Courtship today: the view from academia

For those interested in marriage as a social institution, the advantage of this perspective is that it still views courtship as the pathway to marriage. But in exchange theory, the marriage vow has been dumbed down to a mere contract intended to serve the narrow interests of the individuals investing in the relationship. No-fault divorce laws make marriage agreements far flimsier and more vulnerable to shifting preferences than most business contracts. Exchange theory nicely reflects this cultural shift and spotlights the increasingly utilitarian motivations that guide entrance into these fragile marriage "deals."

Yet by assuming that, by definition, individuals act as rational consumers, "exchange theory" is of limited use in understanding the social and interpersonal aspects of courtship and marriage as institutions. It fails to appreciate the irrational or unselfconscious ideas that may move people to marriage and may keep them in it long after a "rational consumer" would have traded in their old clunky model for a jazzier new one. Many of the essential features of love--the longing for permanence, the desire to give oneself to another--must in the economists' story of courtship be either submerged into "contract theory" or dismissed altogether as irrational. For a full understanding of how and why people marry, we must look elsewhere.

It's all in the genes

Sociobiology is one of the most popular of the new theoretical perspectives on courtship, marriage, and sexuality. In the quest to unravel the convoluted scripts of heterosexual bonding, sociobiology has emerged as an attractive alternative, basing arguments on an appeal to genes rather than morals. In contrast to rational choice or exchange theories of courtship, sociobiologists search for deeply rooted evolutionary factors that govern sexual and romantic preferences in mate selection.

Evolutionary psychology maintains that males and females have radically divergent sexual psychologies. Innate evolutionary factors have conditioned women to value and select men on the basis of their ability to provide nourishment, protection, security, and social status for themselves and their offspring. Females seek "dominant males." Status signals such as power, money, social position, intelligence, education, skills, and the ability to father rank high for women. Males, on the other hand, are "hardwired" to seek sexual liaisons with women who show signs of reproductive viability, such as health, youth, and physical attractiveness.

In this highly charged and competitive world of courtship, male and female interests are essentially incommensurable, yielding divergent strategies and counter-strategies of seduction. Females deceive, about their age and physical attractiveness; males dissemble about their financial resources, career prospects, and willingness to commit. Women deceive and seduce cosmetically, men deceive and seduce through ritualized displays of acquisition. Women concentrate on dressing for dates, men concentrate on planning and paying for dates.