Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!rex!ukma!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: christian@cs.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: arranged marriages Message-ID: Date: 12 Dec 90 03:37:54 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 38 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [This posting is anonymous, in order to avoid personal embarrassment whose nature should be obvious from the posting. I trust people don't object to requests of this sort. I don't think anonymous postings are appropriate in most of our discussions, but when asking for advice on personal issues that could embarrass other people, I think it makes sense. I will be happy to route responses to the original sender. --clh] My situation is as follows: I am an Indian student (i.e. from India). My girlfriend is from India as well. Both of our families are Christians. Our parents are very traditional in their thinking. As you may know, India has the arranged marriage system. Our parents would like us to have this type of a marriage. Therefore, they would be VERY upset if they found out about us. Only our close friends know about us. If her parents found out, they would probably take her away from school here. They are not doing harm to us, but what they think is best for us. We both understand that. We don't want to do anything that would hurt their feelings. We both plan to tell our parents when we think it would be appropriate. We agree that we would break-up if our parents will not accept our relationship. We were trying to find some verses in the Bible that support what I'm going to call "love marriages," as opposed to arranged marriages. There are several references in the Bible of the parents finding a bride for their son, etc. We want to know about verses that indicate that there is nothing wrong with love marriages. The only one that we have found is in one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians where he basically says that, in his opinion, the church members there should remain single, but if any man was thinking "unbecomingly" towards a "virgin" he should go ahead and marry. I hope I'm not paraphrasing this verse out of context. Please help us with this task. We feel that with backing of some relevant parts of the Word, we may be able to change the minds of parents. Meanwhile, our prayers are that God will show us the right answer AND give us the strength to follow it even if it is not desirable to us.