In August 2014, Thomas Umstattd, Jr. published his blog post, “Why Courtship is Fundamentally Flawed.” It sparked a firestorm, racking up more than 1,500 comments, provoking numerous rebuttals from other bloggers, and inspiring a Kickstarter campaign that led (just one year later) to a book entitled Courtship in Crisis: The Case for Traditional Dating.
I read Thomas’s original blog post with interest, which quickly turned to indignation. Why is this guy throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I thought. While I’ve certainly seen some imbalances in courtship as it has been practiced in the last twenty years, it seemed unfair to equate all the excesses and abuses and failings of modern courtship with the practice itself. So I disagreed with Thomas’s initial recommendations and thought they weren’t nuanced enough.
But months later, a request arrived from one of my own readers: would I review Courtship in Crisis if he provided a copy of the book?