To Israel Wayne, marriage “was equivalent to the prospect of living as a missionary in some foreign land where you know you may end up a martyr,” he said. “You can accept it and believe it, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic about it.” Yet within two weeks of his mother suggesting a wife to him over lunch in Michigan, Mr. Wayne would engage himself to Brooke Tingom, an Arizona woman he had barely seen face to face. Their wedding took place about five months later, on Jan. 23, 1999. The Waynes have been happily married ever since and now have five children.
“In seeking to live every area of life fully trusting the Lord, we could not help but see that He desired us to trust him even in the area of marriage,” Mr. Wayne said. “We honor and respect our parents and their wisdom . . . . They’ve experienced more life than we have; they may have insights that are helpful to us.”
The process that the Waynes chose, called betrothal, requires a man and woman to make a binding commitment to marry before beginning any romantic — much less physical — relationship. Generally, the couple’s parents are responsible for arranging the match.
It hasn’t been that long since this sort of thing (sans the parental involvement) was the “proper” way.
My father and step-mother were married in 1942. Both pentecostal christians, my mother said, “I was taught that one does NOT kiss (other than a peck on the cheek) until one is engaged”.
I was flabbergasted, but it seems a similar situation.
Gloria
Sorry, ps: to the above..
They had been married 54 years when she passed..
Gloria
I confess to western romantic ideals and for the longest time looked on arranged marriages as strange. Then I found out an Indian gentleman with whom I work had not only been in an arranged marriage (he met his wife on their wedding day), but he arranged marriages for his daughters. Since he and I have become good friends, he allows me to discuss this subject in detail and I have come around. No, I won’t be arranging marriages for my kids, but I don’t find the practice strange anymore. I have since met quite a few people in arranged marriages and all of them quite happy.
[blockquote][i]TEVYE Golde, I’m asking you a question – Do you love me?
GOLDE You’re a fool!
TEVYE I know! But do you love me?
GOLDE Do I love you?
TEVYE Well?
GOLDE
For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned the house
Given you children, milked your cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?
TEVYE Golde, the first time I saw you Was on our wedding day
I was scared
GOLDE I was shy
TEVYE I was nervous
GOLDE So was I
TEVYE But my father and my mother said
We’d learn to love each other
So now I’m asking you, Golde
Do you love me?
GOLDE I’m your wife!
TEVYE I know! But do you love me?
GOLDE Do I love him?
TEVYE Well?
GOLDE
For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that’s not love, what is?
TEVYE Then you love me!
GOLDE I suppose I do
TEVYE And I suppose I love you, too
TEVYE & GOLDE
It doesn’t change a thing
But even so –
After twenty-five years
It’s nice to know [/i] [/blockquote]
What a lovely quote, #3!
I don’t really see, if marriages are arranged by parents who genuinely love their children and try to find suitable mates, and if the couple themselves are given the option to decline, why arranged marriages shouldn’t be as happy as any other. Perhaps more, because the troubling issues of religious and cultural differences don’t come up in arranged marriages.
I think Joshua Harris wrote a very popular book about this trend almost 10 years ago called, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He followed it up with a book called When Boy Meets Girl. Hardly a new trend here, but certainly one that is causing a bit of a backlash as another author quickly wrote a response to Harris with a book titled, I Gave Dating A Chance.
It seems this might be one of the front edges of the cultural wars inside the X-Y generations.
Arranged marriages are still common in the Hmong community here in St. Paul. They are notably successful marriages, from what I have seen.
I’ve joked with more than one parent about the desirability of arranging our respective kids’ marriages! 🙂
I remember my first encounter with the subject of arranged marriages–I was a graduate student at Keble College, Oxford in the early 1990s, and ran into a fellow student, an ethnic-Pakistani computer student from Canada, whose parents were somewhere in the process of arranging a marriage for him.
He was ecstatic.
It got me rethinking my Western-literature-created assumption that arranged marriage is inherently bad. If I were arranging a marriage for one of my children, I would certainly include compatibility, shared interests, and others of the criteria commonly used by those who marry with no acknowledged external “arrangement”. I would want my child to be happy, and I would expend great effort to ensure that the marriage I arranged would be suited toward that end. Wouldn’t you?
Now, I will admit that at roughly the same time my Pakistani/Canadian fellow-student living in the room beneath mine was looking forward to his impending arranged marriage, the Japanese/American fellow-student living in the room directly above mine was in tears because her Japanese-born mother was trying to sign her up for a Japanese husband-finding service. (My Japanese/American friend ended up, probably healthily, distancing herself from her mother, ultimately decamping to Australia with an Englishman she’d come to love during her Oxford studies.)
So: there can be good arranged marriages–and bad.
But it also occurs to me that there is another kind of arranged marriage, much more common in America than we admit–and that is the unacknowledgedly-arranged marriage. Parental (and other familial) approval goes a VERY LONG WAY in making many a relationship and marriage come about, and thrive. And, conversely, real disapproval can torpedo otherwise-promising romantic relationships. The difference between an arranged marriage and a supposedly-“unarranged” one is often, I suspect, merely a matter of degree.
One of my dear old friends for many years was Sara Przytyk. Never a large woman, when liberated from Auschwitz she weighed but 32 kg (71 lb). Two decades later she wrote an [url=http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-965.html]account of her survival[/url], discovered in a Jerusalem archive in 1980 and subsequently published in English.
Upon returning to Lublin, once home to 80,000 or more Jews, she encountered several men attempting to assemble the ten adult males necessary for prayers. There were not enough remaining alive to form a minyan in what had formerly been a great centre of Jewish culture and faith.
One of those men was an engineer named Andrzej and the two of them decided more or less on the spot that if their community in Lublin was ever to recover they had better marry and get about having a family. Amazingly enough, within a year their first son was born. Some two decades later, when she was a disillusioned member of the Politburo she organised the simultaneous defection of her entire family.
I met her as an older widow, worn but undaunted. She still missed her Andrzej, and talking about him one afternoon she took my hand and told me with great warmth and depth “It is so much more powerful to [i]learn[/i] to love than to fall in love. The way people do it these days is more like putting a hot kettle on a cold stove.”
The long passage I included above (#3) was from Fiddler on the Roof — this may be the best movie on marriage, family and community.
wm.
Arranged marriages are even more strongly at work than ever. Yente is called professional dating services. The pairing is done carefully, as parents would do such pairing if they really cared. And it may be that they are superior because the parents and the go-between have no personal interest or gain. Larry
Let’s not forget an important cousin of arranged marriage: the fix-up. The mutual friends that fixed up my wife and me, nearly a quarter century ago, are still among our dearest friends; we’re godparents to each others’ kids.