Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar

...Nor is it clear how this return to the classics is supposed to help young people learn how to live in companionship with a spouse when many of them, at least the children of middle and upper-middle class families, have never snared a bedroom or a bathroom...

...Most disappointing of all, one comes away from this volume feeling that, in the end, it contains few really satisfying answers to the crucial and intriguing questions it poses...

...It is as important to try to convince young people of the merits of commitment and to teach them the rules of courtship...

...Part of the "Ethics of Everyday Life" series, this is an impressive collection of classic writings on love and marriage...

...To be sure, there is much wisdom here for those who want to think hard about the improbable and wondrous achievement of a happy and lasting marriage...

...In addition, many have witnessed the end of the marriage of their own parents and regard the expectation of a lasting relationship as a nice but outof-reach fantasy...

...At the heart of the collection is a set of reflections on the lost art of courtship, those established rituals of days gone by through which young adults, at least those of a certain class, not only found life companions, but also were supposed to learn the particular duties of partnership...

...Maura A. Ryan is associate -professor of Christian ethics at the University of Notre Dame...

...Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar is meant to be a classroom text, a springboard for discussion, and this is its greatest strength...

...We are reminded in Ben Franklin's "Reflections on Courtship and Marriage" that mutual, unfeigned esteem and sincere friendship are the foundations of a lasting marriage...

...Most people would agree that neither sexual nor social liberation has been unambiguously positive for women...

...Many of our high-achieving and professionally oriented female students reject the very label of "feminist" because they associate it with untenable, either-or choices between the goods of marriage and family, and personal development...

...Rather they look for living examples of how to perform the everyday deeds of love and esteem that sustain a lifelong partnership, to learn how to think as an "us" and to walk what might be called the "way of fidelity...

...The volume includes both historical and contemporary discussions of the nature of love and marriage...

...There are inspiring snapshots and glimpses throughout of the qualities that sustain a lifelong partnership...

...As a collection of "great works" on love, sex, and marriage, this volume is also intentionally unbalanced...

...Beginning with the presumption that men cannot control their baser instincts is hardly conducive to calling forth the qualities of tenderness and respect needed for a healthy marriage...

...The experts disagree about the precise legacy of divorce as well as about how to stem its most negative effects...

...Maura A. Ryan__________ The cover of the September 25, 2000 issue of Time featured a familiar tableau of the modern broken home— the lonely only child caught between warring parents...

...In their introduction, Kass and Kass describe this ambitious collection as offered in the "wisdom-seeking rather than wisdom-delivering" spirit...

...How Can I Find and Win the Right One...

...Prompted by Judith Wallerstein's controversial study ["The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A Twenty-five Year Study,"], which seems to suggest that the children of divorce suffer such serious long-term personal and social difficulties that even a frosty marriage is better for them than the most amiable divorce, this present debate is part of a larger social reflection on the fate of contemporary marriage...

...It is both disheartening and dangerous, though, to look for a solution to the contemporary challenges to intimacy in the cultivation of those virtues needed by women in the face of men's "natural sexual, familial, and civic irresponsibility...

...Eugene Borowitz's "Speaking Personally" recalls that it is through the risk of self-enlargement, through the enduring relationships and serious commitments we undertake, that we become fully who we are meant to be...

...Kass and Kass are right that teenagers see little reason to postpone sex, and, therefore, sell themselves short of the experience of the total and complete selfgiving that is possible only when sex is part of a life pledged to another...

...Why A Wedding...

...Kass and Kass want to touch the reader's deepest longings for intimacy, permanence, and companionship...

...As in an artfully arranged bouquet, literary pieces (Austen, Tolstoy, Muir, Shakespeare), evocative in their own right, work together with philosophical and theological reflections (Kierkegaard, Tocqueville, Rilke, Kant), passages from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and journalistic treatises on the benefits and burdens of marriage by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, to form a singular impression...

...One need not deny that men can write wisely about love and marriage to wonder what would be learned from hearing more from women about matters of such obvious concern to them...

...We are attracted to ways of life, willing to assume the necessary sacrifices and burdens, because we are drawn to them as intrinsically worthy...

...This book will be most useful, however, if it prompts those of us in happy marriages to be selfconscious and articulate about why we committed ourselves to such a relationship...

...for example, Aquinas's treatise on the goods of marriage, Aristotle's celebration of the friendship between spouses, and William May's "Four Mischievous Theories of Sex," but it is the short stories, poems, and snippets from great works such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that aim to "make us think...expand our sympathies, elevate our gaze" about the mysteries of love and fidelity in a way that philosophizing cannot...

...There is also an argument, the authors admit, running through both the selection and arrangement of pieces...

...Convinced that young people today, and not just the children of divorce, are ill prepared to "marry well," University of Chicago professors Amy and Leon Kass offer this rich and "unapologetically promarriage" anthology, designed to help them and their parents think critically about the enterprise of taking on and becoming a spouse...

...However, as an argument, this book is disappointing...

...We must demonstrate what it takes to cherish one another as an everyday enterprise, and what sustains us when we are beginning to fail one another...

...Selections ranging from Plato to Genesis to Miss Manners are arranged as answers of sorts to the fundamental questions we ask as we begin to think about settling down: "Is This Love...

...Under the influence of liberalism, with its challenge to authority and its elevation of individual autonomy, and feminism, with its encouragement of self-actualization for women beyond the mother role, those rituals have broken down, 17 along with sexual responsibility and the stability of marriage and family life...

...Young people now have little direction in choosing the right spouse and little help in learning how to move from self-concerned adolescence to family- and society-centered adulthood...

...Most of the selections are written before the middle of the twentieth century and therefore, are written by men...

...Young people are not hungry for elaborate rules for "winning" her or "trapping" him (popular magazines are full of those...

...Young women are deeply conflicted about a sexual "revolution" that seems only to have made it easier for men to avoid responsibility for their actions...

...Roughly, it goes as follows: At one time, there were established cultural and, to some extent, religious rituals of courtship that helped individuals learn the responsibilities of spousehood and, by postponing sexual intimacy, disciplined eros in the service of committed marriage...

...More important, there is almost no critical attention to the broader political and social construction of marriage and family life...

...They 18 19 are also right that teenagers have a difficult time understanding why sustaining commitments is valuable even when self-sacrifice is involved...

...But it is just as important to live the joy that drew us to one another, to treat each other in public with the regard we philosophize about, to invite young people into our homes and around our dinner tables, and to be honest about how we handle practical problems like snoring, money, and wet towels on the floor...

...The editors claim to avoid simplistic nostalgia in their focus on classic works on love, but the images of women in traditional courtship and the absence of any critical discussion of the "feminine" and "masculine" virtues give more than a nod to the hope of resurrecting the chaste and untouchable Victorian woman...

...Inside, under the banner "What Divorce Does to Kids," psychologists and sociologists hotly debated a question that has plagued us since the divorce boom began in the early 1970s: "Is a good divorce better than a bad marriage...

...And whether we answer "bad marriage" or "good divorce," most of us would readily admit that what we want for our own children of marriageable age is neither one...

...Moreover, that very presumption has been long identified as a contributing factor in the sexual and physical abuse of women...

...The questions raised by Susan Moller Okin and others, for example, about the economic function of the patriarchal family and its relation to the vulnerability of women and children, are never engaged, nor is there any suggestion about how social institutions might work toward supporting family life...

...But no one denies that it takes its toll on children, particularly on their later ability to form healthy and satisfying adult relationships...

...To begin with, it rests on questionable assumptions, most notably that men need to be "civilized" into marriage and female modesty is the civilizing force...

...It is taken for granted that all the threats to the stability of marriage are ideological...

...We have all watched bright and wonderful students "bumble along from one unsatisfying relationship to another," and wondered helplessly what we should be giving them by way of "lessons in love...

...As a practice overseen by parents, courtship functioned not only to help young adults find suitable partners but also to make them aware of the social importance and function of marriage...

...But it is not obvious how the return to earlier rituals of courtship is supposed to help young men and women develop mutual respect and learn the skills of intimate friendship when they are daily bombarded by the reduction of male-female friendship to sex and the trivialization of sex...

...For that reason, important opportunities to question how factors such as employment, health, education, religion, and even geography influence the conditions for intimacy and mutual commitment are missed...

...Anyone who works with college-age students is familiar with the superficial cynicism about marriage and family and the intermingling of distrust of commitment with deep longing for permanence and partnership...