WHY ONE MUST WOO

The Origin of Wooing.—The normal man must woo the woman who attracts him, because of an instinct planted deep in his nature, which had its origin far down in the scale of life. The modern civilized woman must woo, because this obligation has been laid upon her by man’s rearrangement of society, dating from the savage hour when he ended the era of woman-rule, the matriarchate, and took the leadership himself.

The first separate male appears at about the stage of the barnacle in the scale of animal life. The female barnacle, a shellfish attached permanently to a rock, pier, or the hull of a ship, gives birth to from two to seven little male consorts, or husbands, whom she keeps in little openings in her shell, like pockets. From among these pocket-husbands she picks out the one she pleases to mate with her; usually selecting the largest (for all are much smaller than herself), and, where sizes are equal, the one that she feels drawn to emotionally. From this emotion gradually emerges the esthetic sense, or sense of the beautiful. Thus the first male did not have to do any wooing: he was picked, like the apple that one day made Eden vanish away.

As we rise higher in the scale of animal life, say among the spiders and insects like the grotesquely horrible praying mantis, the male has to woo: and a bloody and savage mate he must go after! The female, still larger than her male, sits back and waits for the audacious mate to approach. He feels one impelling biological purpose: to mate with her, and make sure that offspring will come. Nature has implanted this overpowering instinct in him. In the female, are two appetites; a fainter desire to mate, and ordinary hunger. Her male must satisfy both, in his wooing. As he approaches her, the Theda Bara among insects grasps the male and eats, first his head, then a leg or two, and a part of his body. When the edge has been taken off her appetite, she rests. At this time what is left of the male completes the mating. When her hunger returns again, the female finishes her devouring of the male.

The male bee, who outflies the other males in the lofty nuptial flight of the queen bee, mates with her in thin high air far above the earth; and dies at the moment of mating, his husk of a body falling, like Lucifer out of heaven, to the earth far below. There are other cases where mating spells death for the male: but Nature is kinder in most matings, and the male survives. When we reach the birds and the mammals, the wooing is a gorgeous thing. For the male bird or beast, as a slow result of female selection based upon her esthetic or beauty-loving sense, has developed into a far more gorgeous creature than his mate. The bright glitter of the peacock, the gorgeous flame of the male tanager and cardinal bird, the glow of gay tropical bird males, the lion’s mane, the rooster’s comb and feather display, the stag’s branching antlers, the humble billygoat’s beard, the man’s beard, all have developed to stimulate the jaded eye of the female. The mating songs, from the bird carols to the whooping crane’s strange howls, with bill opened to the sky, neck stiff as a ramrod, and wings pumping out the weird noises, and from the tomcat’s caterwauling to the corner quartette’s strange agonies over “Sweet Adeline”—all have developed to stimulate the bored ear of the female. At mating time, the male is often a ridiculous sight, with his stiff formal dances and prancings before the female, even among the animals. He must woo: that is what he was made for. The female was not made primarily to woo: her task is to live, and to transmit life to the generations after her. The male, originally, was merely an incident in her life.

Thus the normal boy and young man came to the wooing period with a tremendous inward urge, that gives them no release until they have wooed and won. The female matures earlier in the human race; and girls pass through a year or two of excessive curiosity and interest in the male sex, when their boy friends of the same age are ordinarily entirely cold to all female charms. The hidden hour comes when boy alters to man. His voice changes and lowers, in that ridiculous kaleidoscope of sound that is humorously called “the goslings.” A tiny fuzz appears on male lips, cheeks, and chin: the young man is as proud of the first hair of his incipient mustache as if he were entitled to credit for it. His body alters, and the mating impulse sweeps over him. No matter how much he has scoffed at mere girls before, they suddenly fill the whole horizon. Just as the animals strut to attract attention, so boys and young men during this transition and shortly afterwards will do anything to gain the gaze of even a passing girl. They talk in loud tones on the street, they jostle a passing girl, they cut up absurd capers—all to gain the first look from a woman’s eyes. Then this bubbling simmers down, and they set out on the long chase of the female, which may occupy much of their lives thereafter.

If the boy or young man continues uninterested in girls, this is a bad sign. It may be bashfulness: we will take up that symptom and its cure later. It may indicate some inner twist, which makes him prefer his own company, or that of members of his own sex, to female company. This is, spiritually at least, a sort of perversion; it is a sterile attitude, contrary to the wide purposes of nature. In normal cases, he can no more avoid wooing than he can avoid feeling hungry and going after food. For that is what he is on earth for, from a physical point of view.

Reasons Against Wooing.—Lord Bacon, that prosy old cynic whom misguided persons have sought to identify as the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, says in his Essays: “A wife and children are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” There is the smoke of truth here, but it points to a fire very different from the one the sardonic old politician intended. Great enterprises gain much of their impetus, from the male’s desire to stand well in the female’s eyes. Another angle on the matter might be worded, that the energy which is implanted in man for wooing purposes may be deflected into enterprises, such as piratical and military careers, adventure trips and explorations. But more often than not, the spur that sends the man into building a house, or tilling a field, into slicing mountains apart to wed great oceans, discovering a pole or a hidden hinterland civilization, into achievement of any distinguished kind, is the desire to gain merit in the eyes of some specific woman, or of women in general. A great thinker has said that civilization is a sublimation, or expression in another form, of the primitive love desire. A man, because of his short height, or some physical diseases or disability, is rebuffed in youth by a woman: to provide against a repetition of the rebuff, he becomes a financial figure in Wall Street, or a conqueror of the world; or, at least, he tries to achieve this. Thus the spur of feminine approval is what goads the horse, man, to enterprises of virtue and mischief.

Of course, wooing does not necessarily involve marriage, or the man’s assumption of responsibility for the children. Many men remain closer to the primitive, and are satisfied to enjoy the woman, often at great cost to her, and thereafter to abandon her with what children she may have as a result of the union. Such men lose the finer fruits of mating, the long comradeship of a compatible woman that makes life a complete enjoyment, rather than a fragmentary one. The fact that a man has accepted a wife and children may tone down his spirit of adventure: from absurd masculine displays, “playing to the galleries” of mankind, his energy is altered to proper continuing courtship of his wife, and the making of a home for her and the children. To that extent Bacon is right: “great,” in the sense of flashy and foolhardy, enterprises “of virtue or mischief” are replaced by ordinary sensible human living. But there is no loss to the man, rather a gain.

Again, the fact of acquiring a wife and children, if the man is well mated, acts as his chief spur to steady achievement in whatever is his role in human life. The unmated man is a wild, reckless creature, taking any kind of absurd risk, sinking a year’s earnings in one night’s play at the gambling table, going on roaring drinking parties, regarding women as his prey rather than as possible companions. The well-mated man is a social unit, or a part of one, at least. The wanderlust is drained away in the humbler yet loftier task of building his own world toward his dreams, rather than skylarking over the world in the vain hope that somewhere he will find the world of his dreams already built for him.

There are dangers in mating, grave dangers: the divorce records of the country indicate many of them. The chief one is where the man, at an early age, contracts a marriage with a woman who is a fit mate for him then, but lacks the capacity for growth along with him. This applies in many cases where the man makes a success thereafter in any line. When he was a ten-dollar-a-week man, he married a ten-dollar-a-week woman; when he became a ten thousand dollar a year man, the woman remained a ten-dollar-a-week woman, and became a distinct and draining load upon his back, and a deterrent to his continued success and happiness. Boswell, Johnson’s biographer, may have had this type in mind when he wrote:

In “How to Love” (Little Blue Book No. 98), problems of this nature were taken up and discussed: the only remedy being, where a marriage becomes loveless, to terminate the marriage, for the benefit of the man, the woman, and the children concerned. From the woman’s standpoint, the chief danger in mating is that she will get a man lacking her sensitiveness, and unable to grow into an appreciation of it. She finds herself mated for life to a cruder, coarser, and incompatible male; and, when love dies, and cruelty and infidelity take its place, only the remedy indicated above will serve. There are all these dangers: but they call rather for a wiser courtship, than for an abolition of wooing and mating.

Lastly, a man or woman is incomplete without courtship and mating. Those who say that a man or woman can become a perfected, rounded human being without human love, are deceivers, spreading a mental poison. The man or woman who goes too long without the practice of love contracts a case of ingrowing love, as painful and morbid as an ingrowing toenail. All the immense love energy stagnates and fouls into a diseased nature, hateful, spiteful, gossipy, perverted and warped from real humanness. There can be no ultimate reason against mating. The task is to woo well and mate wisely.

Wooing by Women.—Today, contrary to the custom in the sub-human world and among the earliest savage men, woman must woo as well as man. The reason lies in man’s alteration of the standards of society. The female animal is not as competent as her mate in the hunt and the kill, and in coping with life. Men have rendered women incompetent by thousands of years of hothouse sheltering and by servile toil for many more. The woman today realizes,—we speak of the less intelligent woman now—that her task in life is to obtain a husband, as a permanent meal ticket, and as provider of home, clothing, and all the rest of the tremendous trifles of civilization. Such a mistaught girl goes after a man as a fisherman goes after a brook trout, and more frequently than is good for the man lands the poor fish, and has him hooked thoroughly thereafter. Such a woman has been taught that marriage should be based, not upon love, but upon a man’s ability to care financially for the woman. Life’s highest crown is a satisfying human love. This she has not aimed for, and this she does not get. When she aims low, she scores low: and, if the man is wise, he will dump her and leave her high and dry, when it is too late for her to go after the finer goal.

But even the wise woman today realizes that the whole social arrangement of mating between the sexes is overcast with absurd taboos and restrictions; and that, if she is to mate happily, she must regain part of woman’s lost privilege of choice. There is nothing “unladylike” in her doing the choosing, in her unostentatious wooing, and, if necessary, in her proposing marriage herself. We will take up woman as a wooer later.

What Wooing Consists Of.—From the standpoint of either sex, wooing superficially consists of only one thing: conquest of the woman or man pursued, the gaining of the ultimate favor, if the woman be pursued, with or without marriage, and the gaining of marriage, if the man is the pursued. If wooing is regarded in this light, it is possible that the pursuit is always limited, if not erroneous. For the matter of conquest is not the ultimate one in wooing and mating. The proper purpose of wooing is to choose and win the right mate.

The matter of choosing brings up the second and far more important element of wooing, which might be described as education in the opposite sex. Society today makes no adequate provision for practical laboratory education in the characteristics of the opposite sex: a wiser civilization will supply ample facilities for this indispensable part of human education. The man comes to adolescence without any knowledge of woman, beyond his slight information concerning his mother and his sisters, if he has any, and casual contacts with other girls and women. The girl comes to adolescence as ill-informed. Yet soon thereafter man and girl are called upon to enter, without preliminary training, the game or gamble of securing a life mate, who will lift them up or drag them down thereafter, in all of their efforts. Socially this is a crime. The only thing that can partially supply the lack of information, today, is the wooing period. For, after marriage, it is difficult to end the relationship; and, before marriage, if the parties learn they are ill-suited, intelligent men and women still have a dignified chance to break off the unwise mating before it solidifies into the chains of marriage. Keep in mind, then, that the wooing period is primarily a time for learning about the other sex, and its traits and eccentricities. The young man or woman in love should study the subject, from books and from living teachers, as amply as possible: and should observe other men and women, unmarried and married, with eyes as clear as he or she can make them. If the wooing is regarded as an education in love, and especially in the person wooed, its value will be doubled.