My Arranged Marriage

My wife Mirjam, being critically ill, arranged a marriage for me with a woman of chiefly Xhosa descent -- in fact of royal descent -- who is now my wife. What I mean by "arranged" is this. She gave me instruction to marry E, and she went over every aspect of it with care. She did not speak directly with E herself, but indirectly, so that E understood it all afterwards. Mirjam said it was an ancient tradition of her Church, the Anabaptist Mennonite Church. People have questioned that: did Anabaptist Mennonites ever do that? But one finds it, as an example, in the Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopaedia under Marriage, where it is said that the Church "withdrew the right of the individual to choose his marriage partner". The particular way that Mirjam did it, I have not found in the literature, but I believe what she told me -- that arranging a marriage for one who was about to lose his wife was a tradition. It started, she said, in the persecutions of the Mennonites in Europe, where spouses were concerned what should happen if they were "taken out", and their partner left alone. OBSERVATION: I am very thankful to Mirjam for having given me instruction, and have experienced the arrangement very positively in various ways . The arrangement, too, turned into love. E and I are inseparable today. But more than that, this opened up a whole new world for me. One of my new African family wrote to me on my Facebook page just this week: "You know what, we are blessed having you as a brother." And the same is true the other way round.