Cast your minds back to just after you’d finished school or college / university and imagine that your parents had arranged your marriage. Assume further it would have been with someone you knew.
Would it have been a good match? Would the two of you have made the marriage work or would it have worked naturally?
In my own case, I know exactly who my parents would have chosen and it would have been good for me, but probably not so good for her. I think we’d have worked successfully to make it work.
I have no clue who my parents would have chosen for me. After I finished college, I had been living away from home for four years and nearly entirely self-supporting for the last two. Plus, most everyone in my town leaves as soon as they can, so there was pretty much no one left there by the time I graduated college.
But I doubt that it would have worked, whoever they picked for me. I am a very very different person now than I was then, particularly in that if you piss me off, I am much more likely to tell you, rather than stewing and bitching to my girlfriends. In short, I’ve done a lot of maturing and growing since then, and can’t imagine that anyone I’d want to be with now would be someone who’d appreciate the then-me as well as the now-me, if that makes sense.
An arranged marriage would have gone very badly for me, I’m sure.
After I had been dating the Kangaroo_in_Black for a while, my mom told me something about what type of person she always thought I’d end up with.
Let’s just say she thought I’d end up with a person with personality type X. I’ve known a few people with personality type X, and there’s only one that I can think of that it might have worked with, and even him I doubt. I married the Kangaroo_in_Black, and he’s got personality type Y.
My mother says that once she got to know him, she said, “Ah. That makes sense.”
I think an arranged marriage would have worked out pretty well for me. In fact, given my single status, it STILL would work out pretty well, if we undergo a massive cultural/social paradigm shift.
I’m pretty easy going, and I’d like to think that I have enough good qualities that a woman who ended up married to me who was willing to make ANY kind of effort to appreciate me for who I am would be pretty happy with me. And my parents know me quite well, and I think that the type of woman I’d seem to be interested in would, in fact, be the type of woman I’d be interested in.
Given that even my best friends managed to pick utterly wrong people to set me up with on dates, I shudder to think how my parents would have done. Especially knowing the pool of available guys that they knew when I got out of college.
I had no idea I was such a difficult person to peg, but since even “surprise” birthday presents for me tend to be somewhat off the mark, I guess I’m pretty much a mystery.
I’m sure it would have been fine in terms of whom they would have chosen. I know how the guys I dated (and who my parents approved of) turned out, and also how the sons of my parents’ friends turned out (I’m assuming these people, or boys like them, would be the arranged marriage candidates). They all seem like they would have ended up pretty good life partners.
The thing that might have made things tough was my immaturity at that point. However, I assume that if they knew I was getting married at a young age, they would have put more effort into teaching me about being a good life partner, and I would have been more willing to learn. And I would have gone into the marriage with the right attitude about making it work.
Funny, but I think they would have chosen my husband–we got engaged right after I graduated from college, and it was a great relief to my dad, who had been secretly crossing his fingers that I would marry him.
It would have been a disaster. My father had no interests outside the bottle but I know from all the “what a lovely chap X is” I heard from my mother, that she would have chosen someone I would have had nothing in common with and, most likely, would have loathed.
Since my father was a high school teacher and a girl’s track coach, he probably would have set me up with one of his athletes. In fact, I have a pretty good idea who.
It wouldn’t have worked unless the arrangement was made several years after college. Nothing wrong with her, I just didn’t have my clues together enough to make a permanent relationship work back then.
My parents have successively done a poor job of figuring out my likes and dislikes. I would be relatively certain that anyone they found I would have, without having any intention of doing so, reduced to a sobbing mess within a month.
Good people-reading skills + Crankiness = Not pleasant to be around if you aren’t ready to slap around someone cranky
Depends on who won the arguement between my Mom and Dad.
My Mom’s a real ball buster, so I’d imagine she’d marry me off to another women who would continue busting my balls. (And no we wouldn’t “work things out”)
My Dad, OTOH, would have hooked me up with that Hawt little cheerleader. Which I might be more inclined to try and “work things out” but only as a favor to my Dad of course.
I’ve always wondered why parents placed such emphasis on finding a beautiful girl for their son. " What’s it to them?" I wondered. I thought it was some form of bragging by proxy. But now I get it; it’s because they anticipate the marriage will be better and their son happier if the woman is good looking!
My mother once mentioned that she’d hoped all of us sibs would have mates who shared our Polish background. None of us do/did.
I know for a fact my folks would *never * have matched me with my current husband, and if they’d set me up, my intended would be OK and I’d have probably lived an OK life doing all the “right” things. I’d have never joined the Navy, never gotten an engineering degree, never held the neat jobs I’ve had - I’d have been a SAHM in a Leave-It-to-Beaver-esque world.
The one person my parents ever expressed an opinion on - a friend from high school - would not have worked out well. Nothing wrong with him - he’s a terrific guy. His boyfriend thinks so too
They would never in a million years have chosen the sort of person I wound up with. My beliefs (political, religous and otherwise) are dramatically different from those of anyone in my family. Even at a very young age I had zero in common with them.
My parents *did * try, and they came up woefully wrong each time.
Not, let me hasten to assure you, that I couldn’t have gotten along with the guy they picked eventually. I am fairly easy-going. But the first time:
It was someone nine years older than me, who had already finished college and was out in the world while I was just entering college. Even then we both thought the difference was too vast.
The second time:
Was actually a very nice young man, who was even older than me than the firs. Eleven years, this time, I think. Lecherous old man.
And the last time they tried, was someone who’d been raised in India. I don’t know if him and I could get along. I never met him. But the mindsets seem to me to be vastly different.
I sometimes wonder what became of my parent friends daughter. She was smoking hot. We were friends since we were little kids because our parents hung out a lot together. After my Mom died we lost touch.
There was another friends daughter that would have been a lot better off with me than the looser asshole she wound up with. Was getting a divorse last I heard, good for her.
