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SOME NOTES ON ARRANGED MARRIAGES

(The New Bible Dictionary, p. 415)

In most cases the choice of a mate and subsequent arrangements for marriage were made by the parents of the partners concerned. . . .
(p. 788)

Usually the parents of a young man chose his wife and arranged for the marriage, as Hagar did for Ishmael (Gn. xxi.21) (See also Gn. xxiv)

(Whom Shall I Marry?, Dorothy Voshell, pp.12-17.)

Did you know that dating is unique to our society? Only within the last century have fellows and girls had complete freedom to come and go with each other with scarcely any restrictions as to where they go, how long they stay, or whether they are alone without other couples --let alone chaperones required in other eras. Most, if not all, foreign societies realize the significance of marriage; parents select mates for their children with certain criteria in mind to make the marriage successful. The same thing was true in Bible times.

What is the purpose of dating? Something to pass an evening? Or to reassure ourselves that we are popular? Or something young people do because of peer pressure -- very young people, I mean? Is it possible to date without any effects upon us or our date?

God commands in II Corinthians 6:14,15: "Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?"

Ezra, an Old Testament priest, held God's people responsible for mingling the seed of believers and unbelievers. It was not a private matter. The congregation of Israel was affected in a vital, fundamental way. Each member was joined to the other members of Israel by the ties of God's grace, and what one member did affected that whole body of the congregation.

Surely God makes it abundantly plain that your marriage, whether to a believer or an unbeliever, is not purely a private matter. God Himself, the Church, your parents, your children, even your nation are affected.

Our society is infused with the idea of complete individualism which isolates and insulates us from each other. We are told to look inward to find ourselves, whatever that may mean. In our preoccupation with ourselves we grow less and less concerned with others. When we Christians date, for example, our desires and the love of ourselves often are given priority over love for God and responsibility to Him and to the Church -- and to the one we date. God and the church take a second place to our egos. The problem is, of course, lack of genuine, fervent love for God based on knowledge of Him and His law.

(Jay Adams, Christian Living in the Home, pp. 63ff.)

The Myth of Compatibility
Compatibility is a dangerous word. It does not occur in Scripture, and the concept -- as normally set forth in contemporary writing and as used in popular parlance -- is quite misleading and unScriptural. The common concept of compatibility, when followed by Christians and non-Christians alike, can lead to disastrous consequences.

What is meant by compatibility? Ordinarily when one uses the word in modern speech he means that two persons have personalities, interests, or backgrounds that are compatible and that, therefore, they would be more likely to make a good marriage than if these elements in each were diverse. There is no evidence in Scripture that this is true. To think that because socio-economic levels are similar or because both persons like tennis or because both fathers wear gray flannel suits to work, these factors will give a young couple the edge in marriage is an idea without Biblical foundation. The entire concept of compatibility must be reexamined Biblically.

The Biblical fact is that no two persons are compatible, regardless of whether their backgrounds were similar or not. We are all born sinners, and that means that we are by nature incompatible people. For two people to be compatible in any true sense of the term means that they first must become Christians and then work (by God's grace) hard at the task of becoming compatible. People are not born compatible, they only become compatible by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

How, then, may one know how to choose a mate? There are only two absolutely essential requirements: first, that the other person is also a Christian; second, that the two of you not only desire to but growingly give evidence of an ability to face, talk over, and solve problems together from God's Word in God's way. The one factor -- beyond salvation -- that is truly essential is the ability to solve problems Biblically. With the capability, persons with quite diverse backgrounds find it possible to enrich their own lives profoundly.

KC, 1997, on "he is by no means a Christian": Ha! That's a laugher! If I had predicted in 1980 that one of Prof. Quigley's drug-smuggling students at Georgetown would have been elected President . . . well, except for the "Georgetown" bit, it fits just about all members of the Clinton Adminstration.  In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton called Prof. Quigley "my mentor." Quigley confirms the conspiracy of an Anglo-American elite to govern the socio-political and corporate lives of all men and nations. While not the "architect" of the "New World Order," Quigley has documented it most thoroughly. Some people (like Terry Boyle) would say that Quigley is in fact a Christian. I meant to say he is not a Puritan. He is a Roman Catholic. It is both ironic and illuminating that I would turn to a member-authority of the "New World Order" to support "arranged marriages." But the "New World Order" is essentially a "conservative" movement which exploits easily-manipulated "leftist" movements simply to buttress its own power (which it views as essential to conserve vital principles of social order).

(Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pp. 1254ff.)

In Marriage, as in so many other things, Western Civilization has been subjected to quite antithetical theories; these we might call the Western and the Romantic theories of love and marriage. The Romantic theory of these things was that each man or woman had a unique personality consisting of inborn traits, accumulated by inheritance from a unique combination of ancestors. This is, of course, the same theory that was used to justify permissive education. In Romantic love, however, the theory went on to assume simply as a matter of faith, that for each man or woman there existed in a world a person of the opposite sex whose personality traits would just fit into those of his or her destined mate. The only problem was to find that mate. It was assumed that this would be done, at first sight, when an almost instantaneous flash of recognition would reveal to both that they had found the one possible life's partner.

The idea of love at first sight as a flash of recognition was closely related to the Manichaean and Puritan religious idea that God's truth come to men in a similar flash of illumination (an idea that goes back, like so many of these ideas, to Plato's theory of knowledge as reminiscence). In its most extreme form, this Romantic theory of love assumed that each of the destined lovers was only part of a person, the two parts fitting together instantly on meeting into a single personality. Associated with this were a number of other ideas, including the idea that marriages were "made in heaven," that such a Romantic marriage was totally satisfying to the partners, and that such a marriage should be "eternal."

These ideas of Romantic love and marriage were much more acceptable to women than to men (for reasons we have not time to analyze) and were embraced by the middle class, but not, to any great extent, by other classes. The theory, like so much of the middle-class outlook, originated among the medieval heresies, such as Manichaeism . . . and was thus from the same tradition that saw the rise of the bourgeois outlook in he Middle Ages and its reinforcement by the closely associated Puritan movement of modern times. The Romantic theory of love was spread through the middle class by incidental factors, such as that the bourgeoisie were the only social class that read much, and Romantic love was basically a literary convention in its propagation whatever it may have been in its origins. It made no real impression on the other social classes in European society, such as the peasants, the nobility, or the urban working craftsmen.

Strangely enough, Romantic love, accepted as a theory and ideal by the bourgeoisie, had little influence on middle-class marriages in practice, since these were usually based on middle-class values of economic security and material status rather than on love. More accurately, middle-class marriages were based on these material considerations in fact, while everyone concerned pretended that they were based on Romantic love. Any subsequent recognition of this clash between fact and theory often gave a severe jolt and has sometimes been a subject for literary examination, as in the first volume of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga.

Opposed to this Romantic theory of love and marriage, and almost equally opposed to the bourgeois practice of "sensible" marriage, was what we may call the Western idea of love and marriage. This assumes that personalities are dynamic and flexible things formed largely by experiences in the past. Love and marriage between such personalities are, like everything in the Western outlook, diverse, imperfect, adjustable, creative, cooperative, and changeable. The Western idea assumes that a couple come together for many reasons (sex, loneliness, common interests, similar background, economic and social cooperation, reciprocal admiration of character traits, and other reasons). It further assumes that their whole relationship will be a slow process of getting to know each other an of mutual adjustment -- a process that may never end. The need for constant adjustment shows the Western recognition that nothing, even love, is final or perfect. This is also shown by recognition that love and marriage are never total and all-absorbing, that each partner remains an independent personality with the right to an independent life. (This is found throughout the Western tradition and goes back to the Christian belief that each person is a separate soul with its own, ultimately separate, fate.)

(p. 1256) Thus there appeared in Western society at least three kinds of marriage, which we may call Romantic, bourgeois, and Western. Romantic marriage, based on the "shock of recognition," has in fact come to be based very largely on sexual attraction, since this is the chief form that love at first sight can take. Such marriages often fail, since even sex requires practice and mutual adjustment and is too momentary a human relationship to sustain a permanent union unless many other common interests accumulate around it. Even when this occurs and the marriage becomes a success, in the sense that it persists, it is never total, and the Romantic delusion that marriage should be totally absorbing of the time, attention, and energies of its partners, still expected by many women brought up on the Romantic idea, merely means that the marriage becomes an enslaving relationship to the husbands and a source of disappointment and frustration to the wives.

Middle-class marriage, in fact, was not romantic, for, in the middle class, marriage, like everything else, was subject to the middle-class system of values. Within that value system, middle-class persons chose a marriage partner who would assist in achieving middle-class goals of status and achievement. A woman, with her parents' approval, chose a husband who showed promise of being a good provider and a steady, reliable, social achiever, who would be able to give her a material status at least as high as that provided by her own parents. A man chose as a wife one who showed promise of being a help in his upward struggle, one able to act as hostess to his aspirant activities and to provide the domestic decorum and social graces expected of a successful business or professional man.

Such a marriage was based, from both sides, on status factors rather than personal factors. The fact that a man was a Yale graduate, was trained for a profession, had a position with a good firm, drove an expensive car, could order dinner with assurance in an expensive restaurant, and had already applied for membership in a golf or country club were not reasons for loving him as a person, since they were simply the accessories of his status. Yet middle-class persons married for reasons such as these and, at the same time, convinced themselves and their friends that they were marrying for Romantic love (based on the fact that they were, in addition to their mutual acceptability, sexually attracted).

For a time the new marriage could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations ago, but today the question is posed by every women's magazine, "Is your marriage a success?" But unconsciously, long before this, realization had been growing hat the marriage relationship was not based on love, which must be a recognition of personal qualities, not of status accessories. [See the note above --K.C.] Without personal feeling based on such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners, with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class minds, still insisted that it was based on love. The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and "fulfillment," will be examined in a moment.

Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally.

The decrease in the number of children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930's. Enterprising editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's magazines (like the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women's clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved, well-scrubbed children. By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women's magazines. her increasing leisure gave her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard as due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to greater effort in pursuit of money. [See Amos 3:15-4:1]

While this was going on, the outside world was also changing. Women became "emancipated" as a consequence of World War I, with considerable urging onward from the women's magazines. Shorter skirts and shorter hair became symbols of this process, but even more significant was the appearance in the outside world of a great increase in the number of jobs that could be done best, or only, by women. As part of this process, there took place considerable changes in bourgeois morality, the ending of chaperonage, greater freedom between the sexes, and the acceptance of divorce as morally possible in bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the stage and cinema).

As part of this whole process, there occurred a dramatic event of great social significance. This was the reversal in longevity expectations of men and women in adult life. A century ago (to be sure, in a largely rural context), a twenty-year-old man could expect to live longer than a twenty-year-old wife. In fact, such a man might well bury two or tree wives, usually from the mortality associated with childbirth or other female problems. Today, a twenty-year-old man has little expectation of living as long as a twenty-year-old woman. To make matters worse, a twenty-year-old woman a century ago married a man considerably older than herself, at least in the middle classes, simply because future preference required that a man be established economically before he began to raise a family.

Today, from a series of causes, such as the extension of the female expectation of life faster than the male expectation, the increased practice of birth control, coeducation (which brings the sexes into contact at the same age), weakening of future preference and of the middle-class outlook generally, which leads to marriages by couples of about the same age, husbands now generally die before their wives. Recognition of this, the increased independence of women, adaptation to taxes and other legal nuisances, has given rise to joint financial accounts, to property being put in the wife's name, and to greatly increased insurance benefits for wives. Gradually the wealth of the country became female-owned, even if still largely male-controlled.

But this had subtle results; it made women more independent and more outspoken. Bourgeois men gradually came to live under a regime of persistent nagging to become "better providers." To many men, work became a refuge and a relief from domestic revelations of the inadequacy of their performance as economic achievers. This growth of overwork, of constant tension, of frustration of emotional life and of leisure began to make more and more men increasingly willing to accept death as the only method of achieving rest. Bourgeois men literally began to kill themselves, by unconscious psychic suicide, from overwork, neurotic over-indulgence in alcohol, smoking, work, and violent leisure, and the middle class slowly increased its proportion of materially endowed widows.

One notable change in this whole process was a shift, over the past century, from the male-dominated family to a female-dominated family. The locality in which the young couple set up their home had an increasing tendency to be matrilocal rather than patrilocal. In increasing numbers of cases, where the young couple married before the groom's educational process was finished, they even lived with her family (but very rarely with his family).

Closely related to this confusion, or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was decreasing sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As recently as the 1920's girl babies were reared differently from boys. They were dressed differently, treated differently, permitted to do different things, and admonished about different dangers. By 1960, children, regardless of sex, were all being brought up the same. Indeed, with short cropped hair and playsuits on both, it became impossible to be sure which was which. This led to a decrease in the personality differences of men and women, with males becoming more submissive and females more aggressive. (But remember, this submission is often compensated for by aggression in other realms)

This tendency was accelerated by new techniques of education, especially in the first twelve years of life. The neurological maturation of girls was faster than that of boys, especially in regard to coordination, such as in feeding oneself, talking, dressing oneself, toilet-training, learning to read, and general adjustment to school. The shift from home to school in the early grades was adjusted to by girls more easily than by boys, partly because girls were more self-assured and gregarious. By the age of ten or twelve, girls were developed physically, neurologically, emotionally, and socially about two years in advance of boys. All this tended to make boys less self-assured, indecisive, weak, and dependent. The steady increase in the percentage of women teachers in the lower grades worked in the same direction, since women teachers favored girls and praised those attitudes and techniques that were more natural to girls. New methods, such as the whole-word method of teaching reading or the use of true-and-false or multiple-choice examinations, were also better adapted to female than to masculine talents. Less and less emphasis was placed on critical judgment while more and more was placed on intuitive or subjective decisions. In this environment girls did better, and boys felt inferior or decided that school was a place for girls and not for boys. The growing aggressiveness of girls pushed those hesitant boys aside and intensified the problem. As consequences of this, boys had twice as many "nonreaders" as girls, several times more stutterers, and many times as many teen-age bedwetters.

While the outside world was decreasing its differential treatment of children on a sexual basis by treating boys and girls more and more alike (and that treatment was better adapted to girls than to boys) within the middle-class home, the growing emotional frustrations of the mother were leading to an increasing distinction on a sexual basis in her emotional treatment of her children.

[B]y the age of six or eight, a daughter has become "Daddy's girl," awaiting his return from work to communicate the news of the day, getting his slippers and newspaper, and hoping that he will read her a story or share her viewing of a favorite television program before she must go to bed. By the age of twelve, in a normal girl, this interest in male creatures has begun to shift to some boy in her class at school. With a boy baby the transference is later and less gradual.

Because the middle-class marriage is based on social rather than personal attraction, the emotional relation of the wife to her husband is insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his work, hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and unsatisfactory it becomes for his wife. Part of the wife's unused emotional energy begins to be expended in her lover for her son. At the same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother's relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded as an emotional rival for the husband's affection.

As a consequence of this situation, the frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by keeping him dependent and immature as long as possible and to seek to hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her out of the family circle as soon as possible. The chief consequence of this is the increasingly late maturity, the weakness, the undersexuality, and dependence of American boys and American men of middle-class origins and the increasingly early maturing, aggressiveness, oversexuality, and independence of American middle-class girls. The mother's alienation of the daughter may begin in childhood or even at birth (especially if the girl baby is beautiful, is not nursed by the mother, and is welcomed with excessive joy by the husband). It usually becomes acute when the daughter reaches puberty and may become very acute if the mother, about the same time, is approaching her menopause (which she often mistakenly feels will reduce her attraction as a women to her husband.)

During this whole period, the mother's rejection of her daughter appears chiefly in her efforts to force her to grow up rapidly, and leads to premature exposure of the daughter to such modern monstrosities as preteen "mixed parties," training bras, access to overly "sophisticated" movies, books, and conversations, and the practice of leaving daughters unchaperoned in the house with boy classmates, on the early high school or even junior high school level. And whether she leaves or not, sexual and emotional maturity comes to the American middle-class girl earlier and earlier, not only in comparison with the middle-class boy but even in absolute terms.

Today sexual awareness comes very early for all, perhaps around the age of ten. Emotional readiness to fact the fact of one's own sexuality comes earlier and earlier for the girl today, but later and later for the boy. . . . And the date for the ending of education and seeking economic independence from parents gets somewhat later for girls but immensely later for men (a process that becomes increasingly extravagant). The lengthening of the interval of time between sexual awareness and the ending of education, from about two years in the 1880's to at least ten or twelve years in the 1960's has set up such tensions and strains in the bourgeois American family that they threaten to destroy the family and are already in the process of destroying much of the middle-class outlook that was once so distinctive of the American way of life.

From this has emerged an almost total breakdown of communication between teen-agers and their parents' generation. Generally the adolescents do not tell their parents their most acute problems; they do not appeal to parents or adults but to each other for help in facing such problems (except where emotionally starved girls appeal to men teachers); and, when any effort is made to talk across the gap between the generations, words may pass but communication does not. Behind this protective barrier a new teen-age culture has grown up. Its chief characteristic is rejection of parental values and of middle-class culture. In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scanty clothing, its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time. Teen-age solidarity and sociality and especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends, to drink "cokes," talk interminably in the midst of throbbing music, preferably in semi-darkness, with couples drifting off for sex play in the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete emancipation from time. A myriad of symbolic acts, over the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the solidarity of teen culture and its rejection of middle-class values. Many of these involve dress and "dating customs," both major issues in the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.

"Dating," as part of adolescent rebellion, became less and less formalized. The formal middle-class dance of a generation ago, arranged weeks ahead and with a dance program, became almost obsolete. Everything has to be totally "casual" or today's youth rejects it. By 1947 a dance program (listing the dances in numbered order with the girl's partner for each written down) was obsolete. "Going steady," which meant dancing only with the boy who invited her, became established, a complete rejection of the middle-class dance whose purpose was to provide the girl with the maximum number of different partners in order to widen her acquaintance with matrimonial possibilities.

"Going steady," like much of adolescent culture of the "jive" era, was derived from the gangster circles of south Chicago and was first introduced to middle-class knowledge through George Raft movies of the 1930's. It was satirized in a now-forgotten popular song of the 1920's called "I Want to Dance with the Guy What Brung Me." But by 1947 it was the way of life of much of adolescent America. As a consequence, teen-age couples at high school dances "sat out" most of the evening in bored silence or chatted in a desultory fashion with friends of the same sex.

"[G]oing steady" was only a brief, if drastic, challenge to parental attitudes, and was soon replaced by. . .social solidarity (sometimes sexual promiscuity within a small group, usually of ten or less. This became, to their adults, the "teen-age gang," which still thrives, but never in a very formal way in middle-class circles as it does in lower-class ones. Two casualties of this process are sexual jealousy and sexual privacy, both of which have largely disappeared among many upper-middle-class young people. In some groups sex has become a purely physiological act, somewhat like eating or sleeping. In others, sexual experience is restricted to loved ones, but since these youths love many persons (or even love everyone) this is much less of a restriction than it might seem to a middle-class mind. Generally a sharp distinction is made between "loving someone" (which justifies sex) and being "in love" with someone (which justifies monogamous behavior).

Because of the breakdown of communication between the generations of middle-class families, parents know little of this side of teen-age culture, at least so far as their own children are concerned. They usually know much more about the behavior of their friends' children, because they are more likely to catch glimpses of the behavior of the latter in unguarded moments. On the whole, middle-class parents today are surprisingly (and secretly) tolerant about the behavior of their daughters so long as they do not create a public scandal by "getting into trouble." [E]ven in religious circles, the behavior of the young is not at all what their adults expect or believe. For example, the number of Roman Catholic young people who have premarital, or even casual, sexual experiences is much larger than the number who are willing to eat meat on Friday. [Quigley's book was written in 1966]

Some Recent Additions (1998)

Hodge, Systematic Theology, III:350

Fathers under the old economy had the right to choose wives for their sons and to give their daughters in marriage. (Gen. 24; Exod 21:9; Judges 14;2; Gen 29:18; 34:12)

The "rights" language is dangerous. There is a subtle rationalism here which questions the moral legitimacy of any father's exercise of this "right."

Your comments greatly appreciated. Write me at Kevin4VFT@aol.com

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