Over the last ten years women have often been blamed for the marriage delay. “Women are not behaving correctly” was the subtext of books like The Rules*. Conservative commentators similarly believed that women had been the cause of the death of courtship. Chief among these doomsayers were Patrick Buchanan (who still has his site up for his 2000 presidential campaign).
There was also Leon Kass’ essay “The End of Courtship,” in which he said ridiculous things like, “In the present climate, those increasingly rare men who are still inclined to be gentlemen must dissemble their generosity as submissiveness.”
My case was that courtship hadn’t died but changed. As a generation we were not cynical about marriage, we were just very cautious. It was true that, if we were going to spend a decade of our young adulthood outside of marriage, we were going to have a good amount of out-of-wedlock sex. But that didn’t mean we had abandoned the idea of marriage. There was evidence, in fact, that we were holding marriage to a higher standard—taking it more seriously—than previous generations.
*My Top Five Stupidest Lines from the Rules can be found here.
I’m not sure if I agree that we’re taking marriage more seriously in this day and age as compared to previous generations. With the divorce rate (arguably a result of female empowerment), we are more likely to look at marriage as a failed institution rather than a higher level of commitment.