Courting Trouble

...Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar will soon be joined by anthologies on dying, edited by Richard John Neuhaus, on teaching and learning, edited by Mark Schwehn, on leading, edited by Timothy Fuller, and on working, edited by Gilbert C. Meilaen-der, each intended to spur the search for ordinary wisdom by which to live...

...and What Can Married Life Be Like...

...Marriage begins with eros, but it disciplines eros, making way for the renewal of the species and the shared work of rearing children...

...or anthropologist J.A...

...This central mission enhances "the singular friendship and love of husband and wife...

...Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Shame decreases with increasing love...

...Precisely because . . . children are yours for a lifetime," they write, "this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person...

...Only one young man replied, "Deciding who should be the mother of my children...

...And so they started collecting literary passages concerning marriage and courtship...

...In that, their book is an admirable first volume in the "Ethics of Everyday Life" series published through the University of Notre Dame Press under the auspices of the Institute of Religion and Public Life...

...In their important introductory essay about the human necessity of marriage, the Kasses recount the episode that planted the seed for their book...

...Why a Wedding...

...a shorter book that nevertheless raises the same essential questions, from texts accessible to high-school students, their mothers' book clubs, Oprah viewers, and the local adult Sunday School...

...Equally, they were pained by what seemed to be the amorous aimlessness of a generation of students for whom "the way to the altar is uncharted territory...

...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...

...The process of self-discovery through courtship springs to life in the excruciatingly roundabout progress of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy from first impressions to mutual love in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice...

...Many of the Kasses' selections are well suited to this purpose (Sullivan Bal-lou's letter to Sarah, for example), and these could be supplemented from other sources...

...Without love, the companion becomes the observer...

...Another strength of the anthology is that it has much to offer readers both secular and religious...

...Instead, their selections indirectly illuminate the chasm that separates wooing aimed at marriage—interested as it is not just in sexual attractiveness but also in "attentiveness, dependability, care, exclusiveness, and fidelity"— from, say, flirting, seducing, trysting, hooking up, and indeterminate being "in a relationship...

...Though enthusiastically pro-marriage, the volume is provocative, rather than prescriptive...

...On the first day of a course they were co-teaching on men and women in literature, they asked their students what they thought the most important decision in their lives would be...

...For all their own high philosophical predilections—signaled by passages from Plato, Aristotle, St...

...As befits a book whose purpose is Socratic, they have organized their selections under interrogative headings: Where Are We Now...

...Ranging from Homer and the Song of Songs to Allan Bloom and Miss Manners, Wing to Wing, O^^ to O^^ is their constructive response to what they have observed over fifteen years of their students' romantic perplexity and jadedness...

...And great Odysseus told his wife of all the pains he had dealt out to other men and all the hardships he'd endured himself—his story first to last— and she listened on, enchanted...

...Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar sets William Tucker's argument for monogamy based on sociobiology beside C. S. Lewis's Christian praise for erotic play as manifesting "our human participation in . . . the natural forces of life and fertility...

...Precisely because the "Ethics of Everyday Life" project addresses a genuine and widespread need, its benefits should be extended beyond literary intellectuals...

...Why Marry...

...For his eccentric opinion," write his teachers, "and especially for this quaint way of putting it, he was promptly attacked by nearly every other member of the class...

...And far from giving up on the young, they have responded to the longings they detect in their students for "wholeness, for a life that is serious and deep," by searching the stores of civilization to assemble this wonderful anthology...

...They quickly saw that if the marital ideal is weak among the young, the reason is that the old—often disappointed and confused themselves— have failed to pass on any culturally prescribed pattern for channeling sexual attraction into lifelong marriage...

...High ideals, after all, are besmirched in every age...

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

...The great virtue of the Kasses' book—but also, it must be said, its limitation—is that it challenges the sophisticated reader with a sampling of the finest fruits of Western thought and literary art...

...What About Sex...

...Certainly one could fill as fat an anthology as this one with the chronicles of conjugal catastrophe, going back, as this collection does, to the Hebrews and the Greeks...

...All peoples exclude the observer...

...In so doing, it points to the need for a companion volume, a less philosophical anthology on courting and marrying intended for readers not quite up to Kierkegaard...

...Undeterred by this profoundly pessimistic conclusion about our present situation, the Kasses affirm a view of marriage they contend is not socially constructed, but rooted in the truth about men, women, and sexuality...

...Sleep never sealed her eyes till all was told...

...The blessedness of domesticity (invisible or even repellent to the young) is conjured up by no less a master than Tolstoy, in the transformation of the lithe Natasha into Pierre's wife and a nursing mother in War and Peace...

...The Kasses themselves, moreover, do not despair...

...They are a happily married, modern, two-career couple...

...Because marriage allows men and women to develop these higher possibilities, the young should be guided towards it...

...The changes that have weakened the cultural inheritance are large and obvious and, for the Kasses, can be summed up as the decline of biblical morality...

...But "mutual love banishes shame...

...Their many-layered discussion of what it means that the species is divided into male and female—and thus of the meaning of shame, the connection between sex and beauty, the interrelation of sex and death, and the desire for self-transcendence—should be required reading for young people used to a starvation diet of rock-culture lewdness and "safe sex...

...Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau, Kant, and Kierkegaard—the editors have not excluded from their pages, for example, Benjamin Franklin's down-to-earth plea for "a Union of Minds, and a Sympathy of Affections...

...or Charles Darwin's touching list of the pros and cons of marrying, written just two years before he mastered his fear that, once wed, he "should never know French,—or see the Continent,—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take [a] solitary trip in Wales," and cast his happy lot with Emma Wedgwood...

...It should aspire to stimulate reflection wherever there are people who read—all of whom have a stake in the recovery of marriage...

...And the reasons for that, in turn, are not far to seek...

...Loyalty cruelly tested finds its dazzling reward in the reunion of Penelope and her not exactly hearth-loving Odysseus after twenty years apart...

...Is This Love...

...Not by mistake did God create a woman—rather than a dialectic partner—to cure Adam's aloneness...

...Courtship, unlike directionless dating and mating, is mutual inspection with a view to marriage...

...in a mutual Esteem and Friendship for each other in the highest Degree possible...

...In all this, the Kasses do not attempt to propound any new dating code...

...It juxtaposes the Book of Genesis' account of Adam and Eve awakening to shame in their nakedness after the Fall with social theorist Kurt Riezler's "Comment on the Social Psychology of Shame," arguing that "Nature herself seems to connect sex with shame...

...Pitt-Rivers's empirical account of family formation in a mountain community in contemporary Spain...

...I can't resist quoting from the Robert Fagles translation the Kasses use: But the royal couple, once they'd reveled in all the longed-for joys of love, reveled in each other's stories, the radiant woman telling of all she'd borne at home...

...They cite, in particular, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the destigmatizing of illegitimacy, divorce, adultery, and abortion, together with the erosion of shame and awe in sexual matters, morally neutral sex education, the loosening of ties to place and extended family, the celebration of youth and independence, and an ethos lacking transcendent aspirations...

...These, they argue, are natural products of liberal democracy's emphasis on liberty and equality and modern philosophy's exalting of the individual: "The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights-bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as, say, unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply...

...It is possible to argue with the Kass-es' emphasis on our present romantic chaos as a necessary consequence of modernity...

...there is no escaping the waywardness of man...

...There is no resurrecting its vanished forms, but what can be done—what this volume helps to do—is cultivate insight, and thus inform behavior, rather than trusting solely to spontaneity in decisions so grave as whether and whom to marry...

...This exalted partnership, encompassing both the spiritual and the mundane, is what is captured in the title the editors have given their volume...

...It comes from Robert Frost's poem on his daughter's wedding, which ends: Two such as you...

...By breaking the cultural silence, as they put it, and exposing us to the wealth of our own cultural past, they enlarge our thinking on this literally vital theme...

...Why Courtship Matters BY CLAUDIA WINKLER The Kasses, by contrast, marveled at his maturity...

...Many of the entries, moreover, are not theoretical at all, but narrative...

...Most of the answers had to do with career...

...Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from, but rather embraces wholeheartedly, the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition...