Highly romantic pattern of mate selection

Under our highly romantic pattern of mate selection, the average youth approaches marriage after many experiences of dating, after numerous emotional thrills in the realm of romance, and after having broken at least one previous engagement.

In a society where love-making is a major pastime and where the choice of a mate is left almost entirely in the hands of youth and where the recognized goal of marriage is personal happiness, young people would seem to have a great deal more responsibility placed upon their shoulders for the future of the family institution than in societies where marriage comes without a previous history of romance and where mate selection is by parents or other elders who have in mind practical considerations rather than romance in matching the pair. At least we must admit that many of the problems of modern adolescents and youths in the realm of emotional turmoil, moral decision, and anxious deliberations over courses of action grow out of the romantic complex.

Among the youth group in high school and college, dating is used as a status-gaining device. A girl's or a boy's desirability as a date is taken as a measure of personal worth, the number of desirable dates as an index of success and popularity.

It is considered desirable today that young people "circulate" until they find a relationship that will satisfy both their emotional and intellectual taste. It is even considered that wide experience in dating is favorable to ultimate courtship. The girl who is considered desirable as a date by a number of fellows is presumed to be the one most likely to be sought after in marriage.

The extent to which this point of view is sound depends on a number of factors, the conduct of the girl in dating, for example. If she passes beyond the point of discretion in love-making, she becomes the object of exploitation and becomes the type of person few men would want to marry. If she possesses proper restraint and dignity, she may be considered highly desirable for courtship.

Because of extensive dating in contemporary society, it probably becomes increasingly difficult for the average youth to narrow down his courtship to the point where he is ready to select one mate and enter into a marriage bargain for life. Dating, however, if conducted on a proper level, gives the youth experience in evaluating different personality types and behavior patterns in the members of the opposite sex, which is probably an advantage, providing he does not associate so promiscuously that he loses the ability to decide the type of person who would be a mate satisfactory to him. Dating experience is also essential to tempering the highly romantic and unreal notion of love so characteristic in American society. Most young people after a certain amount of normal experience in dating come to appreciate that there are many individuals of the opposite sex with whom they could live happily and that there are certain other individuals with whom they could not possibly be happy.

As unsatisfactory as this form of mate selection is in terms of its consequences to the stability of family life, we must accept the fact that the pattern exists and will persist in American culture. In a mobile society where much of romance is conducted beyond the reach of parents and other interested relatives, greater responsibility is placed upon the adult group in family and school for seeing that young people have some standard by which they may evaluate themselves and those with whom they associate as prospective mates. The ability of a member of the opposite sex to inspire romance seems now to be the primary criterion for mate selection. Yet this quality alone is a highly speculative element on which to found a permanent and satisfactory marriage. A lifelong institutional relationship must have something more than impulse to guarantee its success.

For the young person in a highly mobile society who is so often, in his early adjustment to economic life and to secondary group experience, among strangers, the love element is likely to have an exaggerated importance. In strange situations deep affection for a member of the opposite sex is likely to be used as a remedy for a sense of isolation, as a device for restoring selfassurance and for protecting himself against the apparent hostility and coldness of the world about him. Love for such an individual comes to stand for success in social adjustments. It is likely that many young people in their first experience with new situations will continue in our kind of society to rate love as an emotional experience much more highly than it should be rated among the other values that are essential to successful marriage and family life.

One of the unfortunate by-products of our highly romantic conception of marriage is that the girl who fails to obtain dates and later proposals of marriage, in our society, where the male is the aggressor in dating, courtship, and marriage, feels that she has lost out in the most important competitive relationship of a woman's world. The unfortunate consequence is that many of these young women feel defeated, unreasonably frustrated, even to the point of personality distortion. This aspect of the romantic pattern is especially unfortunate at a time when we are for the first time in the nation's history entering a period when there will be a considerably higher proportion of marriageable females than of males, making it inevitable that a portion of young women in our society will have no opportunity to marry.