Cross-Cultural Analysis of Prototypes of Courtship Processes: Turkey, the United States, Lithuania, and Spain

Abstract

This study provides an emic, ethnographic and cross-cultural view of courtship practices in the ‘modern’ world. There are limits to our ability to generalize our conclusions to posit a global process. As such this study is suggestive of a larger movement towards new forms of courtship that favor individual autonomy, the pursuit to satisfy personal desires, even at the expense of interpersonal interests. Ilouz and Finkleman (2009) referred to this shift as a move from a ‘premodern modal configurations’ to a ‘modern modal configuration’ of love and desire. Our findings support the theoretical and interview data of the above study and work by many other researchers (e.g., Giddens 2000; Ilouz 2018, 2012; Jankowiak 2008; Munck et al. 2016; Regnerus 2017). Consequently, we have confidence that the trajectory from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ courtship processes is a global process. Giddens observed that sex, as a result of contra-ceptives, has become ‘fully autonomous’ and become a kind of ‘art form’ (Gid-dens, 1981: 27). Regnerus (2017) builds on Giddens' work by showing how sex, love, and marriage have separated from each other, to the extent that sex is construed as an independent feature of the individual and therefore not part of a coupled, interdependent, construct such as love or family. Sex, as Regnerus writes, has become ‘the malleable property of the individual’ (Ibid.: 7). As our study supports these positions we have confidence that our findings, if extended across more cultures would not be substantially different, only more refined.