I have every reason to despise this book. No matter what they say, this is the best time ever to be a white American woman. Universities are bristling with scholarships for me, dying to turn me into a leader of the free world because of the happy accident of my gender. Quota-fillers are swarming to my door begging for the grace of my employment with their firm. The glass ceiling lies shattered at the feet of the corporate stepladder I am compelled to climb. I haven't even a qualm about walking through the parking lot at night to the car that shuttles me through my father- and husband-free life. I am fearless, bold, working, studying, opinionated, and successful.

There is only one flaw in my spotless life, a bitty little blemish that I must strive to conceal lest it mar the Teflon exterior of my precarious postmodern existence. And this relentless book exposes it. I want to get married, I whisper to the world, and with that the mighty warship of liberated womanhood is dashed to pieces between the Scylla of patriarchy and the Charybdis of femininity. I stand convicted: a humiliation to women everywhere.

The handbook to my downfall is innocuously titled Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, edited by Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass. A volume in the new Ethics of Everyday Life series from Notre Dame Press, it is an "unapologetically pro-marriage anthology," as the dust jacket proclaims, intended to force well-trained feminists of both sexes to start asking the ickiest of questions: Why marry? What about sex? Is this love? How can I find and win the right one? Why a wedding? What can married life be like? (Conveniently enough, these are the subheadings of each section of the book.)

What's worse, this anthology is designed not only to provoke such questions—questions which are surely signs of embarrassing weakness of character and inveterate dependency in our world of Very Strong Humanoids—but also to send us looking for answers in decidedly un-contemporary sources of wisdom. Aristotle has his place (quite dully, even the editors admit) and so does the Hebrew Bible. Kant comments on shame, and Kierkegaard reflects on lasting love. And then more of the dead white males: Aquinas, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Austen (er, dead white female; close enough) all have their say, all defend love and marriage and procreation, and all presume to know more than my twentysomething self does, perched though it is on the shoulders of two Christian millennia. In my more despondent moments, I suspect they may be right.

It must be admitted that the many voices in this book do not speak univocally. Some recommend cultivated erotic attachments as the basis of a happy marriage, others the domestic bond, yet others disciplined agape love. Some, like Rousseau, speak by way of out-and-out prescription of the ideal romance; some, as in the story by Divakaruni (extraordinarily written in the second-person perspective!), show by way of negative example. One study defends marriage on purely pragmatic grounds; another analyzes gender roles in the courtship rituals of rural Spain with detached scientific attention to detail.

Nevertheless the cumulative effect is that making and maintaining a happy marriage is absolutely foundational to human flourishing, and the key to doing just that lies in the peculiar and non-interchangeable behaviors of men and women in accomplishing it. The editors leave no room for doubt from their choice of readings that the man is to be assertive and that the woman is to be modest. Each will do best in the role that nature and most cultures have allotted to him and her. To be a bit more specific about it, women will not do all that well if they encroach upon male roles and activities.

One is curious how exactly this advice might translate into a contemporary workplace where women and men work side by side. My own inclination to defensive skepticism rather wonders at Dr. Kass and Dr. Kass's skepticism towards women in these male worlds. Does academia count too?

At any rate, for all my sympathy to ward the aims of this book (however much I may be inclined to hide it), I admit to some mild confusion as to its method. Here is presented a collection of writings from authors of many stripes, philosophers and theologians and social scientists and critics and novelists. The overarching purpose is to offer a real life look at courting and marrying, from thinkers whose words have a firm fleshy grip on the hearts of their readers. This is a deliberate move on the part of the editors, not only because they have the series title to live up to, but because, in their own words:

Part of the current trouble lies in the fact that we come to life and love increasingly burdened by theory, not to say ideology. True, human experience is always mediated experience, colored by our imaginings and opinions. But today, more than ever before, we live in the grip of image and opinion makers, often shallow and thoughtless, who deliberately and massively interpose themselves between us and "real life."

So what we have—and by we I mean those of us who are of what was once called "marriageable age" and are driven to coupledom regardless of our personal interest in marriage—is a sticky web of competing ideologies in which we are thoroughly entangled. Every time we try to break free, we find ourselves more hopelessly stuck. Stuck in hollow news releases on the top five predicting factors for divorce; stuck in advice columns on the glossy pages of Cosmo; stuck in academic-jargon-wracked imprints on the relative cultural sources of our desire for home and children; stuck in primetime sitcoms that make romance look so effortless and ourselves look so clueless. Stuck, dead-ended, fed up, hopeless, stuck. So much for theory.

And so as one who has crossed the fence to the greener pastures where people admit to craving marital bliss, it grieves me to have to ask if this other wise lovely volume is not in fact perpetuating the disease it would like to vaccinate against. You see, right now things have apparently degenerated so far that "the way to the altar is uncharted territory. It's every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal." And yet is not this book quite the same thing: another potluck dish on the infinitely long smorgasbord that comprises American social life, a dish which some couples will adopt as they please and others will reject? Or worse yet, some individuals will adopt, and these contenders for the engagement ring will have to search for a mate within this small pool of applicants, for better or for worse? And how will they find each other? Will there be a wingtowing.com site where lonely hearts aching for the grand old ways of Western Civ can point and click until a suitable match is made?

I fear that, as I sit in the university library conspicuously perusing the pages of my copy of this book, some nice handsome Christian marriage-track young man will come along and our common philosophical commitments to holy matrimony will lead to a long and utterly disastrous courtship. We love marriage; we don't love each another. A bitter parting of the ways ensues, and once again, so much for theory.

Then again, perhaps I am only betraying my age and the cynicism of my culture. There's no other way for us Americans, really, than to keep offering alternatives until one of them finally sticks. Maybe we are all sick enough of being stuck in our current ruts that we're ready as a society for a great big courtship paradigm shift. This book may well be an essential catalyst. For entirely selfish reasons, I hope it works. In the meanwhile, I'll keep reading sonnets in my window sill by the light of the moon, dreaming about babies, sketching out wedding dresses, and hoping that nobody finds out. You never know. I might lose my scholarship.

Sarah E. Hinlicky is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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