Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Difference between revisions

*Inversion: [[Vorkosigan Saga]] the long-awaited (and eagerly urged by his chaos fearing subjects) marriage of Emperor Gregor is a love match that turns out to be politically advantageous, crossing a delicate ethnic divide among the people's in his realm and raising a distinguished trading family to Imperial influence. This is after Gregor spent over ten years turning down attempts to arrange his marriage to any one of hundreds of eligible noblewomen, both because he was waiting for a love match and because of his fears of aristocratic inbreeding (a problem his family line had already manifested badly).

{{Quote|'''Lady Alys Vorpatril''': Since your mother would not bestir herself in that department, I have by default been supervising Gregor's bride-search for the last decade. And a frustrating task it has been. I mean, he'd just sit there, and stare at me, with this dreadful, doleful, ''Why are you doing this to me?'' look on his face. I think I've paraded every tall, slim, Vor beauty on the planet past him at one time or another, to the great disruption of their lives and the routines of their families; I've offered dozens of resumes... nothing worked. I swear, Gregor has been even more frustrating than Ivan, and Ivan has lost so many good opportunities... A certain nameless wit, or half-wit, even whispered I ought to start trying boys, but I pointed out that would ''not'' solve the heir problem, which is the whole point of the exercise in the first place.

'''Lady Alys''': I eventually figured out the Vor part for myself. It left me with a dilemma, as you may imagine.}}

**Similarly in [[Vorkosigan Saga|Captain Vorpatril's Alliance]] Ivan marries Tej out of pure compassion and stays with her out of love because she is on the run from gangsters. The original goal is to keep immigration service from deporting her to where she is vulnerable to said gangsters, and the long-term goal is - as Ivan is a close friend and cousin of the Emperor - give her a skilled (and sometimes ruthless) security service as her "bodyguards-in-law". When her father, comes back to gather the family for a war of revenge against the enemy Tej had been fleeing from he impatiently berates her for not taking one of all the many marriages he had so patiently tried to arrange. In reality Ivan, who is a close cousin to both the Emperor of Barrayar ''and'' the second-most powerful nobleman in the Imperium simultaneously, and is the 'spare heir' for both families, has enough connections to give the family a better deal then it could have ever dreamed of getting. It is just that [[Fridge Logic|he]] never arranged the deal and Tej got it just by falling in love.