Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

The French think the tale of King Arthur is propaganda eh?

Wonder what they think of Monty Python’s version.

It must have been months ago that my oldest was introduced to Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom.  Maybe years.  We were staging for our first family Disneyland trip and Cheryl wanted to introduce him to what we’d be doing.  The neat thing about VMK.com is that not only is it a MMORPG style game, it is set up so you are exploring Disneyland at the same time - the most famous rides sights and everything are there.  (Update: looks like they are shutting it down shortly, though there are some resisters…)

One day whilst playing around with that, I noticed a link to something called “Disney’s Toontown“.  I signed Dylan up for it and watched it a bit, helping him to learn the basics.  It was cute but too simple to interest me, or so I thought.

Flash forward a few years.  He’d played it a bit more and Lyndan was now big enough to find it amusing to play his own.  I thought I would make myself a toon and log in.

They were thrilled.

They’d run back and forth between the desktop and me on my laptop, yelling about where they were and “Oh!  There’s a cog!  Let’s get it!”  They would follow my character around like puppies, help me with quests, and in general just love being “a team” with Daddy.  I was astonished.  I think they really enjoyed teaching me how to play too.  Dylan had been playing long enough that he had explored a lot of the areas, and he knew what was allowed and not allowed to non-paying players.

Now I am semi-hooked.  I can’t wait to play again - both because I enjoy it and because they enjoy it with me.

Problem is, I should really be working on my paper…

Just ran into this umm… well, it’s not really a dating site. It is a marriage proposal site. It facilitates arranged marriages, based on the old testament model of bride price.

It is an interesting idea on a number of levels, if a bit foreign to North Americans coming out of the European pattern of marriage.

The bride price concept is not meant to assign a monetary value to women, so much as to establish how much the husband is willing to sacrifice - a demonstration of his commitment and seriousness in pursuing marriage. It was in the past a nod to the expense of raising a daughter, who could not do as much physical work as a boy could, contributing to the production and wealth of the family. Today, this isn’t as true (physical labour is rarely the primary driver of income in families today), but on the other hand, the cost of raising any child has gone up substantially. If you ask around couples these days how many kids they desire, the answer is always a very low number as compared to previous generations. If you follow up with a why question, the first reason is invariably, “kids are EXPENSIVE!” If that is true, then paying a bride’s family makes a certain amount of sense.

The second major area of discomfort is the fact that the site caters to families who are offering their daughters for marriage young. Some as young as 13, though it is unclear if they actually expect the marriage to be conducted and consummated before a reasonable time has passed and legal ages are attained. This brings to mind some of the bad press around the FLDS, and the commune that made the news in Texas, as well as the Bountiful, BC situation. Certainly nobody advocates such nonsense, least of all me. Coercion is probably the biggest issue in both those news stories.

It is a fact, though, that girls are attaining puberty at earlier and earlier ages. With the onset of adult hormones comes adult desires, and the tremendous volume of teenage sexual behaviour is now a fact of life. As Christian parents, who seek to see their children into marriage without having fallen to sexual temptation, we are faced with two choices: teaching children self-control and modelling proper relationships, and supporting them in remaining celibate until their wedding at whatever age (which is also moving later and later into the twenties on average), or finding alternative ways to help our children express themselves sexually - while maintaining God’s will for us in marriage. Practically speaking, that means marriage.

In the mainstream, there has definitely been broad-based support for and creative approaches to the former approach. I have heard of father-daughter balls, and other types of approaches to building strong loving relationships between young girls and their dads. Statistics seem to bear out that the stronger a girl’s relationship with her father, the less likely she will be to seek affection prematurely from young men. On the other side, chastity rings and other ceremonies meant to create and support agreements to remain a virgin until marriage are becoming increasingly popular. The sexual urge is a strong one though in young men, borne out by the entirety of human history. It can be used to drive the young men to prepare, if they believe that they cannot have what they want until they accomplish certain things. There is something to be said for directing boys that way, to prepare for marriage, and to prepare for their future that way.

Every person is different though. Some may find it easier to maintain their virginity and resist temptations while others will find it harder. Paul seems to recognize this in his writings - talking about whether people should get married or not (1 Cor 7:8-9). He also points out that this drive should be given freedom in marriage (1 Cor 7:2-5). Some consideration should be given, in my opinion, to Christian parents endorsing earlier marriages amongst their children. Some will be better served by an early marriage. With rates of some STD infections as high as one in four in the USA, there are serious dangers to not keeping it in your pants until marriage.

Now to consider the negatives to early marriage. First, there is next to no way for teenagers to earn a living wage independently. Sure they could get minimum wage jobs and live in cheap housing, but it would take a lot of discipline to get them ahead, and get them the educations they need to be successful in life. It is possible, but very hard. Most parents support their children financially and in terms of education well into their child’s early twenties. If they are already willing to do this, why would loving parents stop if their child was married?

There is also the maturity factor to consider. I firmly believe that a big reason for the historic rules and customs in cultures around the world that restrict the young from marriage were there is because of the basic fact of life - wisdom comes from experience. There are exceptions, but it is true in the vast majority of cases. Young people make dumb decisions which is why the old almost invariably, are the ones who make the important decisions in culture and society. Respect for elders is a preservative against stupid, rash decisions anywhere. The idea of arranged marriages is premised on this - that your parents because of their experience and wisdom, and their impartiality as compared to the child’s position, are better prepared to make a choice for a life partner for their child.

So is it wise to simply let kids marry younger? Probably not if they are making their own decisions unfettered by wisdom and experience. However, the system that the website seems to support is insulated against that by the tradition of arrangement. People don’t go there to “buy” a girl for their son. They go there to initiate a process of evaluation and examination to see if this is a “good” match. If the two young people have much in common, similar values, similar goals, then there is a reasonable expectation that their marriage can work. As I understand it, once the parents on both side approve of this potential marriage, then the potential couple can commence some kind of courtship to get to know one another and decide if there is the attraction that needs to be there for a successful marriage. Loving and supportive parents will give their children the opportunity to veto the match, so nobody is bullied or pushed into anything. “Arranged” does not need to be synonymous with “forced” or “coerced”.

From reading on the site it also appears that most of the girls listed are consenting to the process. They want to be matched for marriage. Now, as we have seen, this process can be abused, as in the case of the FLDS (if you think that your salvation is based on marriage, you are sorely deceived!) But if the children understand that this is their choice, but informed by all kinds of processes and people who have their best interests at heart, I see no reason why it could not be successful.

So am I in favour of arranged marriages? Mine wasn’t. But there is something desperate, random, and unsafe that comes from the ubiquitous quest for “the one” that has been popularized by romantic writings for the last 400 years. I also think that certain pitfalls that I fell into as a young man, and even while I was dating and engaged to my now wife, could have been avoided had our relationship been guided by such a process. As I understand the process - intiated at the consent of both the son and the daughter, assessed by their parents with the view of long-term marriage, then courtship entered into with the goal of determining for each of the betrothed the suitability of the other for permanent marriage, with the potential for veto of either party, and finalized by a bride price to demonstrate the earnestness of the suitor, certainly seems both practical and efficient.

UPDATE: It turns out the site itself is a fake.  As I mentioned, the site was short on details, and abiguous about when a child can legally be married.  However, I stand by my above comments in the sense that I don’t have a problem with people arranging marriages, assuming that rules of human decency and the guidelines I mentioned above are followed.  Anything else I would have big problems with.

I love the internets.

After all, Og mean different things to different people. For instance: some think of Og as ruthless tyrant, splattered with the blood of his enemies. But me remember a gentler Og: modest and soft-spoken, splattered with the blood of a few close friends.

Hat tip to the Macadamian.