Temporary madness

All of us who have lived a while have seen matches made in hell, week-long marriages, bitter divorces where no one is a winner.

It is the erudite marrying a bimbo; it is the educated marrying the massage girl; it is the old and conservative man marrying a young and liberal woman; all disasters waiting to happen. A good computer program or a wise matchmaker would certainly have prevented these disasters.

When a matchmaker you trust calls at the house to announce that she found you a match, there is transparency, there is reliability, there is clarity.

As Louis de Berniers said, "Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides ... Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement ... For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away."

A marriage that arises from a fact-based search cannot possibly be wrong: it is like a corporate merger. Experts from both sides look at the union from all angles; they think of every detail and leave nothing to chance. The matchmaker stakes her reputation on the lovely boy she brings to you.

With love, you take a risk, like traveling down the road unknown without a map or directions. Lao Tzu said, "Love is the strongest passion for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses."

Are the poets and philosophers wrong? Are we better off now that the arranging of marriage, this thin fabric of society, can be done by computer programmers and psychologists? Yes and, again, yes.

So, shall we Westerners adopt this safer, sounder, more logical approach to life's most important relationship?

Probably not. We still believe, as the Persian poet wrote, that happiness is "a book of verses beneath the bough; a loaf of bread, a jug of wine ... and thou!"

The author is managing director of Goshawk Trading Strategies Ltd, Shanghai.