Love and Mate Selection PDF

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Love and Mate Selection...

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Love and Mate Selection We expect love to be an essential ingredient in marriage. Yet in most societies throughout human history, love had little to do with marriage (Abbott, 2011). Third parties, not brides and grooms, typically arranged marriages. The selection of marriage partners was based mainly on calculations intended to maximize their families’ prestige, economic benefits, and political advantages. The idea that love should guide the choice of a marriage partner first gained currency in the eighteenth century with the rise of liberalism and individualism, philosophies that stressed freedom of the individual over community welfare (Beck and BeckGernsheim, 1995; Cherlin, 2009). However, the intimate link between love and marriage that we know today emerged only in the early twentieth century, when Hollywood and the advertising industry began to promote self-gratification on a grand scale. For these new spinners of fantasy and desire, an important aspect of self-gratification was heterosexual romance leading to marriage.

In the past, when marriages were arranged by others, couples may have had the opportunity to know one another only after they were married. Today, marriage is rarely the first step couples take when forming a relationship. Instead, nearly all young people today engage in prolonged courtship rituals. Dating often starts in early adolescence, as youth attend parties, dances, or sporting events together. Romantic relationships in these contexts rarely last more than a few months but provide youth with opportunities for sexual discovery and experimentation. As adolescence progresses into young adulthood, dating shifts from attending events in groups to spending time as a couple. The purpose of dating also changes. In preparation for adult roles, romantic relationships become the basis for testing physical and emotional compatibility with another person. In the past, couples followed a fairly direct path from dating to engagement to marriage. Today, young adults have a variety of options available to them. We discuss differences between marriage and cohabitation before describing other types of couple relationships that exist in Canada today....