Chapter 2 Further Reading: A Brief History of Courtship

The sources below are organized from the most accessible to the more academic. All are worth engaging with; start where your background and curiosity take you.

Foundational Books

Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. Viking, 2005. This is the essential starting point for anyone who wants to understand the historical contingency of marriage norms. Coontz is a historian who writes for general audiences without sacrificing rigor. Her central argument — that marriage-for-love is historically recent and structurally disruptive — is demonstrated through an impressive sweep of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia to the contemporary United States. Chapters 1–4 and 15–17 are most directly relevant to this chapter's material. Coontz's willingness to hold complexity is admirable: she neither romanticizes the past nor dismisses its logic.

Illouz, Eva. Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Polity Press, 2012. Illouz is one of the most important sociologists of contemporary intimate life, and this is probably the most accessible of her major works. Her core argument is that the rise of romantic love as a cultural ideal has not liberated individuals but created new forms of suffering — the pathologization of loneliness, the therapeutic economy that profits from romantic failure, the commodification of intimacy. For students who found the chapter's discussion of romanticism thought-provoking, this book will take those questions much further. Her earlier work Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997) and Cold Intimacies (2007) extend the analysis.

Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford University Press, 1992. A sociological classic. Giddens argues that modernity has produced a new form of relationship he calls the "pure relationship" — one entered into for its own sake rather than for external reasons, sustained only as long as both parties find it satisfying, and organized around an ideal of "confluent love" rather than traditional romantic idealism. The book is theoretically dense but foundational for understanding what is distinctively modern about contemporary courtship norms. His concept of "plastic sexuality" — sexuality freed from reproduction as its primary social function — is directly relevant to this chapter's history of the sexual revolution.

On Digital Courtship and Dating Apps

Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. "Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753–17758. This is the peer-reviewed source for the finding that online meeting has become the dominant pathway to romantic partnership in the US. It is open-access and worth reading directly. The methodology (nationally representative telephone survey) and the longitudinal findings are clearly presented. The trend data — showing the rise of online meeting and the decline of meeting-through-friends over the period 1940–2017 — is striking.

Bruch, Elizabeth, and M.E.J. Newman. "Aspirational Pursuit of Mates in Online Dating Markets." Science Advances 4, no. 8 (2018): eaap9815. This study analyzed messaging patterns on a large dating platform and documented the "hierarchy" of desirability in online dating, finding that most users tend to message people rated as more desirable than themselves. The gender age-desirability patterns are among the findings. Open access.

On Global Courtship Variation

Werbner, Pnina. The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis. Berg, 1990; updated work through 2000s. Werbner's ethnographic work on British Pakistani communities is essential reading for understanding how marriage practices operate in diaspora contexts, how family and individual negotiation interact, and what "arranged marriage" actually looks like from the inside.

Hirsch, Jennifer S., and Holly Wardlow, eds. Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage. University of Michigan Press, 2006. A collection of anthropological case studies of how "companionate marriage" — marriage organized around emotional intimacy and individual choice — is spreading globally while taking distinctively local forms. Case studies include Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, China, and Egypt. This is an excellent corrective to the assumption that Western romantic individualism is simply displacing other courtship forms rather than being hybridized with them.

Accessible Starting Points

Pew Research Center. "Online Dating in the United States." 2020. Available at pewresearch.org. The clearest overview of contemporary American dating app demographics. Free and publicly accessible. A useful reality check on who uses these platforms, how, and with what reported outcomes.

Boxer, Sarah. "The Married Women of 'Old Europe'" (review of Coontz's Marriage, a History). The Atlantic, 2005. A good introduction to the Coontz argument for students who want to preview the book before committing to it.