When Gil passes along an article, I read it. Even if it’s 17 pages long and on a topic I feel like I’ve covered a hundred times before.

As usual – I was incredibly glad I did.

Amy Kass’s A Case for Courtship is some heavy stuff. Fascinating, but heavy.

Overall, it’s a case for marriage and, more specifically getting to that marriage via a more traditional process of dating. Yes, that means she advocates for not having sex before marriage or living together before marriage – the typical stuff you’d expect from an article that started as the keynote address to the American Values Institute’s Annual Symposium.

But the reason I really liked this article was because it does make an interesting case for the psychological why behind things like following a slower more traditional courting process, waiting to have sex, and even choosing not to live together before marriage. Kass sways a little far to the moral argument in sections of the piece, but also presents things from a place of both logic and also the realities of the interplay between men and women. A sort of – listen, this is how the genders are and understand love and therefore this is what helps form a lasting bond.

I’m not saying I fully agree. And I’m not saying I think this is the only way to a lasting, loving union. But it’s an interesting read.

More evaluation tomorrow. You have 24 hours to read it.