The 2025 guide to arranged marriages

How to find your child a spouse

In the 1820s, seven women were among the most powerful figures in Britain.

These were Amelia Stewart - Viscountess Castlereagh; Sarah Villiers - Countess of Jersey; Emily Clavering-Cowper - Countess Cowper; Maria Molyneux - Countess of Sefton; Lady Willoughby de Eresby; Dorothea Lieven - Countess de Lieven; and Maria Theresia - Countess Esterházy.

Together, they were “a feminine oligarchy less in number but equal in power to the Venetian Council of Ten”.

Theirs was a soft power. It came with no formal titles or positions of state. But these seven women decided whether you were part of society or not. They decided whether you would marry up or be shunned. They were the seven Lady Patronesses of Almack's.

The weekly ball at Almack’s was the summit of the Georgian marriage season. It was here that many of the most important marriages in British history were formed, as they danced the quadrille and shared dinner until the small hours. It was exclusive and selective, and the Lady Patronesses reigned supreme.

But the marriage season in Georgian London was more than just a ball; it was an intense series of social engagements which lasted for months. Every night, the young person seeking a fiancé would visit the opera, or the theatre, a dinner, or a ball. Every day they would pursue private engagements, parties, and visits to pleasure gardens (Vauxhall or Ranelagh, of course).

They were out, and they were meeting people - new and familiar - again and again, until relationships could not help but form. It was wonderful, productive, and exhausting.

This was an undertaking as serious as any professional endeavor. We now look back on the past as a time when marriages ‘just happened’ - perhaps because people were more religious, or ‘traditional’, or some other vague explanation. Now that marriages are rarer and rarer, we lament the fading of these ‘cultural instincts’.

But these marriages did not ‘just happen’. It was recognized that pairing people into suitable, stable, and fruitful units was the responsibility of the whole of society, and elaborate social infrastructure was maintained by older generations to support this.

There was a compact: elders would hand on traditions and events (as well as funding for participation), and the youth would take them seriously and engage relentlessly. These institutions made pair-bonding easier but not easy.

Now, the Georgian marriage season - as depicted in the novels of Jane Austen - is not about to return. But by examining how it arose in the first place and the mechanics which it relied upon, we can find practical measures which can be deployed even in our own deracinated time, and can be used even by older parents who don’t know any suitable young people to introduce their children to.

My suggestions are as follows: