LOVE AND ROMANCE
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
 Fall in Love
The basic story went something like this: A boy and a girl meet and fall in love. They spend most of their time together, usually without other friends along, getting to know one another better. Soon, they marry, go on a honeymoon, and move into an apartment. Later, they buy a home. The husband goes to work every morning and comes home every evening, the wife tends to the children and the household duties. They live happily ever after.
It still works just that way -- sometimes.
Marriages aren't always the natural result of falling in love. People marry for other reasons, even in the United States, where romance generally precedes a wedding. A family might arrange a marriage for business or financial reasons, a king might marry a queen from another country to form a political unit and to solidify power, a young woman from a foreign country might take an American husband to avoid deportation. An old Czech expression leaves little doubt about the weak role Cupid sometimes plays: "Choose your wife not at a dance, but in a harvest field." Some people, because of their own or their culture's taboos about engaging in premarital sexual intercourse, marry so that they may be free to enjoy sex. Others who believe in "doing the right thing" marry because the young woman in the relationship has become pregnant; marriage in a case like this is a way of averting social disgrace. Read More
Early and Late Dating
Some hold that dating is a preliminary phase of intersex association among persons who are aware of the fact that they are too young to marry. These writers usually regard dating practices as an unfortunate development of this century, and conclude with Margaret Mead that "the more successfully adolescents deal with . . . dating, the less prepared they are to meet . . . sex adjustments after marriage." In sharp contrast are those who conceive the dating process to be a more or less spontaneous development whereby young people gain experience, develop discriminating understanding of associates, and thereby become more capable of selecting mates with judgment. Read More
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Steady Dating, Imminent Marriage, and Remarriage
In the vocabulary of contemporary American courtship, the stage or status of "steady date" has a different meaning for different social circles and strata, and even for different age groups. These varying meanings need not be discussed here. What is significant is that in our family system we enter marriage typically through courtship, and that therefore a marriage is more likely to grow out of a steady dating relationship than out of an ordinary dating relationship; and much more likely than out of no dating relationship at all. If the normal progression for the unmarried is from dating to steady dating to being engaged, and thus to being married, with each such activity or phase acting as a selective process for the succeeding phase, then we must take steady dating more seriously than general dating, and more seriously than even frequent dating.
On the other hand, precisely because these occur in sequence, grow from the same sets of social relationships, and are affected by the same factors, we need not reproduce for steady dating all the tables that merely parallel our findings for dating in general. Although certain factors are associated with general dating that are not associated with steady dating, we have found almost no items that run in a contrary direction. We shall be able to point to only few factors that facilitate or increase frequency of dating, but hinder or reduce steady dating. Since it is through general dating that people in our society move toward steady dating (and remarriage), factors with a contrary effect at these two consecutive phases should be rare. Read More
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This website is created and designed by Zebra International, 2006
