“What you mean we, white man?” India still has the practice. A workmate I know went back to India for Diwali and a friend’s wedding, and came back married himself! If you love and trust your parents, who’ve known you all your life, you’ll trust that they will make a good arrangement for you.
Your contrast between arrangement and consent is forced. The opposite of consent is coercion. The Church requiring public consent from both parties was no more than respect for the equal freedom of man and woman. See 1 Cor 7 and elsewhere in the NT.
You correctly question the goal of emotional happiness but the alternative measures of success that might be applied to polygamy seem to leave out the children. Even the new word leaves out the idea of mating (-gamy) in favor of a bogus greco-latin hybrid.
As every earthly goal apart from progeny is eventually snuffed out by death (paging Chas. Darwin), we must either discuss theology, or leave it all to the tribe (clan, trust fund, Gates Foundation etc.), which leaves the happiness of one human being rather ephemeral.
I don't actually think consent and arrangement marriage are mutually exclusive! The argument is that we (or, modern westerners) THINK they're opposites but their long coexistence shows that they're not. I don't think the West is ever going back to arranged marriage on any meaningful scale, but in a theoretical sense, I wouldn't be opposed if it did because that would change the nature of marriage toward a more work-mate concept.
> we don’t specifically do arranged marriage
“What you mean we, white man?” India still has the practice. A workmate I know went back to India for Diwali and a friend’s wedding, and came back married himself! If you love and trust your parents, who’ve known you all your life, you’ll trust that they will make a good arrangement for you.
Your contrast between arrangement and consent is forced. The opposite of consent is coercion. The Church requiring public consent from both parties was no more than respect for the equal freedom of man and woman. See 1 Cor 7 and elsewhere in the NT.
You correctly question the goal of emotional happiness but the alternative measures of success that might be applied to polygamy seem to leave out the children. Even the new word leaves out the idea of mating (-gamy) in favor of a bogus greco-latin hybrid.
As every earthly goal apart from progeny is eventually snuffed out by death (paging Chas. Darwin), we must either discuss theology, or leave it all to the tribe (clan, trust fund, Gates Foundation etc.), which leaves the happiness of one human being rather ephemeral.
I don't actually think consent and arrangement marriage are mutually exclusive! The argument is that we (or, modern westerners) THINK they're opposites but their long coexistence shows that they're not. I don't think the West is ever going back to arranged marriage on any meaningful scale, but in a theoretical sense, I wouldn't be opposed if it did because that would change the nature of marriage toward a more work-mate concept.