Restoring sanity, helping people get married.
Tuesday night Deirdre and I saw the documentary The Dating Project. I thought it was great and naturally, I have my own two cents to contribute as well. Good news, the site now says that the movie will soon be available digitally and on DVD. I hope they make it available beyond groups and programs. I think parents, especially those whose children are not homeschooled, but who are concerned, should really watch it with their older kids (ones who already know about the hookup culture — if they don’t, don’t watch it with them, but instead peruse my links at the end of the post).
First, some observations as I was watching:
The film is well done. (I am over those camera angles close up and from below. Don’t know much about movie-making but Ken Burns has a lot to answer for here, seems to me, if you are a historian or professor and not a model with perfect teeth and nostrils, but as I’m not going to be in a documentary anytime soon, we’ll let it pass). The music works well to place you in the contemporary scene while adding its own amplification of the complex feelings undergone by the subjects; the visuals are excellent; the editing keeps you involved and allows the themes to develop without forcing them.
The professor who started it all, Kerry Cronin (along with the estimable Jesuit priest whose talk on Chastity and Courage I would love to read), is lively, cheerful, and approachable. She’s a true apostle of common sense (a good, if unexpected, quality in a philosophy professor!). Her comments are very helpful.
The five main subjects of the film project honesty and depth. The producers must have spent hours and hours with them over a long period of time, because not only do they express what’s on their mind, they evince development and change in their thinking. There’s a sense of discovery that the viewer is participating in, which in turn helps the viewer understand better the possibly foreign concepts of simple dating being presented.
The narrative unfolds gently. Not every point is made at first, but I emerged from the theater satisfied that the difficult topics were brought up. Porn, premarital sex, cohabitation, hookup culture — the film gets you to think about these things and to begin to take seriously the necessity of turning away from them definitively.
It’s really, really sad to see the freshmen in college, nice, sweet kids, talk about their experiences with hooking up. Even given the point made by Cronin, that hooking up can mean various activities on a scale (and, she points out, that’s what makes it so appealing or successful as a concept — no one really knows what you did), the thought that it’s considered normal for young people to treat intimacy as its opposite — something detached and separate from their inner selves, something they must recover from in order to regain feeling. We simply must help our society recover its sanity.
The film takes on a lot. This is a huge topic. Just addressing the hookup culture on campus is enough material for a whole series of documentaries. But The Dating Project also looks at finding love after college, at 30 in the midst of a demanding career, and at 40 after a lifetime of evading deep relationships. It wants all the conversations to happen at once, and yet somehow it doesn’t crumple under the weight of this self-imposed challenge.
It seems clear that the producers want to engage with the secular, sex-obsessed culture. At a basic level, Prof. Cronin’s thought boils down to, “Do daring things for the good, if for no other reason than you see that hookups aren’t working and because you trust me to have common sense — and good things will happen.” Specifically, the daring thing she has in mind is going on a date. I respect that and totally endorse.
Will the movie reach the intended audience? I have no idea.
I can see this film being embraced by church youth programs, and that makes me uneasy, because the culture of faith should work with a more precise moral vocabulary and greater clarity than this film incorporates (simply because the film does aim to reach those who have been left behind, morally speaking) (leaving aside the fact that Boston College, where Prof. Cronin teaches and offers her dating course, is a putatively Catholic institution, to its shame). “Meeting people where they are to help them come closer to the truth” isn’t meant as a strategy for church, where it’s reasonable to just go ahead and tell them what they need to know.
But out in the world I could see this movie being a good starting place. How to get people to watch it without feeling like they are a captive audience?
I am not sure that men will watch, just because men don’t usually watch (or read) things that women really, really want them to watch. I could be wrong; I hope I am. But men need to watch it.
So I am not sure how it will fare. Since my aim here is narrower — to enliven the everyday, ordinary beauty that draws us to the Good, to encourage parents to bring up virtuous children (or at least children who know what virtue is and how to recover it if it’s lost), and only probably secondarily to help any stray unattached readers to commit to finding a spouse — I will offer, as I said, my two cents on the topic of dating (and chastity in general).
So here they are:
The model of the “Level 1 Date” (you can download it here) is a good one for our crazy society. It’s simple and people do appreciate rules for things. Beyond getting a cup of coffee or an ice cream, which are also the suggestions my husband and I made to our kids, we included this one: Invite the person you think you might be interested in on a walk. Liking walks is normative for a happy life! It has the benefit of being free (unless you get your ice cream cones and take them with you). It allows you to talk. It keeps you moving. It’s invigorating. You can walk somewhere beautiful or to something interesting. It allows you to talk without worrying excessively about your appearance or how the other person is reacting to you, but it’s not a conversational road block the way a movie is. If the person looks askance at a walk, they likely won’t be for you.
One of the rules of Level 1 Dating, “if you ask, you pay,” is okay, but… I thought it was interesting that the women in the movie expressed the desire to be pursued. Prof. Cronin made a the argument that the Level 1 date is not courtship, it’s just coffee, and as such it’s more like a green light to be pursued, perhaps, in the future. That is a good point.
The movie really avoided addressing the difference between men and women, and I get why that choice was made. However, if the rule were re-written slightly to say, “if you ask, you offer to pay while saying, ‘you can treat next time, or we could go Dutch,’” you leave the door open for a next time. And you leave the door open, if you are the woman, to not paying if you are the one suggesting the date — that is, you avoid setting up the notion that you subscribe to a feminist, egalitarian vision of relationship — one that is not compatible with the whole idea of this project (although I’m not sure that the producers of the movie would agree with that — and that’s maybe an avoidance of theirs).
Since women do long to be pursued and, as Cronin points out, our society simply doesn’t support that model at the moment, it’s important that if a man is being asked, he doesn’t get the wrong idea about expectations going forward. What Cronin doesn’t say is that men don’t understand this about women — or are afraid to admit to understanding it — in large part because women have collectively, and to their unacknowledged grief, trained them out of any natural instinct to do it. Why should the man ask, and pay? Because he ought to be the pursuer, and by spending money is demonstrating to the woman that he can, and is willing to, support her if they should decide to marry. This is decisive for their future happiness, since marriage isn’t a sort of business arrangement. It’s a sacred way to build a life together complementarily.
Saying “you can treat me next time” is important to answer the question of how the relationship moves forward from date to date and from level to level (the levels are explained in the movie, but the moving forward is not). This is something I might talk about more later.
It struck me that in the interview after the main part of the film ended, Cronin made the excellent point that knowing how to ask people questions and have a give-and-take conversation is just good manners in society(don’t miss this!). So I do think that the “Level 1 Date” could actually just be interpreted more broadly as a desirable interaction for any two people, not necessarily those who have romantic possibilities.
Mothers with young children are probably the only adults left on the planet who know how to say to each other, “Want to come over for a cup of coffee?” — simply because they have the pretext of getting their children together for playing. They are the only ones left who can pull it off without awkwardness.
Because we now email and text — but most of all, go on Facebook to relate to each other in groups — we have lost the art not only of dating but of just getting together with one friend of any description. So I would encourage the lucky mothers who have this privilege to encourage their husbands to stop for a quick beer with a friend after work once in a while, let’s meet up for an hour of conversation over tea, and let’s make a point of meeting a friend over a drink. And in general, let’s think about how to model and help our children be able to say to a friend, “want to get together for a chat?”
If we have more practice having real conversations, one on one, our children will too, and then when it’s a matter of a date, they won’t be so disadvantaged.
Only at the very end of the interview does Cronin get into the role of friendship in romance, although throughout her main point is that one person needs to get to know another. I’d love to hear more from her on this topic.
I do think that if we were better at having friends in general and knowing what to do with them even for an hour, we’d be better at the kind of dating she’s describing, where you actually are trying to become romantically involved with someone you’ve actually come to know, and to come to know someone you consider romantic material.
Our society has duped us into thinking that the goal for men and women is a sexual hookup, but the goal is marriage. The movie is good at identifying the first part and its problems, but doesn’t quite nail down the second part and its joys. That’s okay. It does a good enough job of indicating it, of leaving the question hanging out there — especially with the small segment with Chris’ 90-year-old mother (and do you realize this means she had him when she was 50? Fantastic!), a beautiful, funny, articulate, and happy lady whose life really seems to be an example of all one could hope for from romance, even if it was cut short by her husband’s passing. I wish they would do another documentary with, say, five people at various stages of marriage, with Chris’ mother front and center.
I am still not sure how one signals to a potential romantic interest that one is committed to waiting for marriage to be intimate. To me, it’s fatal to this whole concept of the “normal, simple” date to discuss “The Relationship” or “What I Want out of a Relationship” — on the Level 1 Date I would highly encourage not discussing such things at all. When you are getting together for coffee you just want to look outward at interesting things, conversationally, so that you get to know each other. You want to know simple facts about the person so that you have context, such as where she is originally from, how many siblings he has, what he studied in school, what she’s reading now.
But obviously it’s not good to invest a lot of time with someone who expects to jump in bed! But… people can change their shallow ideas simply because it’s worth it to them to get to know this new person with such novel attitudes! So it does need to be known. Perhaps we need to bring back wearing a crucifix around the neck so that at least the other person has an early distant warning. What are your thoughts about this?
A reader asked in the comments to my previous post on the movie:
Leila, are there any print or online resources you’d recommend for parents or dating-age young people? Meeting my husband was pure serendipity. I think a lot about how we’re going to help our sons navigate that problem… and haven’t any good answers yet.
To answer, I will say that parents simply must realize that preparation for dating (that is to say, for the process by which one finds a spouse) is primarily remote — it starts very early on in life. We all understand very well that you don’t get a lovely ripe tomato from your garden a few days before you want one. We understand the importance of loosening the soil, preparing it with compost, leaving it fallow at the right times, letting even the frost do its work on its structure, carefully planting the seed at the right depth in the spring, and on and on.
The same is true in the family! If you do that hard work all along, you will find that when the time comes for your children to go out and date, your wisdom won’t fall on inhospitable ground.
Here are some links for you on the remote preparation part of things:
How families help their older children socialize with each other.Your friends and your community are your best chance to keep your children on the right path.
The moral development of the child. (This is the last of the series — they are all linked here.) Our young adults need courage and all the virtues, which are habits. How do you get these habits? It takes a lifetime, and people who love you.
Sex education and your child.Do not turn these important matters over to others. The real experts are the child’s parents!
Solidarity and standards.Your friends are your allies, if you choose them well.
Trust in your own marriage, your child’s best “curriculum.” Marriage is God’s plan for raising moral beings in union with Him — and also for sheltering those who are in need. Marriage has its own grace!
And make friends with others — form a community over the years that will serve your children well.
Most importantly, pray together. I wrote a book to show you how… start by praying the Rosary together as a family!
Did you see the movie? What did you think? I’m sure other readers would love to know!
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