We have a perfectly good phrase for forced marriage, that phrase being “forced marriage”.
Forced marriage and arranged marriage mean different things. Certainly a third party could arrange a marriage and then force someone into it. But a force marriage doesn’t have to be arranged. In the classic “Shotgun wedding”, the girl has sex with a boy she chooses, gets pregnant, and the girl’s father forces the boy to marry his daughter at gunpoint. He didn’t choose that pimply-faced hoodlum for his daughter out of an array of potential suitors. Rather, she chose him. So that’s a forced marriage but not an arranged marriage.
Of course, arranged marriages can be forced marriages, where families essentially buy and sell young people like livestock. But that doesn’t mean the two terms are synonyms.
Give it up, even sven. Your heart’s in the right place, but this is Dio The Internet White Knight you’re facing here. Dio’s always ready to go out and save every woman from herself. If a woman looks underage and decides to have sex with an older man, chooses to be in a polyamorous relationship, or decides to marry a man recommended by her parents, have no fear, Dio is here to save her with his patented “1,000 posts by lunchtime” technique!
Well, unless her name is Jenn Sperger and she happens to be accusing St. Brett Favre of something.
Actually, no, that’s not the case. In fact, it was never the case ever that all arranged marriages were forced, and many of the ones which were “forced” had nothing behind them except family disapproval, which varied widely in importance in time and place.
I realize it seems to be open season on Dio lately, and I’ve seen a number of threads where it’s been with more than a trivial amount of justification.
This isn’t one of them.
Here’s the quote that Dio was responding to in the original thread:
There’s a big difference between “no more forceful than a blind date or matchmaking” and what **Crotalus **just described:
In the situation Crotalus described, there’s nothing forced about it, but it’s unquestionably an arranged marriage - others are doing the arranging, and the participants expect that they’re going to marry the person selected for them unless serious alarm bells go off when they correspond with or meet the person chosen for them. Marriage is the default option.
If someone sets you up for a blind date, OTOH, any thoughts about marriage on anyone’s part are purely speculative. If someone goes on a blind date, marriage is unquestionably NOT the default. And even if the couple being set up do turn out to hit it off and eventually get married, those who introduced them will probably have nothing to do with planning the festivities. Anything that can properly be compared with that is NOT NOT NOT an arranged marriage.
Dio is absolutely right here. Find something else to jump on his ass about.
I would point out with respect to expats and South Asian expats especially they tend to have a far more traditional view of arranged marriage then people back home.
And it’s also super-common in even non-arranged marriages, either to try to break up a pair or to try to push one partner to go ahead and marry the other, so I fail to see why it’s so important here.
They’re worried about assimilation and loss of cultural heritage. The main thing they want is for their kids to marry within their ethnicity. Marrying outside of their ethnicity can be greeted with anything from simple disapproval to outright ostracization or disownership. That’s why I keep trying to make the point that they are not necessarily coerced into marrying a specific person, but they are strongly pressured into marrying within an approved pool.
I’m not sure what you mean by “important,” but all I said was that the coercion exists, I didn’t comment in its “importance.” I also don’t see how it’s a defense of the practice to point out that its worst characteristics can also exist outside of the practice.
But that’s true even when there is no “arranged marriage.” You can have no formal arrangement in your culture and still be pissed when your daughter brings home a black guy as her fiance.
Well, it means that there’s probably some level of coercion in everything we do. The level of coercion present in those cultures with arranged marriages is probably similar to that in our culture.
It’s not even close, in my opinion, and it’s not typical in the culture for parents to screen acceptable applicants. It’s certainly not the norm any more to confine parental approval to a specific ethnicity (not unheard of, but no longer the norm).
I guess I don’t understand what’s even being disputed anymore. My contention was that arranged marriages are coercive. If we agree on that, then what’s the beef? What am I wrong about?
It’s so true. My parents once said they didn’t think I should spend all my Christmas money on Metallica CDs and it was exactly like they robbed me at gunpoint.