What we need to do is create new boundaries, devise better guideposts, and enforce new mores for our technological age

Whether one laments or praises courtship’s decline, it is clear that we have yet to locate a successful replacement for it – evidently it is not as simple as hustling the aging coquette out the door to make way for the vigorous debutante. On the contrary, our current courting practices – if they can be called that – yield an increasing number of those aging coquettes, as well as scores of unsettled bachelors. On college campuses, young men and women have long since ceased formally dating and instead participate in a “hooking up” culture that favors the sexually promiscuous and emotionally disinterested while punishing those intent on commitment. Adults hardly fare better: as the author of a report released in January by the Chicago Health and Social Life Survey told CNN, “on average, half your life is going to be in this single and dating state, and this is a big change from the 1950s.” Many men and women now spend the pling each other’s sexual wares and engaging in fits of serial out-of-wedlock domesticity, never finding a marriageable partner.

In the 1990s, books such as The Rules, which outlined a rigorous and often self-abnegating plan for modern dating, and observers such as Wendy Shalit, who called for greater modesty and the withholding of sexual favors by women, represented a well-intentioned, if doomed, attempt to revive the old courting boundaries. Cultural observers today, however, claim we are in the midst of a new social revolution that requires looking to the future for solutions, not the past. “We’re in a period of dramatic change in our mating practices,” Barbara Dafoe Whitehead told a reporter for U.S. […]