Functionalist Perspective on Dating, Courting, and Other...

Dating, courting, and other pre-marriage arrangements are practices that are influenced by the time period, social conditions and constructs, biology, cultural norms, and institutional structures that surround people. Dating has changed a lot in the past century. In the 1920s to 1940s, dating involved a more informal dating. For the first time there were no chaperones on dates between males and females. The dates required no formal commitment to each other and there was more freedom. Previously the community and church established the dating rules, but now peers institute the rules. Instead of the man coming to the womens house, They went out where it required money. It is said that there was a control issue surrounding the change†¦show more content†¦To understand dating, courting, and other pre-marriage arrangements we must look at a particular time and place to understand the ways in which a society works and therefore how the people in that society go about activities like dating. In modern America, dating has emerged as an activity that is not often regulated by adults as it once had been. There are many explanations for this change including the change in lifestyle that industry and technological advances have brought about. Sociologists point out that the idea of romantic love did not even exist prior to the industrial revolution. Marriage was an institution that allowed a man and woman to enhance their chances of survival and quality of life with one another. Romantic love as we now know it did not exist as a concept. After the industrial revolution when people did not depend on each other as much to survive, the idea of romantic love first appeared. After this time some feminists and sociologists point out that marriage and motherhood was used to subjugate women to men and to keep them out of the work force. Dating at a young age is characterized as fun and is done for companionship rather than as a serious activity for the purpose of fin ding a lifelong mate. Group dating is a way in which students have been able to move away from traditional, two-person dating which implies intimacy to them. Doing things in groups saves