Friendships and Opportunities to Meet People

The term "friends" in the U. S. does not ordinarily mean great intimacy of relationship. When we speak of our circle of friends we do not necessarily imply that our "closest friend" is in that circle. We ordinarily mean that most of our visiting and our social engagements take place in that group. In some contexts and in some situations, there may be no real "group" of friends.

We may have several friends, for example, people with whom we have dinner or lunch somewhat frequently, with whom we gossip and exchange personal opinions; but these people in turn may, because of geographical location or time schedules, have only little to do with one another. This situation is more likely to occur in a metropolitan setting than in small cities or towns. Nevertheless we have to keep in mind the shifting meaning of the term "friends." Here it does not suggest great intimacy of relationship.


On the other hand, if one says that one is without friends, this statement has a much more definite meaning. It ordinarily suggests that the individual has no group of acquaintances with which he has much social intercourse.

Changing one's friends is not necessarily the result of being rejected by them, or even of having decided to reject them and to select a new group of friends. The change may come about merely because a change of residence makes it difficult to continue seeing them.

We would expect friends to be of more day-to-day utility in finding new acquaintances and in meeting eligible suitors, if only for the reason that the divorcee is in day-to-day social interaction with her friends. We should not, however, reason too easily from these facts to the picture of the urban environment as being a rootless one in which the elder generation disappears. Actually there is a close association between (a) the family helping the respondent to meet eligibles, and (b) friends helping the respondent to meet eligibles.

Courstship as Love Involvement

Love cannot develop in a vacuum. Since every love feeling must be oriented with reference to some object, it follows that sweetheart love requires interaction with other persons. The process by which the two sexes associate and adjust together as preparation for marriage we shall call "courtship."

Courtship is both the art of making love and process of love involvement; considered broadly, it extends all the way from when boys and girls are first attracted to each other to the time when married mates bid each other farewell at the sunset of life. There is a more narrow usage of the term, however, one that views courtship as being separate from both dating and marriage.

According to this usage, dating refers to the early friendship activities of young people whereby they seek to have fun in pairs (emphasis upon friendship and enjoyment, not marriage); courtship connotes a more advanced stage in these boy-girl relationships, the stage just prior to marriage where the emphasis is upon choosing a mate and preparing for what lies ahead; and marriage is the consummation or end result of what has gone before. Dating evolves somewhat gradually into courtship as the marriage prospect becomes more real, and courtship gives way to marriage when the mates decide that the involvement process has gone far enough and has been successful enough to be made permanent. We are interested here in the dating and courting processes of the premarriage period.

Parents and teachers sometimes blunder, and young people flounder, for failure to understand adequately the customs and value systems of each other. As "time marches on," oldsters tend to lose track of the feelings and problems of the oncoming group. With males and females made differently, and trained somewhat separately, sex antagonisms are bound to develop. Consequently each generation is partially blind to the new one emerging, and each sex, to a degree at least, is ignorant of the other.

To come to any real understanding of how modern youth think and feel about the various patterns of courtship behavior, it is necessary to let them speak for themselves.