Arranged Marriages

A friend of my mine was cursing like a good feminist, ranting about advice on an email list for church-administered matchmatching. Yes, cold-calling local reformed churches and asking about the eligibles would be disrespectful and out of place in a modern social context. However, it's very "Genesis" of some book-blindered Reformed nazi to suggest. :)

But the fact remains that there was a time in which people approached marriage from the standpoint of looking to the community to provide the right person. It's so ironic, so "omega," how the pattern has inverted, when you think about it. It used to be that couples were introduced by their elders, got to know each other in public, and then gradually withdrew to from public to private in order to focus on one another as they neared the point of commitment. Now, in our modern Mordor society, we've inverted the model: people meet anonymously, without advice, without references, superficially, as alienated individuals; they date in secret, they gradually get to know each other, when they trust each other enough and have more or less decided to committ, they introduce each other to their family and friends as as de facto spouses. Was this what Francis Fukuyama meant by the "end of History"? LOL