Novus America wrote:Fahran wrote:We have a lot of assumptions in the West about arranged marriage that don't necessarily pan out when we go to the Middle East, India, or China. Even the European medieval period tended to refute some of our notions about the function and viability of arranged marriages. First, marriage was decoupled from romantic love as we understand it. That's not to say that women were always happy with much older husbands or plain husbands or anything of the sort, but rather that the goal wasn't always some sort of deep passionate love. Your objective was to find someone you could live with in a reasonable degree of comfort and happiness - and often friendship or affection were aspects of such marriages, especially if the bride and groom were close in age and semi-decent to one another. And love matches weren't altogether uncommon either. We get numerous examples of great romances from the medieval period. Sibylla and Guy de Lusignan, Roger Guiscard and Judith d'Évreux, etc. There were, of course, a lot of social problems with arranged marriage, but, at least in Christian Europe prior to the Renaissance, women had to consent to a marriage at the altar, murdering one's spouse was not especially common or seen as laudatory, and people generally got on as happily as they could under the circumstances. Even today, arranged marriages have a surprisingly high rate of happiness and love - and, no, I'm not advocating that we go back to that.
By the Renaissance the French Kings had an official mistress in addition to their wife.
We know the royal marriages of the Renaissance resulted in widely accepted infidelity.
If you could afford it you would only sleep with your wife to she had a son, then get a concubine (or two or three). If you were poor prostitution was rampant in Renaissance times.
So that is not a good system, where you do not get officially divorced but stop seeing your wife for someone else anyways.
So hardly a laudable system.
Modern conservatives would find many Renaissance practices completely degenerate.
Now that being said a more collaborative system where the family helps choose the potential suitors but both parties can opt out is not necessarily a bad thing.
For some people it is easy to find a wife or husband on their own, but for others it is much harder.
It should certainly be available as an option for those who want to participate.
Opting out isn't good enough. There's still massive potential to be coerced into an undesired marriage.
I.E., "marry this person who raped you in high school and have kids with them, because their parents and us have a great business deal riding on it, or you're getting cut out of the will".