My husband and I courted, in a sense. We were hardly strangers to one another, having been best friends for a good, long time. We knew one another better than most lovers we'd had. So you might think there was little "getting to know you" involved there but...yeah, not so.
Courtship is rather like dating...only zero physicality before marriage. Sex is out, which has a significant impact on our "dates". In dating, typically, you're simultaneously trying to determine if you want the other person as your lover while trying to convince them that they do. Absent that...you're left pretty much with the "get to know you" stuff. So it's just a whole other animal.
For us that amounted to getting to know one another as potential mates. Spouses, specifically. And having never really considered one another in that light, certainly not any deep, serious consideration, that "get to know you" was just that. As friends and we knew one another very well. As spouses...wow, not at all.
Which, btw, I came to the conclusion that, no matter how well you know someone, unless you're married to them you simply don't know them well enough to know if you want to be married to them. In the end I decided the real question was whether and to what degree the other person (and yourself, really) are willing to commit. Everything pretty much hinges on that. Barring the obvious killing points, and assuming you're dealing with even a reasonably well adjusted person, that's really the factor you're dealing with.
So...no romance, no sex. Both, we figured, were wasted pre-marriage as well as, and probably more importantly, horrible distractions from the real question we were tackling. Did we, each of us, want the other as a spouse? 90% of our "dates" consisted of long, detailed, deep discussions about anything and everything related to marriage and our roles in it. Which shouldn't suggest we didn't have fun. We've always had fun together. And we did things together in the midst of all that just for fun. Just not really counting that as part of the courtship stuff, you understand.
But...though we didn't start out bothering with chaperones and such (didn't really need them, we figured)...we ended up volunteering a couple of good friends for that toward the end there. Interestingly, it turns out deciding the person you're courting will very probably be the person you marry...well, let's just say we started drafting chaperones after all. And stopped even visiting one another without friends along. Partly, of course, for appearance's sake and partly...well, for the other. Ahem. And don't let that suggest we acted like a couple of dumb teenagers or anything. We're just prone to take precautions when a potential difficulty presents itself.
All in all though, I may not be able to speak directly to this topic really. Ours was rather an unconventional courtship from beginning to end, on account of all kinds of factors. Most courtships, as I understand, the two involved don't know one another well, if at all. And they typically are much more structured, dealing with folks still under someone or other's else's roof and beholden to them.
Really, boiling it down, I think the main difference between dating and courting is this: when dating you're looking for a lover and when courting, a spouse. On that point alone it should be obvious courting is the superior method of finding someone to marry. Dating rather removes marriage from the picture altogether. At best it's something that may happen, possibly, at some point down the road long after you've fornicated for a few months at least. It's certainly not the goal and using it in that manner seems a little ridiculous.
Like using a hammer to drive a screw. I mean, you could. And it'd probably take a while. Require a few tries maybe but...why not just use a screwdriver? :liberals:
