New York City, September 20, 2000/The Institute for American Values today releases an evaluation of the current state of courtship research in North America, by Dan Cere, Co-Director of the Newman Center at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The report, "The Experts' Story of Courtship" evaluates the three most prominent schools of thought about courtship among family scholars today: exchange theory, sociobiology, and close relationship theory. While each provides important insights into contemporary culture, the report finds, none provides an adequate model for scientific understanding of courtship today.

Cere concludes that "[F]amily scholars as a whole would do us all a great service if they would rediscover their historic scientific curiosity about courtship as traditionally understood -- that is, as the attitudes, values, social rituals, and practices leading to marriage, especially successful marriage."

Until recently "courtship occupied a prominent position" in the research interest of social scientists. Courtship matters because marriage matters: "marriage was understood as a social institution vital to welfare of society -- much more than simply a life style choice or a personal relationship between two isolated individuals." As marriage has weakened, scholarly interest turned elsewhere.

What findings and ideas can current family and social science scholarship provide in understanding courtship and marriage today? "Very few" reports Cere. Indeed, of the three major expert narratives of courtship, only one -- exchange theory -- still defines courtship as related to marriage at all.

However, exchange theory is of limited use in understanding courtship, argues Cere, because this field "explicitly assumes that acts of marriage, like other acts, are primarily directed at the self, and that the self is above all a consumer of goods, relationships and even attitudes. . . 'Persons marry,' [exchange theorist] Gary Becker writes, 'when the utility expected from marriage exceeds the utility expected from remaining single.'"

The second expert narrative, sociobiology, also rips apart the veil of romance to bring a "stark realism to discussions of heterosexual attraction," notes Cere, offering a "rollicking spoof on the world of romance and power" where "lovers are bustling about, stumbling through their relationships, deceiving one another." For the study of courtship, though, sociobiology has inherent limitations: "To a sociobiologist," reports Cere, "your mate is not the person you marry, it is the person with whom you have children. If those children survive and reproduce, the union was successful; if not, not."

The third theory of courtship, or the close relationship theory, suffers from a similar blind-side, reducing marriage to just one of many sorts of possible couple relationships. "Close relationship theorists argue that the family is 'essentially a lay or commonsense construct,' rather than a meaningful scientific model," says Cere. Of course the term "family" may be a "valid poetic and literary description of folk-culture reality" in the words of one close relationship theorist, that may be helpful in "fostering communication among lay persons" but such folk concepts distort and limit scientific research.

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