love and marriage

Unresolved and tantalizing in the mind...

I once heard a woman historian-sociologist-or-something adding her two cents to a discussion that included the "arranged marriages" of an earlier (American?) time. The interviewer was clearly dubious about marriages that did not rest on the "love" one partner might feel for another: Today's marriages are more often premised in or argued from the basis of such love.

And the historian said approximately, as if thinking out loud, "Today, people marry because they love each other. Back then, perhaps they loved each other because they were married."

I would like to consider whatever that might mean ... not assert a truth or falsehood, but simply consider that it might mean something in the human warp and weft and if so, what? And in whatever way I come at it, in whatever way I try it on for size, somehow I come up stymied... stymied and yet unwilling to dismiss it out of hand.

It's sort of like a piece of bubble gum, inviting the chewing process and yet never reaching the natural conclusion of swallowing.

A peculiar little nugget.