Archives: Dating, Mating, Hooking Up

Okay, I have fought feeding into the Royal Wedding frenzy but a recent article I was reading mentioned that Prince William would NOT be wearing a wedding band, and it made me think…

“Huh,” I thought, “That seems odd.”

Am I right, though? Is it odd? 

I started digging Internet style and found a 2003 article by Vicki Howard that traces both the history and gender theory implications of the tradition of the “double ring” ceremony.

Little did I know that the male wedding band “tradition” did not begin until after World War II!  Prior to that time, only the lady received a ring, fancy or otherwise. But then in the 1940′s, due to competition from department stores, jewelry stores began marketing wedding bands as a speciality for men both as a romatic symbol of domesticity as well as a masculine symbol of commitment to family and country.  Howard shares how the spiritual meaning of the rings and incorporation into the marriage rite merely followed the fad. 

Ad campaigns highlighted valiant knights riding into a violent sunset with the wedding ring the only keepsake from the lovelorn maiden they leave behind or in abstract displays of masculine medals of iron and metal resting on phallic fingers.  How could we resist?  The tradition soon took off.  Even Humphrey Bogart chose to wear his first wedding band when he married for the fifth and final time to Lauren Bacall in 1946. 

“Unlike the woman’s ring, the groom’s wedding band expressed his ability to support a wife, to enter the adult world, to commitment and the containment of sexuality.”

Does the male wedding band play the same role in 2011?  Is it a symbol of financial solvency, adulthood, committment, and monogamy?  What about a spiritual meaning?

In the Christian marriage rite we bless the rings saying that just as a ring has no beginning nor end, God’s love for us is eternal and inspires the love we have for one another.  As the bride and groom place the ring upon each other’s fingers, words of promise are said stating that this ring is a public sign of love and faithfulness. 

What other public sign of love, faithfulness, and commitment do we have?  I am no longer on the dating scene, but when I was, you always looked to see if the guy had a ring on his finger.  A married man without a ring was perceived as a player.  In this age of wide-spread divorce, how do single people determine eligible dating partners without a public symbol of unavailability?

I guess Prince William doesn’t need a public symbol of marriage.  Everyone will know he is married. Or will they?  In this day and age, is a male not wearing a ring a power play?

For those in the NYC area, come next week, on Thursday, April 21, to our Center for Public Conversation event. FamilyScholars blogger Amber Lapp will interview Kay Hymowitz, author Manning Up, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, author of Why There are No Good Men Left. It promises to be a terrific event! RSVP here.

At CNN.com author Kay Hymowitz reflects on the persistence of an archaic ritual:

…And as in animal kingdom courtship, so in the human proposal, size matters. Disneyfied mega-proposals now clutter YouTube. These productions often include choruses, dancers, original choreography and musicians.

They always culminate in the suitor’s knee bending, question popping, and the damsel’s (feigned?) surprise. If you have any doubt that some unconscious force is at work here, watch the women in these videos. They always — always — gasp and then bring their hands to their open mouths in an unlikely exhibit of female modesty from the spring-break-at-Daytona-Beach generation.

At the Psychology Today blog two authors explore Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s work on single women in her book Why There are No Good Men Left.

…Whitehead had the courage to investigate the phenomena of American women seeking marriage in the 21st Century. This was not supposed to happen. 1960s and 1970s feminists like Erica Jong called marriage “the slavery of Home” and viewed it as an obstacle to liberation. The idea was that marriage would one day disappear as women overthrew the shackles of patriarchal society.

But a funny thing happened on the way to equality. The 1960s-70s era featured the successful breaking down of barriers in the board room.  Today’s single woman has parity in the workplace. With the battles for equal access to higher learning and equal pay for equal work largely over,  the focus of smart young women has turned to a politically incorrect subject.    As Whitehead observed, “There is something in the new single woman’s professed desire for marriage that runs against the official story of women’s social progress.”

These same forbidden themes  of women’s desire for marriage and their frustrations with men and dating have been box office magic in recent “Chick Lit”  movies like “Bridget Jones Diary ” and “Sex In The City”. Feelings of fear, powerlessness and alienation  are safely released as long as it is in fiction or pictured on the silver screen.

It turns out that today’s liberated women want to marry. The problem, as Whitehead points out, is that the social infrastructure that was designed to help young women meet marriageable men no longer exists. read more

Last night I was chatting with some friends about dating. We were standing in my kitchen, swirling glasses of wine and balancing plates of gorgonzola and double-crusted Italian bread, when the topic inevitably turned to relationships.

“What’s better?  To date a lot of people, or to just be friends with guys and get to know them that way?” my beautiful and single 25 year old friend asked.

We puzzled over it for awhile, crinkling eyebrows, cringing, wondering how one is supposed to meet a mate.  It’s not there aren’t ways to do so—it’s that there are so many ways to do so, and no etiquette or script for any of them.  If you choose the friend route, chances are you’ll end up in a world of ambiguity: just friends, something more, friends with benefits but no love, brotherly love but no attraction?  Every interaction becomes an opportunity to drive yourself crazy with overanalysis. 

And if you go the dating route—booking your calendar with as many nights out on the town as possible—the varying expectations and interpretations of what it means to go on a date make things messy.  Juan might never ask you to be his girlfriend, even though he takes you out regularly, but Johannes might think that you’re a couple after two mediocre dates and get offended when you tell him you don’t know how you feel yet.  Richard might get jealous that you’re seeing other people, Rob might book two dates for the same night. Read More

Cheryl Wetzstein of the Washington Times offers up new insights from Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker on why young adults are delaying marriage. (See their new book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, just published by Oxford.)

Young Americans have “scripts” that say they should wait to marry because:

• They can’t afford it. College is expensive, and couples want each other to be completely finished with school, have stable jobs and be “economically set” before marrying, the researchers wrote. Ironically, such rules do not apply to cohabiting.

• The 20s are a time to “be your own person.” Committing to a marriage looks risky when both people expect to “change” as they find their “true selves.” The resulting script says: Do the self-discovery part first, then involve “other people.”

• “It’s too soon to have children.” The lack of logic here is daunting: Marriage doesn’t cause babies, sex does, and more than half of American singles ages 18 to 23 are in sexually active relationships, Mr. Regnerus and Mr. Uecker found. Moreover, staying single doesn’t mean a birth won’t occur; in fact, four in 10 babies are born out of wedlock.

But, skipping over these facts of life, many young people think if they postpone marriage, they postpone children. As one 22-year-old woman said, “If I don’t want kids, I don’t really need to get married right away.”

• It’s time to travel, not settle down. A desire to travel was a common refrain, but it was “seldom accompanied by references to particular places they wished to go,” the researchers said. “It’s just the idea of it that’s appealing. And the assumption that marriage nixes one’s travel possibilities.” more