AND ANOTHER THING
The strange case of thirty thousand spouses
PAUL JOHNSON
hen I arrived in Korea last week, for a brief visit, I found Kimpo airport at Seoul teeming with an enormous number of young men. They appeared to come from all over the East and, as most of them were foreigners, long queues stretched in front of the immigration desks. This annoyed me but it did not seem to disturb the young men, who were laughing and chattering. They were clearly pleased with life. When I finally got through, I remarked on the phe- nomenon of the young men to the people who met me. `Oh,' they said, 'if you had been here earlier in the day you would have found the airport crammed with young women.' The fact is I had stumbled upon the ingathering of what was described as `30,000 pure young men and woman from 120 countries' who had come to Seoul to be married in a giant wedding ceremony in the Olympic Stadium.
This event had been organised by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and he con- ducted the ceremony which took place on Tuesday. I received an invitation to it in exquisite Korean script and I regret I could not be there. The Revd Sun Moon is a strenuous campaigner for world peace, and one way he believes it can be furthered is by encouraging young people to marry across national, racial and colour divides. This is a radical attitude anywhere but more so in the East than in the West, for many oriental societies are still endoga- mous. Neighbouring peoples, such as Ko- reans and Japanese for instance, are highly suspicious of each other, what we would call 'racist'. So encouraging them to inter- marry may well be a step in the right direc- tion. However, I don't intend to argue the point either way. What aroused my interest was being told that many of the 30,000 brides and grooms had never actually met, though they had corresponded and exchanged photographs. They had been matched up, as it were, by the Revd Sun Moon personally or by his organisation.
Most people in the West find this outra- geous but we are in a minority, if a growing one. The Far Eastern Economic Review tells us, in its current issue, that when the popu- lation peak is reached, the population of China will be 1,890 million, India 1,875 mil- lion, Pakistan 520 million, Bangladesh 295 million, Indonesia 370 million and Vietnam 165 million. That is 5,115 million from just six countries, making all our western soci- eties together look puny. And the likeli-
hood is that most of the marriages generat- ed by this huge mass will be arranged by parents or families in one way or another, as they always have been. But parents and families are often motivated by unworthy considerations, usually financial. So it may be that matching by a disinterested out- sider, concerned only with decorum and compatibility (and, in Mr Moon's case, internationalism) would be an improve- ment. That, interestingly enough, was Dr Johnson's view. Even in England, he thought, 'Marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor.'
His own marriage with a widow, Tetty, entered into from love, was far from happy; a failure indeed. Surveying the multitude of his friends and acquaintances, he saw that unions produced by mutual choice often worked badly. The notion that a man can find bliss only with one special woman, still widely held today, he thought rubbish. When Boswell asked him: 'Pray, Sir, do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any of whom a man may be as happy as with any woman in particular?', Johnson replied, 'Ay, Sir, fifty thousand.' This is a harsh, shocking doctrine to us. We find it hard to credit that the 4th Duke of Norfolk, who lost his head for conspiring to marry Mary Queen of Scots, had no contact with her except by letter. 'For other eyelik- ing hath not passed between them', as Walsingham put it. We are brought up on the romantic notion of a coup de foudre, a flash of recognition of mutual need, which only personal contact can produce. Yet Hollywood, the place where the ideology of romance is pursued most relentlessly both in theory and in practice, is notorious for the multiplicity of its failed marriages.
`Gentlemen, business is terrible!'
Henry VIII, the unhappy prototype of the much-married man, as Antonia Fraser's new book reminds us, made the disastrous error of mixing reasons of state, which were naturally predominant, with personal romance. He wanted male heirs and sup- posed a girl with flashing eyes more likely to produce them. If anyone ever did, he illustrated Johnson's maxim that to marry again is 'the triumph of hope over experi- ence'.
It seems to me that our present royal family has now tested the theory of roman- tic marriage to destruction. Traditionally, most royal unions had been arranged. When Princess Margaret fell in love with Group-Captain Townsend, she was argued out of her desire to marry him. But that was the turning-point. Thereafter, the Palace, egged on by the media and with the approval of public opinion, foolishly scrapped its prohibitions and allowed its young people to marry anyone within rea- son whom they fancied. The result has been a series of much publicised disasters, with possibly more to come. Having failed to stick to its principles, the monarchy now finds itself in real trouble, with the media in full cry and public opinion increasingly fol- lowing. It should ignore both and go back to the well-tried old methods, risking being called stuffy. But it is probably too late for that.
Meanwhile, young people, who study royal behaviour carefully, are in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the breakdowns and scandals. Instead of react- ing in favour of more prudential marriages, putting sense before sensibility, they are turning against formal marriages altogeth- er. It matters not that informal arrange- ments, such as that between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, are still more likely to end in anguish and recrimination, as a growing body of evidence proves. To many emancipated young women — and it is the women who decide, in most cases, whether marriages occur or not — it now seems a shrewder bet not to marry at all. That is the road to misery and economic disaster, both for individuals and society. So I am glad that someone, albeit in distant Korea, is trying out another alternative, and I shall look with interest to see whether the statis- tics confirm the wisdom of these new-style arranged unions. The Lord Chancellor, a canny Scot doubtless anxious for fresh busi- ness, ought to keep an eye on them too.
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