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  3. Few practices are as widespread among human cultures as the ceremonial wed

Few practices are as widespread among human cultures as the ceremonial wed

游客2024-08-09  55
问题       Few practices are as widespread among human cultures as the ceremonial wedding of a woman and a man.Individual impulses to ensure the survival of one’s genes mesh with society’s desire to establish stable family units.This may all sound very unromantic, but marriage is serious business - much too serious, some might say, to be left to extremely young men and women.Surely the elders know best.This is the impulse behind the age-old practice of matchmaking.

      The basics of matchmaking are simple.After collecting information about marriageable men and women (or boys and girls), a matchmaker decides which would be a good match.Sometimes the matchmaker represents the male or his family and therefore assesses available females.Sometimes the matchmaker represents the female side and looks at available males.In still other cases, the matchmaker is an independent judge, representing neither side but hoping to make a choice that will satisfy both.
      We’ve already hinted at one motivation for matchmaking - the belief that the people getting married are too young to make a wise decision.Especially in cultural traditions that encouraged marriages between 11- or 12-year-old children, this belief was probably true.Even with older teens or people in their early 20s, a society might encourage matchmaking in the belief that young people, blinded by the sexual attractiveness of a potential mate, cannot shrewdly choose someone who would make a good lifelong partner after the beauty of youth fades away.
      In the main, matchmaking has historically worked to preserve the integrity of certain social groups and prevent the weakening of the group by intrusion from outsiders.The Hindu caste system specifies distinct social roles for people based on their ancestry, a system that would become hopelessly confused if young people married freely between castes.Matchmaking, usually by the elder women of families looking to arrange a marriage, was a mechanism for ensuring that caste boundaries were observed.
      In arranged marriages, such as those practiced in earlier centuries by European royalty or Asian nobles, the man and woman to be married have no voice.This is not, however, an essential feature of matchmaking.In 19th-century Ireland, for example, a sturdy matchmaking business grew up in the market town of Lisdoonvarna, but arranged marriages had no part in it.The main customers were bachelor farmers from the remote countryside who flocked to town in September, after their harvest had been safely gathered.They contacted well-connected locals who knew the names and circumstances of eligible females in the town, and the bachelors paid these matchmakers to set something up.
      Few communities in highly mobile, industrialized societies could sustain an arranged-marriage system anymore, or even a freer system like Lisdoonvarna’s.Such systems simply require too much knowledge of other families and their histories.This knowledge was available to matchmakers in earlier communities where families established themselves and stayed for many generations.A sense for the enduring qualities of one’s neighbors is no longer the norm.Consequently, the role of family elders as matchmakers has become negligible outside remote rural areas.Instead, professional services that aim to collect and catalogue vital information have conquered the field.
      For many years, Internet-based matchmaking services have led the way in this adjustment to less-cohesive community life.They have largely replaced earlier systems that depended on telephone contact or even on face -to -face meetings.Users of Internet matchmaking services surrender a wealth of personal information to the administrators of the system, who promise to comb similar information from other users in search of a perfect match.This is essentially what matchmakers have done in lower -tech ways for thousands of years.Internet matchmaking services can cite many successful pairings, and the business is going strong.Still, their selection practices do not always create happy customers.
      The practice of matchmaking, both【A1】________and in modern times, serves several social purposes.Matchmakers may help unmarried persons from remote, lightly【A2】________areas find compatible mates.A religious, ethnic, or socioeconomic group may hope to promote unity and【A3】________with the group by matchmaking among its younger members.Even  Hindus who 【A4】________traditional caste -oriented matchmaking use the services of matchmakers.Users of Internet matchmaking services surrender a wealth of【A5】________to the administrators of the system, who promise to comb similar information from other users in search of a perfect match. [br] 【A2】
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