Should You Marry Your First Love?

You know the scenario: The star quarterback of the football team drops back to pass the winning touchdown in the big game and, out of the corner of his eye, spots the cute cheerleader jumping up and down with pompoms lifted to the sky. Love at first sight?

After the prom and a college courtship, the quarterback proposes and of course, the cheerleader accepts. Sure, it reads like a fantasy. In essence, that is what it is -- an idealized depiction of marriage to your first love.

But guess what? It may be possible to have it all with the first person you fall for. You may not buy the dog and cat, live in the suburbs or spawn a large brood, but maybe you can make it work with the right person.

Is the grass greener?

Let me school anyone who is pondering marriage with your first sweetheart while obsessing about what else is out there. Nothing much, I regret to inform you. Look, you may meet many wonderful people who stimulate you, but is it worth dumping the love you have now?

Think about it: unless you are in an abusive or dysfunctional relationship with no room for personal growth, it is not a good proposition. Forget about your concerns of monogamy. If the sex is good now (or the foreplay if abstinent) and you both are open, willing to experiment and please each other, sex with anyone else will leave you empty.

What if you, well, regret it?

I know, I know; the curiosity is killing you. Just stop and think a minute -- with your brain. The best sex is with someone with whom you share a deep bond, where the comfort level is high and the rapport is honest. I assume you have all that with the love of your life.
So why consider shelving the marriage plans or long-term commitment because you want to be with more than one woman before you die? The bottom line is that real love is priceless. Don't let it slip away.

What you'd be missing

A final note for the Doubting Thomas in you. Think about a future with your current sweetheart and first love. Marriage, family, a home -- the whole nine yards -- or whatever it is you aspire to as a couple.
Now imagine that you cave into your desire to experience more and leave your first love. What would life be like then? Yes, after braving the difficult transition period of being alone, you may find comfort in the arms of another person.

You may have more lovers than a movie star. Fine. What then? It takes a strong person to stick with one love for an entire lifetime. If that first love is the real deal, do not succumb to the temptation of the more-is-more value system. This could be the truest love you'll ever find.

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.

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.

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.