Saying that the point of dating is marriage-screening seems like saying that the point of sex is reproduction. It may be true from an evolutionary perspective that the point of sex (dating) is reproduction (marriage-screening)1, but at least from a male POV, we rarely have sex (date) thinking hoo boy I’d really like some offspring (marriage) out of this.
So why do we (males) date? Um, because we feel like it. That’s the answer to why we do everything. And I don’t mean “because we feel like it” in the scoff-y teenage way but rather that we have certain mysterious feelings that guide every decision we make and every action we take. As soon as you take the next step to asking why we feel like it, you get into murky philosophical (horseshit) territory where writers like Alain de Botton do most of their damage:
Solitary though we may have become, we haven’t of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love that sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a lifelong and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.
So Alain’s answer is that we date to rid ourselves of the need of people in general. Sure, that’s one interesting theory, and it’s good because it feels mildly to moderately true, but I could probably name 18 other much less eloquent but equally as valid theories.
What makes the romantic game so challenging (and interesting) is that men and women generally have different goals or at least priorities. There are good evolutionary reasons for those differences, but it’s pretty unpleasant to deal with them as a man or as a woman.
It occurs to me that the female human is probably the single most romantically cautious animal on the planet.2 It is crucially important that she gets this decision right and incredibly scary to think that she might get it wrong. What the average male may consider maniacal stalking is actually a pretty common screening process that she does when evaluating someone who seems to have long-term potential. I don’t think the screening is to estimate compatibility as much as it is to assess whether you are likely to be(come) a creep. In other words, it’s not about finding a good thing as much as it is avoiding bad things. I’m generalizing, and I’m not completely sure about this, but that’s my guess from 26.5 years of limited experience.
And this screening process often takes place before they’ve even started dating. There seems to be a crucial pre-dating stage (or stages) that we don’t have and desperately need a word for. Dating often begins at such an advanced stage that it’s like trial marriage.
Oh yeah, there was a point to this, which is that dating is not (for most guys, most of the time) about screening for marriage. To come back to the dating vs. sex analogy, feeling like I’m interviewing wife candidates would be every bit as buzzkilling as feeling like I’m trying to create small humans inside this here uterus. It turns it into something much more scientific and rational than it needs to be.
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1I have serious doubts about that. There are lots of other species, and especially the primate variety, that have sex for reasons other than reproduction. Consider the bonobo. Reproduction is a logical, valid reason for sex just like marriage-screening is a logical, valid reason for dating, but there are plenty of other logical, valid reasons for both.
2A related observation is that women, because it’s typically understood that they are the choosier party, seem to have such confidence that they can get the guy that they sometimes have no concept of leagues.
