The Engagement: Thinking about Marriage

The society sections of the conservative and respectable New York newspapers carry a picture of a young woman together with her parents' announcement of her engagement to be married. Perhaps the announcement lists briefly the schools of high social standing which the young lady has attended. It may also describe the party at which the engagement was announced. That the families which expect to be brought together in the future marriage are represented in the social register and that considerable family fortunes are involved are matters left unannounced, but they are nevertheless generally understood.

Are the engagements throughout our society simply slight variants on this theme? In Plainville, James West found that engagements are, in contrast to the above type, highly secret affairs. Only the immediate families of each of the pair know of the approaching marriage. Even in communities much less rural and isolated than Plainville, the engagement while not secret may be simply a scarcely perceptible aspect of the growing emotional involvement of two people who have been "going steady." Then again, in many individual cases, an engagement may have largely the function of cloaking sexual exploitation of one of the pair by the other, or, in other cases, a camouflage mutually worn in order to gain freedom from community sex regulations and controls.

What does it mean to be engaged? From the foregoing it is obvious that a good deal of ambiguity and haziness surrounds not only the act of becoming engaged but the very state of being engaged. Perhaps no situation in any society is ever completely defined by the symbols which relate to it, but the engagement situation in our society is one which is left almost completely undefined by its symbols. The symbols are commonly the wearing of a ring or fraternity pin, the announcement of engagement at a party and in the newspaper, exclusive courtship over a long period of time, the words "I love you. Will you marry me?" and so on.