Here is an article I never figured I’d write. I’m a Caucasian American of Scottish and Irish Descent raised in New England by a Southern mother. I am a romantic and believe in “falling in love” even though my understanding of world history and my personal experience watching the pursuit of love unfold for many over nearly six decades has raised serious questions about which should be labeled the cart and which the horse.
But I am also a biblical scholar and am quite aware that marriage in biblical times was more, often than not, “Arranged-Marriage.” Isaac’s bride is brought to him from abroad by his father’s manservant. At the same time, “Love-Marriage” is also present in the pages of Scripture. Jacob’s pursuit of Rachel, for instance. Of course, he also gets conned into an “Arranged-Marriage” to his Favorite Love’s sister, Leah. Then he gets pressed into “Concubine-Marriage” with his warring wive’s female servants.[1] In all these matters, issues of doweries and bride-prices emerge to really freak out modern western readers. (Are they buying wives?!) Oh, and let’s not forget levirate marriage… marrying off a childless widow to the nearest male relative to keep her in the family and to provide an heir for her husband’s estate. (Egad!!! What was wrong with those people!!!) This, of course, was an important process for preserving her in life, and keeping his name alive through posthumous adoption. When you’re in the family, you’re in the family, we aren’t casting you to the street just because our son died.
The testimony of Scripture reveals a good deal of the blessings and troubles of all such processes, acknowledging their practice without siding this way or that on the “ought-to-be” in the mechanisms of establishing marriages.[2] But the Bible does have much to say about the importance of marriage in direct defiance of the animal inclinations of people toward wantonness. Case in point, Jacob’s daughter Dinah, who is pursued indecently by a rich man’s son. Everyone connected to them pays a dear price for that young man’s immoral passions in pursuing a wife. (Golly gee willikers! I wonder if there are any lessons for Americans in that? Surely not, cough cough.)
In addition to attending or teaching at eight different international universities and making friends with people from most of the countries of the world (Nobody from North Korea or Mongolia yet) I also spent two months a year for eight years traveling in India while building a Bible College in Pune. I have cultivated good friendships since 2008 with the faculty and staff even when home. I was privileged to witness a different romantic order of things (which is the cart and which the horse?) and have engaged with these brothers and sisters as they themselves have been pressed to rethink their own cultural processes in the wake of the globalization of markets. It is from them that I got the phrase “Love-Marriage.”
And it is that phrase—“Love-Marriage”—and the mono-cultural lens of most American Christians that provokes this discussion today. “Love-Marriage” is a misleading term for the way Westerners make marriages. In India, many would ask me if it is as wonderful as they imagine to live in a land where everyone is Christian (Oh, the naïveté) and where everyone gets to make “Love-Marriages.”
My response was not unlike my reactions to the common opening lines of explanation to children when these little darlings demand to know where babies come from. It usually goes something like, “Well, Dearest Child of My Heart, when a man and a woman love each other very much…” Indeed, I snark, given the increasing wantonness of our culture, “Hmmm… love… Yeah, that’s one reason people have sex and make babies.” So, “Love-Marriage”? Hmmm… love… Yeah, love is one reason Westerners get married.
I’ve had some Americans, discovering that I spent so much time in India, voice the same culturally opaque delusions about marriage there. Let me paraphrase the soul of the question: “How did you handle being in a place that dishonors marriage by making strangers marry each other?”
That is not only an inaccurate picture of the complexity involved in cultures that arrange marriages, but also rather presumptuous about the nature of marriage as God ordained it in the first place.
Biblical discussions of marriage do not focus on the emotional strength preceding the union. That is nice, but secondary. (Carts and horses and all that.) Scripture speaks of the essential nature of the union—commitment. As goes the marriage, so goes the family… as goes the family, so goes society.
Genesis 2:23-25: “Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
Viola! The first marriage, an arranged marriage… Not that Adam is not passionate for her (The Hebrew makes his excitement obvious), but nothing is said of her reaction to him. This moment of marriage, God bringing Adam his Eve, facilitating the forever connection, is codified by Moses as the paradigm of the ages for the establishment of human civilization through the marriage union and the creation of the nuclear family through procreation. God made Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve… and not Adam & Eve & Sally & Aiko & Fatima & Chiara & Amara. Just Adam & Eve and any other practice is a perversion of that pattern even if God later permits such things in the Scriptures out of care for vulnerable women in the messy world sin makes for mankind.
And this brings the point home, I hope. The difference between “Love-Marriage” and “Arranged-Marriage” is one of labeling carts and horses, not a wholly different character of relationship. Both work when rooted in commitment and love and both fail when human selfishness does the driving.
When I say, “Love is one of the reasons Westerners get married,” it is true. Westerners get married for all the same reasons other cultures get married.
The greatest difference between the competing mechanisms is the official family involvement in making the union. Parents and sometimes siblings are officially involved in the decision in “Arranged Marriage” and not officially involved in “Love-Marriage.” But family normally has a role in both situations. The key term here is “officially.” Because many in non-western cultures provoke arrangements through family because of love or infatuation, and many in western culture make practical personal unions because of perceived necessity or advantage. Western families often put pressure on relationships by introducing, voicing concerns, noting strengths, or giving strong approval or disapproval.
The biggest issue in the making of marriages is not the emotional strength starting out; it is the strength of commitment to do life together. Let me illustrate with two stories.
When I started my PhD, I had a full scholarship. That scholarship required that I work for the PhD office in close connection with the heads of all the PhD departments… a real benefit, believe me. The office manager was my first report. She was a Korean woman who took an instant dislike to me… and the feeling was mutual. I was miserable for the first couple weeks as we clashed over everything. I was just trying to do my job and she seemed to harass me endlessly over every little thing. No statement that I made went without attack. So, sitting at my desk one day, I realized something (It felt more like God slapped me upside the head). I was there for two years in that office unless I wanted to give back my scholarship. I could spend that time miserable and in constant conflict, or I could swallow my pride, and find a way to make it work. I went to her and sat in front of her, saying something like, “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. We have to work together for the next two years. Let’s be friends. Tell me how I need to change so that we can get along peaceably. We made mutually apologies and a solid commitment to be friends. It was a wonderful two years. She did indeed became a dear friend. She cried when my time of service was over and told me I was her favorite intern to date. It’s not how you begin but how you grow and how you end that matters most.
My Grandparents had a “Love-Marriage” but it didn’t begin in mutual love. My grandmother was in love with another man… her fiancé. One weekend he disappeared and came back on Monday married to his old girlfriend. My grandmother was heartbroken. She wanted to pay him back. She wanted to make him jealous. She knew that my grandfather was nuts about her. So she went to his home. Threw pebbles at his bedroom window and announced, “Gardner, come down. Let’s go get married.” He was a taciturn man, but as reported to me, he thought, “Hot Dog! Let’s go!” My grandmother’s best friend from childhood to her parting day, told me, “Your Grandmother didn’t marry for love. But she grew to love Gardner very deeply. She didn’t marry for love, but she honored her commitment to him to the bitter end.” I was there at that bitter end. My Grandmother, the iron lady (Margaret Thatcher had nothing on her), wept deeply as he passed.
It is great to feel passion as you marry. But it is more important that you cultivate it during marriage. It is great to feel passion, but if your bond is based on passion, it will break when passion wanes… and it will wax and wane and morph into something far more substantial if you let it. Love and marriage, do not go together like a horse and carriage… unless you are properly defining love, not as passion and strong feeling, but as strong commitment and a determination toward ‘til death do us part.
“I, [Name], take you, [Name], to be my lawfully wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”
Now that is a real “Love-Marriage” whether arranged through family or personal choice.
~Andrew D. Sargent
[1] This article is not about Polygyny (The marriage of one man to more than one woman) as was a common practice with specific rules of governing it. I consider that in other articles on my blog.
[2] There are laws governing the standing practices of the times, protecting women and preventing abuses, but these do not amount to a divine statement about the right and proper way to find a spouse.