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Uh, westerners trying to do the rough equivalent has mostly not worked very well, although the neuroses of fundamentalist Christianity may be a major explanatory factor there.
It's a civilizational issue. Westerners have this combination of individualism and guilt based moralism that prevents this sort of rigged-for-your-own-good type of institution from lasting in the face of principle.
If you want to make this idiotic romanticism manifest, try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.
This particular mode of being is not without its virtues, but we can plainly see the limitations of it now that it's been pushed to its logical conclusion.
You've baited me here. Romeo and Juliet have, even in death, done a great deal towards mending a wholly destructive blood feud between their families; if Shakespeare wasn't writing a tragedy of errors they would have been successful. What good would their duties have done?
To be entirely honest, I think Shakespeare was a good enough writer to capture both the perspective of society and of the individual and as with all good art, it's open to interpretation.
But I am immensely irked by the turn taken by the scholarship and public view towards unconditional elegy of teenage love. Precisely because it's totally uncritical and one sided. There is more to R&J than the ostensible tragedy of a ancient grudge.
That the interpretation that see no taint in a true love that has dire consequences is the prevailing one is a good tell of what our society values more. But that hierarchy of values is neither universal, nor unquestionable.
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