Dirty Dancing really isn’t a bad movie. She likes him, he likes her, she gives a little, he gives a little.

They even did a little dancing, too. Patrick Swayze refers to his lover as, “the kind of person I want to be”, and this sly reference to the practice of homogenous pairing bothers me somewhat.

Yes, it’s true, that our current social stigma in Western Culture is that sharing common points of interest, does, in fact, make for a good pairing. When picturing your ideal partner, you might picture your partner to say, “____, I love you, we have so much in common!” You might be very satisfied with this common ground, it’s true, but how true will this ground hold, 10 years from now?

Advocates of arranged marriage have argued that it has a higher success rate (whatever the measure of success might be) than traditional western homogeneous pairings. Why is that, do you think?

I’d have to say that our concept of a partner is often tied up with our concept of self – we change, they change, we, “grow apart”, as is the beck-and-call of so many divorce attorneys.

A professor of mine said that the strongest force in the universe is resistance to change – so, when we base so much of our affection upon commonality, we feel somehow cheated when our partners change, and shift away from the previously shared common ground. This reaction is both selfish and natural.

Well, I was going somewhere with this, by my train of thought has been permananently derailed.