Good arranged marriage

Every so often, I like to return to the knotty subject of arranged marriage, triggered in most cases by experiences and examples of how it should not work. For arranged marriage is a complicated thing. In theory, it is a good thing- or at least no worse than any other way of finding a life partner. In practice, it very often means arranged in every sense, so that the marrying parties have no say at all. It is simply assumed that they are happy. The question of how they feel simply does not arise. That surely cannot be right. Yet this is how it was done in the past and continues to be done in many cases at present.

So what is ‘good’ arranged marriage, or will we be like the socialists who continued to insist that socialism was a good thing, but that the counter examples given by critics were not cases of ‘real’ socialism? I think it need not be like that. So I propose the following definition of good arranged marriage. I would welcome alternatives or comments:

Arranged marriage is when parents introduce a child, who has explicitly stated their readiness for marriage, to a potential marriage partner and if marriage follows from the introduction, it does so as a result of the explicit consent of both parties. Nothing is implicit.