In many parts of the world - one thinks of southern Italy, India, and the Middle East, but these are by no means the only examples - male/female partnering is commonly achieved by something like the following process. Parents and friends of a man (let's say) investigate a number of potential young women, check out their education, their family background, their character, their wealth, their employment prospects, their beauty, and decide that one (or perhaps a couple) would make appropriate matches for the young man. Then it is arranged for the young man to meet the woman a few times. If each finds the other agreeable, then the match is decided, and marriage follows.
Now of course this procedure can end up in abuse in a number of ways. For example, it might be that, in effect, young women become traded for money and forced to marry against their wills. Again, in some cases it may turn out that, despite the parents' and friends' best efforts, the couple are poorly matched, affection does not develop, and the marriage becomes miserable.
But no system is perfect. I invite you to compare for a moment the procedure above with that common in the Developed World. From the age of 18 (perhaps younger) young people devote a large amount of time and money to pursuing each other in ill-defined courtship dances, with some interested in permanent relationships and children, others interested in temporary relationships but not permanent ones, and others interested only in brief physical encounter - and there being no good ways to determine who wants what. We procede, randomly and almost aimlessly, through a succession of angst, getting the nerve up, expensive and half-competent interaction, fumbling passion, uncertain relationship, betrayal, breakup, heartache, recovery, and then back to angst. After perhaps fifteen years of spending much (often most) of our leisure time on this thankless task, bearable only because we buy into a myth that it is all that is meaningful in life, we finally give up on the nonsense of finding the partner of our dreams, and settle for "good enough" - something that the arranged marriage partners agreed from the beginning. Once we give up on the pointless dance, if we are lucky (just over half the time) then life can stabilise and we can become useful and productive people once more - perhaps even eventually achieve something worthwhile in life. If we are less lucky (just under half the time), then the baggage we carry from all our previous failed relationships and habits of bad temper and betrayal and our age making habits more set and compromise more difficult means that even "good enough" cannot carry us through and we divorce - resetting our lives back to "angst".
This pathologically unsuccessful courtship pattern - issuing in untold misery for our own lives and for the lives of the children that are its by-product and collateral damage - we then boast of as "advanced" and "free" and we look down upon the cultures that employ arranged marriage as "backward", adding arrogance and a comical lack of self-knowledge to our sins. Why?? Is this the best our culture can produce?
