Specifically, the act of not going through with one. I ask this having recently watched Amok Time - Spock's arranged wife, T'Pring, rejects him, choosing instead another Vulcan male, and using Kirk as a way to get Spock out of the picture, via Kal-if-fee. Indeed, Sarek must have done the same - he married Amanda of his own volition, so he had to have rejected an arranged Vulcan mate. Did he force his bride-to-be to a battle to the death, as well? And yet, there's Enterprise, wherein T'Pol is arranged to be married to Koss, but doesn't want to, much like T'Pring. And to solve this problem, she... just doesn't do it. So, why on Earth did T'Pring use such a brutal method of breaking off the marriage if it doesn't need to be done that way? And why would the Vulcans keep up a tradition like that?
What we learn in all these fight-to-the-death episodes is really that fights to the death basically never happen. Which makes good sense IMHO. Vulcans are a brutal species by nature. If there's disagreement on who gets the woman, it's better for the community that the winner takes it all and the sore loser is immediately put to death. A duel is a nicely ceremonial way of achieving that, and one likely to satisfy the primal urges of not just the contestants but the community watching them. Of course, this sort of pressing need to kill the loser goes away when Vulcans go all stoic in the Surakist revolution. But only because the Vulcans involved exercise extreme mental self-control. Asking for the actual lust to go away is evidently way too much, so the emotionally driven ceremony for choosing the mate is allowed to persist. And once in a blue moon (even if Vulcan doesn't have one), matters get so out of hand that the push comes to a strangle. Although never in any aired Star Trek adventure does it lead to the (permanent) death of anybody involved. Why did T'Pring deliberately force a fight? She fails to refute Spock's theory on why she did it, so we could simply go by that one. The fight is a necessary precaution because if Spock refuses to grant divorce, T'Pring can now snare him in a Catch-22 where Spock will be humiliated and court-martialed if victorious. Now, Spock could simply have backed off. T'Pring didn't give him a chance to do that at the ceremony, insisting on the fight from the very start. But if she had any reason to suspect Spock would refuse divorce, then her best bet would indeed be to wait until Spock was in plak tow, incapable of rational thought, and unable to avoid the trap. This is fundamentally different from T'Pol calmly negotiating the issue with a mate who is not yet in plak tow... Now, why would T'Pring think Spock should refuse a divorce? We don't know whether she was correct, but potential rationales abound. Spock is a halfbreed misfit and might well cling on to what he has in the knowledge that he will never get a second chance. Or, Spock is a halfbreed incapable of the mental control required for a quiet divorce. Or, the factors that allowed Sarek to marry his invalid son in the first place are so overwhelming that T'Pring has no other hope of fighting them (she may well have tried, behind the scenes, but since Sarek refuses to even attend the ceremony, we don't learn of this). Timo Saloniemi
Regarding Sarek, we learn in ST5 that he was initially married to Vulcan princess who subsequently died. This was the mother of Sybok. Sarek's marriage to Amanda was subsequent to her death and his marriage to Perrin was subsequent to Amanda's death. --Alex
Ah, thanks you both, that's cleared everything up. I especially can't believe I forgot about Sarek's previous marriage...
Because she's a bitch. Wait, a minute, what are you even talking about? T'Pol does marry Koss, in the episode Home. He later decides to let her go. Half the traditions, rituals, and customs they have don't make sense for a technologically advanced race who supposedly devote themselves entirely to logic.
In Breaking the Ice, T'Pol basically just refused to marry him (though as you say, she later did go through with it).