Not long ago, a friend of mine posted an excellently snarky commentary about a new television show called,
Married at First Sight
. On this show, potential—I don’t know what you call them…”contestants,” perhaps?—fill out personality assessments and undergo “spiritual counseling,” and then four experts narrow down several hundred people to three couples. Then they get married. Without meeting one another first.
My friend was gleeful: what a train wreck! But after an initial shiver of dismay at yet another reality show, I thought to myself—y’know, is it really? It’s just bringing back the idea of matchmakers—what’s so shocking about that?
In earlier times, marriage wasn’t expected to be the way that individuals fulfilled themselves. We think of marriage this way now, but the truth is that we think of nearly everything this way—it’s one of the less admirable side-effects of a rights-oriented society (there are good things of course, too, but stay with me here, we’re not talking about those right now). Older societies viewed marriage in different ways, but the pattern tended towards viewing them as a way to join families (not individuals), a child-rearing project, sometimes a way to maximize economic resources (or if you were very wealthy, to concentrate them). When done well, compatibility of background and interest are taken into account, too.
In theory, this leads to much less of the “oh, my infatuation period is over, lets move on to the next high-excitement partner” problem. In a good marriage, where the daughters’ needs were taken into account by her parents (i.e. no child marriage, no large age difference between the future spouses, etc.—a lot of which is actually mentioned in traditional Jewish sources in those eras when marriages were, of course, arranged) that can mean that a lot of the silliness involved in modern courtship arrangements doesn’t happen. There is no problem with people worrying about the passion not being exactly as it once was, because love comes later, and passion is a bonus, if it happens.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are so many people out there—I see it at least twice a week in my Facebook feed—advocating that if you don’t “feel the passion” at every blessed moment, there’s something wrong and you should leave, whether it’s your job, or your spouse. But if we think about it, that’s kind of crazy: imagine deciding that when your child was old enough that you were no longer in the stage where you daftly stare into the baby’s face all the time and can’t get enough of smelling its adorable baby smell—imagine if people advised you to give away the baby at that point, because you didn’t feel the passion.
It’s the same for marriage (or your job, for that matter) the beginnings, where you gaze moonily at each other all the time, and can’t really think of anything else—that shouldn’t be the end point of the relationship, where you want to stay for years and years. Like the child, there need to be changes as your relationship matures -that’s not a failure of love any more than sending your child off to preschool—or college—is.
I’m not really advocating for parents to once again arrange matches between families—heaven knows I would likely have been appalled at anyone my parents were likely to pick for me. But there may well be something to be said for having someone who is not directly involved in the emotions of the process being the one (or more) who matches couples up—maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible thing for there someone looking out for long-term goals other than simply the excitement of anxiety and physical attraction in the early days of infatuation. Maybe it would be good for us to return—at least a little bit—to couples thinking of their partnering as something more than just the two of them—or, at least for the person matching them up to think of those things. And while I don’t foresee a wholesale return to shadchans (matchmakers), the fact that there is a show in which people who want to meet someone else, and are willing to hand over their choice to people who might do a better job than they do—that’s something to think about.
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