A Joke Comes Into Reality - The Prearranged Marriage
Posted by Shannon on June 29, 2007
Sometimes I will kid my friends that I’m a supporter of pre-arranged marriages. The joke typically is grounded in my lack of dating skills and my inability to find someone who will stick with the big guy for more than a month.
The joke often has some justifications for this belief, primarily rooted around the thought of a pre-arranged marriage just seems easier than the dating chase. It’s not something I would feel comfortable with, honestly, but something I joke about nonetheless after another poor dating choice or streak of duds.
You can imagine my surprise then when I found this article where the author writes how pre-arranged marriages are “coming back into style.” These marriages are not the typical ones where there is some money or property traded in exchange for the rights to marry ones daughter. Instead, potential mates are allowing their parents or someone else do the searching for them.
Marian Salzman, author of Next: Trends for the Near Future explains it this way:
“This is about picking a marriage partner — not about falling into bed for a world-class romance. There is a newfound interest in letting someone else solve the love dilemma,” she explained. “We’re on option overload, and we’re maxed out in terms of time, and we’d all love a partner. So it makes sense to enlist those who know us best to forge a proper and satisfying match.”
According to the article, the parents meet the potential partner in some controlled envrionments and then if there is an interest the other partner, I would presume, comes into the equation.
This sounds like a super-hyper blind date.
I’m not sure how I would feel about my mom picking my future wife. The thought scares me a little bit. If my grandparents were doing the picking, well my luck may be a little better, but I’m still scared.
What if I let Chuck Woolery do it for me? We could bring the Love Connection back for that, right?
June 29, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Studies of prearranged marriages show that they had much higher success rates than our current ones. Seems that people understood their need for one another and the roles they needed to have to make life work. Overtime love had a chance to grow through friendship and bond.
I liken it to the Methodist Itineracy system. When a church and a pastor are brought together by someone else, there is a sense of discipline and submission that goes into that relationship. It can be really beneficial for both parties. Especially when one may seem “unattractive” to most suitors. In a free agency system of pastoral assignments, there is a courting period that is about showing off the best of who you are to each other and then trying to live with the arrangement when the reality is exposed to each other. I can see why the system exists.
That being said, I like being choosy, I have a hot wife, and I am still at my wonderful church because no one in authority has asked me to leave yet. So you know where my bread is buttered.