Forget ‘Sex In The City’

Week by week on ”The Bachelorette,” 30-year-old Trista Rehn, a former Miami Heat cheerleader and sometime physical therapist, has been paring down a field of two dozen male suitors. In the final episode, airing five days after Valentine’s Day, she will dub one her Mr. Right and, theoretically at least, walk off into the sunset with him. Critics have panned the ABC series as just another cheesy reality show. But its ratings success is easier to fathom if you understand that it provides something that’s missing from the lives of many young women today: the experience of romantic courtship. And I’m not talking only about courtship as the 1950s understood it. I’m also talking about courtship 1150s-style.
Despite its contemporary trappings, ”The Bachelorette” is about courtly love. It conjures up a leisurely world where gallant young men devote their energies and imaginations to winning the hand of their chosen fair lady. In the knightly tradition, the competition is oriented to the fine, rather than the martial, arts. Trista’s suitors sing to her, write poems for her, give her tokens of their love and generally wear their hearts on their sleeves. Each week, she rewards successful competitors with a red rose, the classic symbol of love, and sends the losers away. The rejected suitors leave peaceably and without rancor, much less with declared intentions of harassment or stalking. The rules of the game are well understood.
For an older generation, these rituals of romantic courtship may seem as stale and cliched as a box of drugstore chocolates. But for today’s young women, they are fresh and new. Their generation has come of age at a time when the experience of being romanced is the exception rather than the rule. Their peer culture is comradely rather than courtly. They grow up sharing dorms, bathrooms and, ultimately, beds with young men. During their high school and college years, they socialize by hanging out with a coed group of friends and ”hooking up” for casual sex. But many have never been asked out on a date.
In the late 1990s, Columbia University researchers conducted a large-scale study of student life based on a survey of more than 9,000 students from 586 colleges and universities, and concluded, ”Traditional dating is largely dead on college campuses.”
After several weeks of intimacy with a boyfriend, young women still aren’t sure whether they’re in a relationship or just hooking up. And post-college relationships are like post-college internships–”learning” experiences that are meant to end after a year or so.
Even the language of romance has faded. A classical language of romantic love, rooted in poetry, elegant prose and art, has been supplanted by semi-clinical ”relationships talk.” When young women recount their experiences, they rarely use expressions such as ”falling in love” or ”finding the love of my life.” Instead, they talk about ”issues” of communication, sexuality, intimacy and commitment. Even romantic disappointment has lost its association with grand passion. ”Broken hearts” are dismissed matter of factly as the consequence of ”dumpings.”
Youthful romance is a casualty of a shift in the way young people are prepared for adulthood. For most of the last century, marriage came shortly after high school or college. Girls and boys were initiated into the rituals of romantic courtship in school. The larger purpose of this informal education was to prepare them for early marriage. In the early grades, it was simply teaching boys and girls how to behave with one another. They engaged in puppy love. Valentine’s Day was for schoolchildren. Boys and girls played at romance by exchanging candy hearts and paper sentiments.
In the teen years, there were occasions for boy-girl socializing. Parents, teachers and clergy all played a role in designing these events. For those who went on to college, campus social life aimed toward marriage, with steppingstone rituals leading from steady dating to pinning to an engagement ring in the senior year. All this occurred during a relatively leisured period in young people’s lives; for those in their late teens and early twenties, there was lots of time to meet and court.
Today, this social curriculum is obsolete. Marriage no longer comes on the heels of graduation as the median age of first marriage creeps upward. In 1960, it was 20 for women and 22 for men. Today, it’s 25 for women and 27 for men; probably a year or two older for the college-educated. Many young people are putting off marriage to meet the demands of the economy. That means longer years of schooling and early career development, not to mention time to pay off college loans.
There is a clear upside to delaying marriage: It is likely to result in more satisfying, long-lasting marriages. Today, statistics show, marrying at an early age is the most reliable predictor of divorce. Waiting longer before marrying gives young women a greater chance of finishing college and establishing themselves in careers. They are better equipped to weather the economic risks of divorce, or to lead fulfilling lives as single women.
But there’s a downside. To stay on the prolonged and demanding educational track, men and women are virtually required to hold romance in the old-fashioned sense at bay. Indeed, premature romantic entanglements can jeopardize the successful pursuit of education and career.
The social curriculum has changed accordingly. The implicit goal is to help young people manage their sex lives, not learn how to choose a future life partner. And the burden of this falls most heavily on young women.
At ever younger ages, in an increasingly sex-drenched teen culture, girls must take responsibility for fighting off the boys and avoiding the risks of early sex. For some teenage girls, according to recent reports, the solution is oral sex, or ”buddy sex” as it is sometimes called.
But what does this mean? Yes, they avoid the risks of getting pregnant. But, according to the new calculus, they aren’t giving their hearts away. Buddy sex isn’t ”real sex” or ”true love.” It’s just efficient, ”safe” and, well, no big deal. For college women, hooking up for casual sex allows them to put off a serious romance. For women beyond college age, living together with a boyfriend is a way to have a relationship without a premature commitment that might interfere with the pursuit of other personal and career goals.
Many young women have met these goals by their late twenties. They have traveled, earned a degree or two, gained a foothold on the career ladder, maybe bought a condo. Now they’re ready for romance, but there’s no pool of eligible men their age who have been schooled in the ways of courtship. Other than bars and clubs, there are few places for working singles to socialize. And the demands of work leave too little leisure time for romance.
The popularity of ”The Bachelorette” isn’t a sign of the further decline of American civilization, but the longing of accomplished young women for the romance of earlier generations. Their mothers struggled for a place in the world of work. What they needed was a workplace that was hospitable to their desire for professional fulfillment. For the daughters, however, the struggle is to find their way in the world of love. What they need is a contemporary form of courtship that respects the new timetable of women’s lives.
Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, is author of ”Why There are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman” (Broadway Books).