Love Requires Relationship

Bis Art Print
Hanson, Pamela
31.47 in. x 23.6 in.

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Framed   Mounted


There are quite different understandings of the nature of loving. Monastics throughout the world, for example, have held that the most fundamental experience of love comes not from relations with other people but from an inward experience of Being itself. Such an experience has been described as bliss, enlightenment, mystery, or light. Within Christianity the term agape is used to denote the love of God for human beings. It is a Christian contention that we are obligated to love others—indeed, that we can be commanded to love others because we have been loved by God.

Our present Western understanding of love, however, is more strongly sociopsychological. Whatever self-love we have acquired depends on our having been loved by others. Our parents, friends, and lovers have significantly shaped, if not totally determined, our capacity to love. Thus, our experience of having been loved provides us with inner prescriptions as to how we should go about our own loving. It is not possible for us to grow and develop unless our basic human need for love and acceptance has been met adequately.

To most people, love means caring for others, looking after them, seeing to their well-being, "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, . . . till death us do part" 6 People often assume that because caring is very much related to the amount of time spent with those we care for, the longer the relationship, the more caring there will be and the more loving. Thus, they ask: "Isn't it important that marriage be for life?" "Must not any partnership last a long time for it to become a deep and meaningful experience?" "After all, what do people know about love who have not had the responsibility of caring for another person over the years?"

Indeed, caring is a significant part of what we mean by "working" at a marriage, and it is an important part of any intimate partnership. For this reason this book has a lot to say about loving in partnerships. But such a conception of caring for others must be balanced by an awareness that the members of a partnership also must work toward their own self-actualization. Caring for one's partner is only half of the relationship, for it is also important to care for and nurture into being one's own creative, growing self.

Early and Late Dating

To the first group, dating is logically disadvantageous at any age. Among those who regard dating as educational, there is difference of opinion about when it should begin, and what the relative merits are of initiating it at an early or at a late age. Some think youngsters are fortunate if they become absorbed in projects and put off dating until they are relatively near the age of marriage. Others are so positive about the merits of learning through association across sex lines, that they are anxious to see adolescents begin dating associations early. Failure to date until the end of high school is therefore looked upon as an individual as well as a social handicap.

In reality, few have investigated the objective facts to determine the home conditions associated with early dating or analyzed the behavior patterns of either early or late dating. Necessarily, a first effort can do little beyond scratching the surface; still if it is found that measurable differences in family and social patterns exist between early and late daters, further inquiry may be expected to delineate more fully the nature and significance of these differences.

For a number of years, the writer has been studying dating behavior among high school and college students, an article showing that among five thousand students the initial age of dating varied with the age of those furnishing information but was practically the same for boys and girls. More recently, dating has been investigated in the high schools of three cities of approximately one hundred thousand population, located in distinctive sections of the country: Ohio, Texas, and California.

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.