“The stability of community and family, and their future depend on the proper structuring of the family, with an established sense of how the generations relate. In a Western context, we emphasize the individual more than the family or the community, and the idea that I should subordinate my attraction and my longing to the need of the community seems odd.
That Western feeling lies behind our puzzlement at the idea of parents being involved in the arrangement of a marriage. This involvement need not mean that the parents made a decision that the boy or girl opposes, yet it worries us. It compromises the principle that’s so important to us, that I and I alone make the key decisions in my life in light of what seems best for me and seems to me most likely to make me happy. But our affirmation of that principle doesn’t seem to generate happiness for us. And it seems to produce fractured families and communities.“
John Goldingay, Old Testament Ethics: A Guided Tour(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 138.