Magic Thursday - Love and Marriage

By Nicole Murphy

“Always, my thought was I would make an arranged marriage. I know it seems terrible to people brought up with the mantra of personal choice, but there are hundreds of thousands of strong, happy marriages in India because of this system. I’ve lived in Australia, I’ve enjoyed working here, I love my job but I never once thought I would do anything but marry an Indian man my parents approved of.”

            “Growing up in Australia didn’t change your mind at all? Make you think love is the answer?”

            “Love is wonderful,” Maddie said. “But it can also blind you to reality. You can be in love and not make a good marriage because you’ve not worked through the practicalities of melding two lives into one. Love is possible in an arranged marriage. My parents are devoted to each other and yes, there is a part of me that hopes I can find that with my husband. But love isn’t the right place to start.”

            “Then where is?”

            “Compatible life goals and visions. Agreement on the question of children, and how they will be raised. Respect for one for the other and a desire to see that the other is happy.”

            “Attraction?”

            “It’s preferable, but not necessary to begin with.”

            “That sounds sensible, if utterly unromantic.”

            Maddie decided to put it in terms he would understand. “When you’re taking over a new paper, do you make the decision based on whether it appeals to you or not?”

            “Clever girl. No, not just appeal, but whether it adds value to the company, whether it’s worth the risk.”

            “Surely marriage is a more important decision than buying a newspaper?”

***

The above passage is from my latest release – ‘Arranged to Love’. It’s contemporary romance, so not really a Darkside Downunder book.

But this is Valentine’s Day and I thought it worth while thinking about love and marriage. The character above, Maddie, is very practical about the place of love in her life but then again, she’s yet to realise she’s fallen head over heels for a guy.

Maddie’s point of view – that love doesn’t really play a part in making a good marriage – is something that pops up from time to time in paranormals. I think that with some of our paranormal creatures – those who are long lived such as vampires – it should come up more often.

Love as the basis for choosing a marriage partner is a very recent construct. I’m a fan of Regency romance and I love those books, but I’m very aware that the prevailing opinion and action at the time was that love and sex wasn’t the reason you got married. You married for position, power, wealth. And a lot of those marriages would have been just as satisfactory as our modern love-based relationships.

A creature that’s lived for centuries would be well used to this system and probably consider it the natural order of things. They might consider love as the reason for choosing your life partner to be an amusing foible of the moment that will pass as generations die and humanity again shifts its opinion. Perhaps they go so far as to think it foolish.

It just makes the moment they realise they have succumbed to love all the more delicious.

I think that it not only makes sense but is needful that an immortal creature would crave love. What else do they have to look forward to in their loves except that heady rush of falling in love? Everything is so passe. But it doesn’t make sense that they would then decide to marry someone for love, when for most of their life their understanding – the world’s understanding – was that this was folly and doomed to failure.

Particularly a creature like a vampire, for whom status and wealth and power is so important.

So what do you think? Should vampires, werewolves and the like marry for love, or should they still be very much on the marry for the best merry-go-round – until that great love knocks them off their feet?

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