Village to arrange marriage? It works

Kia ora Shane, I see your point – arranged marriages are hard to understand. All those people meddling in a couple’s love life, no premarriage trial period in case the whole idea is a horrible mistake . . . what place is there in New Zealand for this anachronistic custom?

I thought whangai and pu¯ kana were weird ideas when I first came to New Zealand; who gifts their child away for someone else to raise? Why do chins need to jut unattractively while dancing?

Over the years I’ve come to understand the meaning and beauty of both ideas, even finding myself practising pu¯ kana at the dinner table before my kids’ kapa haka performances.

In the new New Zealand of 2019, where one in four of us was born overseas, I think it’s time we had a closer look at the custom of arranged marriages. After all, the amount of verbiage thrown on the topic is, as you say, saddening.

One Somali woman says we should think of it like a blind date on steroids. A Singaporean friend reports that all three of her grown children are in happy, arranged marriages and that they couldn’t imagine any other way of making such a serious choice without their parents and others playing a central role.

Shane, it’s not just people from India, it’s nearly the entire world. In one international study of marriages, 130 out of the 142 cultures examined reported having elements of arranged marriages.

Other research says that 53 per cent of all marriages worldwide are arranged. There seem to be more arranged marriages in the world than, well, the number of seedlings expected in your Billion Trees Initiative.

Your British queen, in the tradition of other European royals, married her third cousin Prince Philip at a time when there was little choice but to couple along arranged, family-determined lines.

And of course Ma¯ ori, like many indigenous peoples, have traditionally used arranged marriages as a means to establish political ties between hapu¯ or iwi, with some children promised in marriage from a very young age.

Thankfully, things have moved on.

Here’s how modern-day arranged marriages work: parents or older family members seek out and screen prospective mates for consideration through their social circles, extended family, or even by advertising on matrimonial websites or in newspapers. Once someone acceptable is found, the two families meet. Sometimes the potential couple meet up too, depending on the culture and families involved.

Extended families are consulted, chaperoned ‘‘dates’’ can occur, and further meetings may be set up until one or both of the individuals consent to or decline the pairing. If the prospective couple live in different parts of the world, photos are exchanged and information shared online, often via family members.

Maybe the well-publicised concerns you recently raised about these commonplace practices arose from confusion with forced marriages. There may be some occasions where one partner, usually a much younger woman, feels as if she is coerced into the partnership, but this is usually only in situations of extreme poverty. By and large, the vast majority of arranged marriages require the consent of both parties.

I think one reason why arranged marriages may be hard for us to understand in the Western World is that the decision about who to marry is a collective one; it’s made by a community of supporters rather than the two individuals, which sits in stark contrast to our Western notions of individual autonomy and freedom of choice.

But, Shane, if you are comfortable with the use of dating sites such as Tinder and Bumble, which use algorithms to bring prospective couples together and are now responsible for a significant proportion of marriages in Western countries, you could think of an arranged marriage as a village-sized, human algorithm which calculates and negotiates new relationships that, by the way, are more likely than a marriage-by-choice relationship to last a lifetime.

On their wedding day, after which couples at last spend time with each other alone, advocates of arranged marriages see it as the beginning, not an extension, of their love for each other. The background thinking by their tribal collective has been done, the sensible matters have been sorted out, and enough information has been shared to ensure that this most important decision is a pretty good one. Let love grow.

Never mind that they’ve never lived together or are brand new to each other. When they join their spouses in New Zealand on their fresh visitors’ visas designed for culturally arranged marriages, it’s clear as daylight that their whole village doesn’t need to come too because – through their collective decision-making and lasting cultural norms – the village is already here.

You could think of an arranged marriage asa villagesized, human algorithm which calculates and negotiates new relationships.