from Alan Jacob’s Breaking Bread With The Dead
I vividly remember the first time I heard a parent say that she thought she and her husband should choose a mate for their daughter. (The moment is memorable largely because that first time has, so far, been the only time.) My initial thought was You’re completely insane. That was also my second and third thought, but reflecting on the encounter later I finally had a different thought, which was How do I know you’re completely insane? And that question led me down a curious path of thought.
The woman’s core argument was this: Young people are both hormone-afflicted and inexperienced, and that’s a combination of traits poorly suited to spouse selection. Better to allow their more knowledgeable and less emotionally invested parents to sift through the options and come up with the best fit for long-term satisfaction. Which (I thought) might be at least a defensible idea if those parents are as levelheaded as all that. But what if they happen to have priorities other than the happiness of their children? Or their idea of happiness is irreconcilably different from the children’s self-understanding? Or if they choose someone whom their child finds thoroughly unattractive?
As it turned out, the woman had anticipated all of these objections. She freely acknowledged that marriages made by parents could go wrong, and in exactly the ways that had leaped to my mind. But the question, she said, was not whether her model is perfect; it was whether her model was better than the one our society currently employs. Look at the state of marriage in this country, she said. Look at how many marriages fail. Look at how many young people, who see how many marriages fail, choose not to marry at all. It’s time to try something different. She even thought that, if we could clear away some of the widely distributed propaganda about Romantic Love, young people might come to embrace the idea, to appreciate being relieved of the burden of making a choice they don’t know how to make well.
I’m sure all of us have at some time had the experience I had then: being overwhelmed by having to confront an idea we had never considered—being at a loss, argumentatively, not because the person arguing with us is necessarily correct, but because that person has reflected on something we’ve never reflected on. Until that woman suggested her plan to me, I had never considered that there could be a serious alternative to our current model: two individuals choosing to marry each other on the basis of . . . well, whatever they thought was most important, I guess. On even two minutes’ reflection the whole system suddenly seemed ramshackle, maybe even untenable. Why had its shortcomings never occurred to me before?