this question, but they are only at the beginning stages of
providing an answer.
One theory of human courtship is called the "exchange" theory. According to
the exchange theory we select mates who are essentially our equals, in such
things as money, physical health, physical attractiveness, intelligence and so
on. The evidence to support this is in the fact that most people do marry
within their social and economic group.
A second theory is based on the belief that an important factor in mate
selection is the way a potential suitor enhances our self-esteem. According to
this idea, all of us are longing to think well of ourselves and we pick a mate
who will help us in this process. The evidence for this theory comes mostly
from asking people why they picked a particular mate.
A third theory has its roots in the work of Charles Darwin. Darwin first
connected courtship and evolution in 1870. However, this aspect of his theory
was pretty much ignored until about 25 years ago. Recently evolutionary
biologists have argued that we select partners who will enhance the survival
of our species. Men are drawn to young women who appear to have healthy
bodies. We look for clear skin, bright eyes, shiny hair, good bone structure,
red lips, rosy cheeks and a waist circumference that is 30 percent smaller
than the hip circumference. For men these are signs that a woman is in the
peak of her childbearing years and will likely produce healthy children.
Women select mates for different biological reasons. Because youth is not
essential to the male reproductive role, women instinctively favor mates with
physical strength and the ability to provide. Therefore, a wealthy, physically
strong male has an easy time attracting young healthy women.
Some evolutionary biologists believe that there are many other parts of the
human body involved in courtship decisions. In a new book called The Mating
Mind, Geoffrey Miller argues that the human mind’s most impressive
abilities are courtship tools, that evolved to attract and entertain sexual
partners. Miller says Courtship has driven the emergence of creativity,
intelligence, wit, music, humor, oration - in short, all that which makes us
human.
He describes a political demonstration he observed as a student:
Suddenly, in the spring of 1986 in New York, hundreds of Columbia
University students took over the campus administration building and
demanded that the university sell off all of it’s stocks in companies that
do business in South Africa. As a psychology undergraduate at Columbia, I
was puzzled by the spontaneity, passion, and near-unanimity of the student
demands for divestment. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North
Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two
weeks, in support of political freedom for poor blacks living in a country
six thousand miles away? . . . Although the protests achieved their
political aims only inefficiently and indirectly, they did function very
effectively to bring together young men and women who claimed to share
similar political ideologies. Everyone I knew was dating someone they’d met
at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin, and
the protest ended just in time to study for semester exams. Yet the sexual
relationships facilitated by the protest sometimes lasted for years.
In other words skilled "loud public advertisements of one’s political
ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual
mates." Political activity is useful not only to show intellectual health and
strength. It also draws people together who share common values, and are
therefore more likely to stay together to raise children.
Another researcher, Meredith E. Small, in her article "Love with the Proper
Stranger," presents data suggesting that we reject mates who are similar to us
in the genes that drive the immune system. We all have a genetic immune system
called the human leukocyte antigen system, or HLA. When parents share all the
genes of the HLA system, miscarriages increase significantly. At this stage of
the research the scientists cannot say for certain that the HLA genes
themselves interfere with fertility.
Other studies involving mice have established that mice are far less likely
to mate with other mice that smell like the female mouse who raised them. This
also might be true of humans. It appears that humans (at least females) are
more likely to court a person whose HLA genes are different from the mother
who raised them. The key person is not necessarily the natural mother. It is
the woman who raised them, which could be a stepmother or a nanny.
How do women know who is who? A controversial finding, first published in
1995, suggests that the sense of smell also plays a role in human mate choice.
Researchers at the University of Bern, presented women with T-shirts
penetrated with the body scent of men with various HLA types. The women who
were not taking birth control pills, preferred the T-shirts of men with HLA
types unlike their own. The women also tagged these T-shirts as smelling like
their current partners, suggesting that odor has something to do with their
real-world mate choices. (Interestingly, women who were taking the pill
-- that simulates pregnancy -- preferred T-shirts of men with HLAs like their
own.) Surveying both sexes about which senses are important, they found
that "for females, how someone smells is the single most important variable"
in choosing a partner. If odor does provide information about the immune
system, it makes evolutionary sense for women to pay attention to smell. They
have much to lose if they mate with an inappropriate male and give birth to a
baby with a reduced ability to fight off disease. If smell is so important to
women in selecting a mate, it may explain why, in this day of deodorants and
showers, courtship activities that involve sweating, such as dancing, working
out at a health club, and hiking in the woods, remain important to women. It
also suggests why a romance born on the internet might not go well when a
couple meets in person.
A fourth theory that attempts to explain why people are attracted to
particular persons might be called the family systems approach. This theory is
popular with family therapists and clergy who meet with couples. In his book
Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix puts the theory in one
sentence. He says: "What we are doing, . . . is looking for someone who has
the predominant character traits of the people who raised us."
In other words, we move into relationship with a person who reminds us of
our mother or our father or our older brother or sister. We recreate what is
familiar to us. We use our new relationship to work out all the unresolved
issues of our childhood. The primary reason we fall in love with our partner,
many family therapists believe, is not because our partner is young and
beautiful, or had an impressive job, or was similar to us in status and
income, or smelled differently from our mother. We fell in love because our
partner reminds us of the person who raised us. Unconsciously we believe that
we have found the ideal candidate to work out and resolve the unresolved
issues left hanging from our childhood.
So what advice do I have for those of you interested in moving into a
committed relationship with another person?
First, many couples met at work, so if you are having trouble meeting
people, you might change jobs. The dating services on the internet are the
latest thing, but remember that people lie. Be careful.
Second, successful courtship is an odd process of raising and lowering
barriers. Therefore, when someone else approaches you, move slowly in
developing a relationship. If you like the other person, be reasonably
persistent in your invitations. This courtship process is an art not a
science. Trying to discover if a "no" is a "no not now" or a "no, never."
Recognize that there are factors over which you have no control. For example,
if you are a male and an attractive female rejects you, it may be because you
smell like her mother, not because you lack money or physical strength. If you
do smell like her mother, it may not be a good match biologically for either
of you.
Third, before picking a potential mate, it helps to be self-reflective
about the issues from your family of origin. Think about what old issues you
may be trying to work out in the new relationship. Ask yourself in what ways
are the people you are attracted to similar to the people in the family of
origin? What problems from the family you grew up in are you likely to want to
try to work out with your new partner? If you cannot see this yourself,
perhaps a friend or a therapist can help you identify these issues.
Finally, what about love? Love I believe, in is not the sudden grip of an
irresistible feeling of attraction, love is attraction combined with a
commitment to respect another person, to be honest with another person, to
care for another person and to try to understand another person. So in all
your courting may you be respectful, truthful, caring and understanding. And I
wish you all good luck.
Sources:
Miller, Geoffrey, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Evolution of
Human Nature, Doubleday,2000.
Small, Meredith F., "Love with the Proper Stranger," Natural History
Magazine September 1998.
Hendrix, Harville, Getting the Love You Want, Harper & Row, 1988.
Tripp, C.A., The Homosexual Matrix, Signet, New York, 1975
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