"Courtship: A Journey Toward the Love that Moves the Stars"

I highly recommend reading the opening remarks from a colloquium held at the John Paul II Institute in 2009. My professor Dr. Margaret McCarthy offers some thought-provoking analysis of authentic courtship vs. today's general view of dating and relationships.

For example:

The first theme concerns what life is for, where it is going. Implicit in the idea of courtship is the (almost imperceptible) idea that human life has been placed on a path (an “Odyssey”) that is going somewhere. And that where it is going is something to be “stepped into.” There is nothing about it that is simply “made to order,” in the manner of improvised make-it-up-as-you-go tour (“walk-about”). Indeed neither the being on the path nor the nature of the destination are simply “choices.” Its terms are given, even if, then, consent will be asked, and even required!

And that requirement of consent indicates another factor, and that is that the “being put on the path” is not a forced march toward bondage, but a liberating journey—an adventure—toward an awaiting presence, love, a home (Ithaca).
In the absence of courtship we are not given an alternate path, but rather a kind of aimless wandering—a kind of vagabondage. If there was the idea of a “ladder” with courtship, there is now the idea of a “cyclical relationship system,” serial relationships, which may or may not lead anywhere (Barbara Dafoe Whitehead). This new generation has been called by David Brooks the “Odyssey Generation,” because there is now no longer an idea of growing up into an adulthood defined as getting a job, finding a mate, and having children. Significantly, it is an Odyssey Generation because it is on an adventure and on an adventure because it avoids bonds. For this generation, if there were an Ithaca, there could by definition be no odyssey, no adventure.

And:

Implied in the courtship idea is that the most fulfilling things (at the end of the path) are had through the taking of a risk.11 Happiness and joy are associated with engaging oneself whole and entire with the life of another (Another), and into the mystery of another who is beyond one‟s grasp. One looks forward to, and eventually consents to, a future which is “in the hands of another,” not a “life goal” achieved through the discipline of time-management skills.
On the contrary, in the post-courtship world it is almost impossible to think of such risk as anything but “unsafe.” One must in the very movement toward the other already prepare for separation. “The energies people should use in the common enterprise are exhausted in preparation for independence”12 with conditional attachments and “pre-nuptial arrangements.” And this, again, as Bloom suggests, is not a mere moral failure. It exists on account of the fact of separation assuming, that is, an anthropology of the whole and self-sufficient individual (of “social solitaries”) in which “one cannot risk interdependence. Imagination compels everyone to look forward to the day of separation in order to see how he will do.”13

Also:

If indeed there is this coincidence between “being in want of a wife” (or of a husband) and the desire for God, then we have much more than a moral problem on our hands. Absent a desire for the eternal—and the perception that it is the depth of the world, of this woman and of this man—there can be no love, only “relationships.”18

Read it all here.