If your family has been bugging you to wed that nice girl or the guy you’ve brought home, you’re not alone. Parents have been trying to arrange marriages for centuries, but it used to be much more serious than it is today.
Different religions dictate different types of wedlock. Some religions doctrine marriages only between persons of the same faith in order to ensure that the line of faith stays strong within the community. Other marriages were arranged so the land could be divided and shared among the rich and powerful within the lands, and other marriages were arranged so that two families could maintain a stronghold on the community. This goes back as far as ancient Rome and is as modern as the wedding of the affluent in England.
There was, once upon a time, the need for the woman’s family (her father, as a matter of fact) to build a dowry, or gift of land or money, sometimes cattle or sheep, to be given to the father of the groom’s house. The bigger your dowry, the more important it was believed that you should marry into affluence. In other countries the marriage was arranged when the children were born, to come about when the kids reached to marrying age. Sometimes these children never even saw each other until the day they were wed, in other areas; the two grew up together, knowing that someday they would marry. Often between tribes from far away, this was to ensure that there was no incestuous marriages, keeping the bloodline from becoming weak due to the possibility of birth defects caused
by marrying, say, your sister.
Remember that tribes were few and far between, and travel was hard-several days walk to the next village in some cases-so it became common place to arrange a marriage between children of distant tribes. This was hard on the wife, who was expected to leave her home and everyone that she knew to travel many miles away to her husband’s family.
Today arranged marriages are unheard of in the United States, except between children of specific religions. This is still true in the Hebrew tradition. In India arranged marriage is still very much common place.
I do not want to leave you with the impression that these are forced marriages-they are not. The betrothed agree to the marriage, sometimes because of their up bringing, sometimes because they agree with the reasons for it. Mostly, however, an arranged marriage is the result of religious beliefs, and both parties have never known anything else. It is as common to their way of life as first communion is for devote Catholics; it’s just part of their lives.
In America, for the most part arranged marriages are unheard of between the masses. America is such a melting pot of every kind of person from all countries that the need for arranged marriages-other than bringing two powerful families together-has been out of date since the civil war times, when Southern families still practice a kind of arranged marriage by threatening to disinherit children who did not want to marry the boy or girl of their families choice.