Going Steady

U.S. mating habits have undergone quite a change in the last generation, and the change is worrying leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Far from being charged with lack of seriousness and fickle habits, youth is now being reproved for being too serious and not fickle enough. Instead of using their adolescent years to meet as many of the opposite sex as possible, to learn their ways and appraise their worth, teen-agers are tending more and more to "go steady."

By definition, boys and girls who go steady dance together exclusively (cutting in is frowned upon), sip their sodas, absorb their double features and spin their platters in each other's company or not at all. Steady-going girls indicate their unavailability in various ways, ranging from the old-fashioned fraternity pins and class rings to certain arrangements of pigtails or bobby pins. Parents often encourage these relationships as stabilizing or "cute." But Catholic authorities view them as a danger to morals so serious that last month the principal of St. Anthony's parochial high school in Bristol, Conn, expelled four students for going steady, and the current issues of two Catholic magazines attack the custom.

Bad for the Soul. In the monthly Today, Jesuit Philip Mooney approves heartily of dating. In a country like the U.S., where individuals decide for themselves whom they will marry, he calls it "practically a necessary first step to an intelligent choice of a marriage partner later." But going steady, he finds, is bad for both the body and soul of those too young to contemplate marriage as imminent. "Teenagers going steady are enkindling mutual love in much the same way as courting couples do ... But the sacrament of union is not within their reach as the natural term of their desires. The resulting tension [puts] a heavy strain on the observance of God's law of chastity."

The spiritual danger of going steady is spelled out in some detail by Free-Lance Writer Roma Rudd Turkel in Information, a monthly publication of the Paulist Fathers. The church, she writes, "knows that it is impossible (not improbable but impossible) for a boy and a girl to be alone together in an intimate and exclusive companionship for any length of time without serious sin. And she has seen the tragic pattern shaping up Saturday night after Saturday night in parish churches across the country; these boys and girls start making bad confessions, then no confessions, followed by no sacraments, no Mass, finally no faith."

The practice of going steady has even "dipped into the grade schools to excite ten-and eleven-year-olds with its poison." If the situation continues, writes Author Turkel, the church may well pronounce going steady "a specific mortal sin [and] legislate on the matter as she has done on mixed marriages, and on other situations where the welfare of individual souls and family life is concerned."

Back to the 19th Century? The Congregationalist president of Amherst College, Charles Woolsey Cole, takes a more hopeful view of the phenomenon--at least at college level. In Harper's he writes: "Youth at present is almost completely monogamous in a thoroughly established fashion, and it is aggressively sure that its customs and ways are right."

He describes the effect of the new pattern on dances. They are shorter ("When you dance with only one partner, two hours or so is enough"), and a little somber "because neither the boys nor the girls feel under any special obligation to be gay or entertaining."

Young people get married much earlier today than ever, and "the ideal seems to be four or five children." Steadies in college, he says, definitely think of each other as potential partners. All this makes "the new monogamy" look like a return to "rural 19th century American mores ... In the 1880s or 1890s it was normal to have boys and girls pair off in a more or less stable fashion."

Educator Cole sees hazards in the situation--lack of experience may keep youngsters from choosing "a permanently compatible mate." But "it is conceivable too that the fiercely monogamous premarital folkways may carry over into married life and erect strong buttresses to the institutions of marriage and the family."

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