I'm certainly no proponent of courtship, and I lived through its "peak" in conservative evangelical circles when I was a teenager (I was born in the early '80s). My first exposure was a book called
Of Knights and Fair Maidens by Jeff Myers
http://www.amazon.com/Knights-Fair-Maidens-Danielle-Myers/dp/193013309X (Amazon says the first edition is from 2009, but I read the book in 1996, so I have a hard time believing that!).
So first the good. The book really convinced me not to date in high school, and I didn't. I had a really awesome circle of friends that included boys and girls, and I like to think I had more fun than if I had been tied to someone who, chances are, would never have been my wife anyway.
Now the bad. Fortunately, by the time I got to college, although Joshua Harris was in high demand, the fact that we were all hours away from home made the type of Strict Courtship we're talking about here nearly impossible. However, the whole idea of "only date your mate" had so saturated my small Christian college that people were nearly terrified to be seen alone with someone, for fear that people would assume you were moments away from engagement.
However, in some rare extreme cases, I think the courtship mentality infected some to the point where they thought as long as the were Christian and opposite sex they should be able to just "will themselves to love each other" (Because real love is a choice and not an emotion). That blurred reality lead to some interesting pairings (and breakups).
