Tilting Toward Nineties Courtship

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 21, 1998 | by Suzanne Fields

There's this joke told by stand-up comic Susie Essman. It goes like this: "A guy I know is in a men's group: `Single Heterosexual Men Who Harbor No Hostility Toward Women.' What is there, one member?"

The sexual revolution was supposed to change the humor in the war between the sexes by leveling the playing field. Anyone who's ever played pinball machines knows that you can't win with a tilt. But the playing field for men and women is as tilted as ever, sometimes in favor of the man and sometimes in favor of the woman, rather like a seesaw. It's especially difficult in the postmodern nineties to find a balance.

How does an old married woman know this? Well, I've got lots of sources, but I'll start with a current television show called Cupid. Its premise touches the greater truth discovered more quickly in fiction than in reality, It's about the failure of modern courtship.

There's so much suffering, grief and loneliness among singles that word has reached the gods on Mt. Olympus: Cupid has shot his arrow into his own chubby little foot and crippled his ability to do his job. His limp has been felt by men and women all over America.

So distressed are the gods that they decide to send him back to Earth in the dress of a mere mortal (designer chic without wings), and they won't let him return to his heavenly haunts until he has joined together at least 100 couples. At the rate he's going, the gods may have to reduce their expectations or increase the number of television episodes.

Of course, not everybody believes this guy is Cupid. Some of his targets think he's insane, literally, but that certainly fits in with the notion that anyone who believes he has the formula for bringing a man and a woman together has to be crazy.

Today close to 14 million men and women between 25 and 34 years old -- almost 35 percent of that cohort -- have never married. The average age for first marriage is 25 for women, 26.8 for men. Anxiety about getting married sets in during the late 20s and early 30s, especially for women as they begin to worry about having children. But what's fascinating about the episodes of Cupid is that the men are as nervous as the women yearning for romance -- what Cupid's handsome male roommate describes as "foreplay before foreplay."

I was going to save these ideas for a Valentine's Day column, but the problems for singles remain too urgent to postpone, and who knows how long a sitcom devoted to romantic courtship will last? Besides, thinking about romance today may help some men and women plan their winter holidays.

They could start in cyberspace. You've Got Mail, the new movie directed by Nora Ephron, is about an e-mail romance, in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan flash seductive messages to each other. Anonymity offers a delicious security and titillation, but you can't always expect the object of e-mail affection to look like a Hollywood star. An ineviitable face-to-face confrontation could be disastrous, if not downright dangerous. Surely there's a better way to zing the heartstrings.

Mother Nature, always on the lookout for ways to ensure an evolutionary advantage between a man and woman, prefers the kiss to the Internet. A kiss is not just a kiss; it's the first touchstone for love and marriage. It's even scientific.

A psychologist who studied a group of 80 undergraduates who went a-courting in the nineties asked them to describe in writing the sensations of their first kiss. Those who remembered its arousing nature, he said, "are in a far better position to cast their genes into the future" than hapless lovers who don't remember it at all. He noted that women remember more specific details than men, which is not surprising, since women count the ways of love much more than men.

But the kiss may not be as easy to get as it used to be. Sexual overexposure can lead to timidity and resistance. Cosmopolitan magazine gives its readers advice for giving off kissin' signals to initiate the liplock. Justine, age 29, for example, describes how her date had to be nudged into the act: "After walking me back to my door, he stood there nervously, rambling on and on," she says. "All I wanted to do was kiss, so I touched my fingers gently to his lips as if to say `quit babbling and start bussing' -- which he did."

On Cupid, a woman psychotherapist who runs a group for lonely singles warns that reason is a better ally in love than romance, that compatibility is more important than. chemistry, that eros is an unreliable indicator for future mating.

"It doesn't matter how you meet," says a character in the movie Next Stop, Wonderland, a romantic comedy that cuts right to the chase. "The real mystery is what keeps people together after they meet." That sounds about right, but that's the stuff for another column Stay tuned.