The arranged marriage is beginning to make sense

Happenings in the relationships scene these past months make getting married seem like going sky diving without a parachute.

If partners are not raining blows on each other, then they are hacking each other to death or better still, hiring gun men to take each other out.

The more recent case of Jacque Maribe, a news anchor with a local television station who fell in love with and got engaged to the classic bad boy who is now taking her down the rabbit hole with him with a murder charge, has got me thinking about marriage and courtship as it was in the past.

I have always wondered how these women in our past, our grandmothers and their mothers, would be content marrying men who didn’t give them that butterfly feeling in the stomach. How they could be happy marrying men that their families chose for them?

Recently though, the arranged marriage is beginning to make sense to me.

Someone asked me the other day whether men and women today get to know the people they are getting hitched to and I answered no. These days we socialise in clubs and coffee houses. The towns are fast paced. Relationships are hurried.

Perhaps because we are in a hurry to fulfil the societal expectation of having a ring on our finger so that we can move on with our lives; we have lots of couples just shacking up.

People moving in with each other without having even met each other’s family or close friends. There is absolutely no sense of accountability.

You can’t then wonder how easy it has become to just destroy a love interest. After all, you have not made promises to or built a relationship with anyone else in their life.

SOMEONE TO HAVE YOUR BACK

If I was heading back out to the dating scene today, it wouldn’t seem like a totally absurd idea to have someone scope out my prospect first.

It would even be better if this someone was not a private investigator who is only in it for the money but someone who actually cared for me.

I am aware of the ways in which those marriages of the past took from women. Having your father pick a partner for you and having no say in the matter, not even when to get married, might not work for today’s woman who is somewhat liberated. I am not suggesting that we go back there.

I believe, however, that we can borrow from some aspects of these marriages.

Marry for love or even money if you want but let’s slow down a little bit. Let the dating process be systematic. Be thoughtful. Be interested not just in a man’s career exploits and his bank account but in his back story. Make sure at least you are on pages of the same book.

Remember when you get together, his past will be your past and his family yours. Also, there are some skeletons that love can’t triumph over. Maybe then, marriages will last longer and they will be safer.