Why do reluctant women in arranged marraiges end up perpetuating it?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This article today in Slate.com brought to something I’ve always wondered about societies that practice this type of thing. I know that in India, this sort of thing is still common enough to shock us wild and crazy Americans who believe in love and dating and screwing up on your own. Our own Anaamika has talked a bit about her upbringing and some of the pressures parents have on their kids. Being Chinese, I know that this was fairly common in China just a few generations ago.

But inevitably, when I read about the women who are going through the arranged marriages in this system, its pretty much 100% reluctant young women who wished they could get out of it. In some parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, girls are married off, essentially sold, to even older men. What bugs me is that the mothers in these cases never seem to protest too loudly at the arrangement, as if they’ve completely forgotten their own experiences. Maybe the women have no power at all, but I’ve read here and there about mothers and aunts zealously enforcing honor codes and marriage arrangement to the point where I don’t believe they are simply coerced by the men but active participants.

Why does this happen? You’d think the moms would remember how they felt when they had this happen to them, and fight back against their daughters going through the same thing. As someone who grew up in America, I don’t think I could perpetuate this kind of thing to my kids, or embrace the concept of familial honor as worth selling my daughter to de facto slavery over it. I’d be the first one to help her escape, and I’d get the hell out of dodge with her.

And this unfortunately seems to be the attitude in parts of Africa where they still practice female genital mutilation. Are these women delusional? Do they not look down between their legs everyday and get pissed about what they were forced to go through? Why do they seem eager to force the next generation, their own daughters, to go through with it?

2

I don’t know much about arranged marriage, but I’m guessing rationalization has a lot to do with it. A young unmarried woman who is against arranged marriage hates the idea of them and wants it to never happen to her. But after she is forced to go through with it, she might start rationalizing it, and thinking “all my relatives have done it, and my husband isn’t that bad of a man, and I don’t know if I really could have found a better husband on my own” and so on. By the time she has daughters old enough to be married off, she might remember her hatred at the idea of arranged marriage, but view it in the same way we all remember silly ideas we had as teenagers.

3

When who your daughter marries influences if your family will eat or starve in hard times your child’s emotional happiness and romantic wishes are kind of secondary.

4

I suspect that these will typically be strongly patriarchical societies in which women don’t have much say anyway.

5

Let me play devil’s advocate here. Couldn’t this be evidence that arranged marriages aren’t as bad as they appear to outsiders? Perhaps the women who protested against their own arranged marriages when they were young now realize it actually worked out well for them. So when they see their daughters and nieces protesting, they push them onward because they know that the young women will eventually realize it was for the best.

To make a comparison a Westerner would be more familiar with, we don’t consider it strange that parents send their children off the school every morning even though they presumably remember how much they hated going to school when they were young.

6

Well, to me, they seem like slavery and rape. The only reason I can see that women would have (or still do) submit if they don’t want the marriage is because they feel it’s better than being dumped out into the street, beating optional.

7

I think it’s an example of a pathology that is all too common everywhere - people can feel deeply unwilling to grant other people freedoms that they never had for themselves (the abused becoming the abuser, if you will.) In some circumstances it probably takes a strong person to be able to break that cycle.

8

Well, in many cases it could be because she never had any problem with it and it turned out well. “Arranged marriages” and “forced marriages” are not the same thing; an arranged marriage can be completely consensual for all the parties involved.

And as far as forced marriages go, I’ve always found it sexist that no one ever seems to think that a man might be unhappy at being forcibly married to some woman he’s never met.

9

A little research shows that apparently arranged marriage and love-based marriages have about the same level of happiness. Please be sure to read the information on the sites cited below:

Cites:

From Psychology Today

From one of many blogs out there:

http://whywereason.com/2011/09/10/the-psychology-of-marriage-choice-or-arranged/

So it appears that the answer to the question seems to vary, especially depending on the length of the marriage. I like the saying that Love marriages are like putting a boiling pot of water on a cold stove, and Arranged marriages are like putting a cold pot of water on a hot stove…the assumption that mothers are putting their daughters through a horrible experience assumes that the mothers feel the same about their marriages after 20 years as they did when they were first married.

Personal contribution - I’ve known several folks with arranged marriages, and they all seem happy, but they are older couples who have been married for decades…If I had asked them when they first got married, I am not certain that same happiness level would have been expressed.

While in Turkey recently, I came to know a man who was in his early thirties, and he had been pressured to enter an arranged marriage by his family. He finally rebelled, and has married an Australian woman. We discussed this issue at some length. I learned that more arranged marriages happen in Turkey than love-based marriages, but that is changing in the big cities.

I have no dog in this fight…I have a love-based marriage that has lasted for 49 years, and can see both sides of the story.

10

Agreed that it’s important to note the difference between forced marriage and arranged marriage. Arranged marriages come in different shades, and modern arranged marriages resemble online dating more than the old “you’ll see your husband for the first time on your wedding day” model. Most modern arranged marriages involve ample input from the bride, a “getting to know you” period, and of course adult participants. It’s not actually a particularly bad model.

Forced marriage, on the other hand, often involves underaged and powerless young women with the threat of coercion being forced into relationships they have no input about. Often this leads to the end of their educational activities and other aspirations.

So why do people perpetuate forced marriage?

When you can’t support yourself independently and are dependent on men, being a “good wife” is one of the few routes to security in the world. Unattached women, then, become a threat to that. Basically, if your security depends on the scarcity value of sex and reproduction, you end up with strong incentives to make sure that sex stays scarce. This is why women have always been and still remain among the first to heap shame on “sluts.” Women who have sex outside the prescribed boundaries are seen as undercutting the ones who “play by the rules.” Those at the top of the heap-- wives with children who will later support them in old age-- have the strongest motivation to keep things as they are.

In purely practical terms, an unattached daughter of marriageable age poses all kinds of risks. She can get knocked up, raped, run off with some rando, etc. You may desperately wish she could finish her education, but each and every year is a risk that can affect the rest of your family. After all, if she gets knocked up, who is going to take care of the kid? If she gets raped and can’t get married after, who is going to feed her for life (and what kind of life is that?) Eventually. you may decide it’s worth a less-than-ideal situation for one of your daughters to buy some safety and security.

Finally. sometimes it is just resignation. When you think about it, it’s just something that people do. I’ve seen forced marriage ceremonies where everyone was laughing and joking about the poor girl. It wasn’t because they were cruel and callous. It’s just that they saw it as just another rite of passage that isn’t particularly fun, but needs to get done for life to move forward.

11

Here is the dirty little secret. “Arranged” or “forced” marriages are a lot more common in the South Asian/Middle Eastern diaspora’s overseas then they are back home. If you are in an alien land, you tend to become a bit more attached to traditions, whatever your gender or indeed background. It is the same for persons in these areas who have recently moved from rural surroundings to urban and often cosmopolitan centers.

I would also caution against believing the stories of older women about “arranged marriages”, there is a big cultural taboo against not fulfilling the form. My dear grandmother insisted till her dying day that her marriage was arranged, but when I read her diaries recently… lets just say that I wished that she had had an arranged marriage.

Moreover, many of these interfering old bats are interested in match making, its a hobby for them. They would like to set you up with someone, in the same way as your friends might.

12

“1 in 25 arranged marriages end in divorce.”
-Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
To play devil’s advocate, how well do most American self-arranged marriages fair?

Being in high-tech over the years, I meet a lot of Indians. I don’t know if they are “arranged”, but every once and awhile, one of them goes on vacation back home to India for a few weeks, and comes back married to a person they never mentioned before.

We Americans take a view that we have the right to do whatever we want, whenever we want and that marriage should be a fairytale story of romance. But from the woman’s point of view, is getting married to a guy you and your family have known since you were a child really that much worse than spending your twenties and thirties scouring dating sites and singles bars looking for some magical lifelong connection?

I think they can always refuse the arrangement (especially if they are living in America). But when push comes to shove, they would rather have the stability of going with the devil they know and not being disowned by their families than to take their chances on the more high-risk dating market.

Call my un-romantic, but maybe marriage should be less about “love til death do you part” and more about the economic contract that it is.

This is mostly based on my experience with educated and relatively affluent Americanized Chinese and Indian people. So it might be very different in more backward countries where women are treated like chattel.

13

An Indian-American male friend of my sister’s did this. He owned a house and had plenty of money but for some reason he and his wife lived with his parents. And as far as my sister saw, it wasn’t like he was married at all. He did whatever he wanted (well, I don’t know whether he got involved with other women or not, but he went on vacation with my sister once [they were really just friends although they had dated like 10 years earlier as teenagers]) and he never talked about his wife, even right after they got married. He must have gotten married just to please his parents. He was very American as far as I saw. I wonder how his wife felt about the situation. And what the situation is now, because my sister hasn’t talked to him in a few years.

14

I just picked up a new patient this week, a recent widow married for 49 years in an arranged marriage she didn’t want. Her grief over her husband’s death is as genuine and loving as any love marriage I’ve ever seen. So, yeah, for some of them at least, the answer is, “because it worked out okay in the end.” She told me about how scared she was, how she begged her parents not to make her marry, how their first months were isolating and sad and she seriously considered ending her own life. And she also told me that over time, she got to know him better and he always took care of her and was gentle and slow with the sex thing (unlike an American marriage, they didn’t “do it” on the wedding night…they didn’t have sex until they’d been married almost a year, and they both wanted to have sex) and that as she realized he was a good man, she fell in love with her husband. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, she tells me. It doesn’t always, but you’re supposed to “make love” with your husband, and that’s literal love, not sex.

15

I used to work with a woman of Middle Eastern descent who was in a childless arranged marriage with a man who lived in another state. They rarely saw each other, and she talked about him like he was her brother. We’re also pretty sure she had an affair with a locum who came in to work with us. :eek: She and the locum were actually quite compatible, IMNSHO. IDK if they continued the relationship after they both left (she was fired, his contract was terminated) but he died shortly afterwards; I never found out how. :frowning: Both of them were in their 40s.

16

I think part of the reason is that people are spiteful; if I had to do it, so do you. Same reason why parents try to force everyone to have kids (so you’ll be as miserable as they are :slight_smile: ).

17

To the best of my recollection,I’ve never seen an article, book , etc written by someone whose raised-in-American-society* parents were pressuring them into an arranged marriage. It always seems to be the immigrant parents wanting their thoroughly American children to follow the “old ways” (not only regarding marriage and which they may expect their children to follow long after the original culture has changed) . There’s no reason to assume that those who grew up in a different culture where arranged marriage was the norm would have objected to the idea of entering one.

  • I am leaving out any groups that limit their exposure to general American culture- if a person’s parents only socialize within a group, live in an neighborhood populated only by that group, send them to schools attended only by that group, don’t allow TV etc, then that person wasn’t raised in American society for the purposes of my answer.
18

The two people (and their significant others) who I know are in arranged marriages seemed to either be OK with it from the start (the younger), or already happy and very much in a stable marriage (the older one).

The younger one, other than not meeting his wife in person before the wedding, seemed to have had an average long-distance relationship, once the match was made. They talked, shared plans, used Skype, planned parts of their wedding, etc. And, after marriage, since he had troubles with his visa to return, they spent some time back in India, living together before she had to get the big shock of completely moving to a new country. So far, the relationship seems good. She is now in a master’s program, he got a full-time job, they seem to get along well, etc.

19

It’s interesting that the question only asks about women being reluctant. The linked Slate article makes clear that their incompatibilities made the husband just as miserable.

20

I’m pretty sure a good chunk of them are arranged.

My favorite story is about the first client (an Indian guy) who I took all the way through the employment-based green card process. Just as we were about to file his green card application, I called him to check his travel schedule, because he needed to be physically present in the U.S. on the day of filing. Obviously he’d been waiting for this moment for quite some time and had been bugging us to do final review, etc. and file it.

So he picks up, and I tell him “hey V., we’re ready to file your I-485. What’s your travel schedule?”

“Nooooo, you can’t do that! I’m leaving for India next week to get married!”

“Um, congratulations, who’s the lucky girl? Just have her fill out her questionnaire now, and then we’ll file both of your applications as soon as you get back.”

“I don’t know - it’s going to be one of three. I’m pretty sure which one, but I’m going to decide when I get there.”

He and I were on pretty friendly terms, so I asked him “OK, if this is offensive, you don’t need to answer, but I’m honestly curious. You’ve been here a long time. Why are you choosing to get married this way?”

“Well, I tried the whole American-style dating thing, and it didn’t work out for me, so now I’m trying this.”

They had a stateside reception a few months later, and he invited me - I was just about the only American there except for a couple of his co-workers. Not a full-on Big Fat Indian Wedding, but still lots of fun, in the party room of a friend’s condo complex, with Indian food, dressed-up guests (maybe 60 or so), and Punjabi stick dancing. The bride was also a highly educated professional and went on to be recertified as a dentist in the U.S. - definitely not a submissive wallflower. I’m still in touch with the groom 10 years or so later, and they have 2 kids and seem like a normal, happy, well-adjusted family.

Now hey, it’s not for me, but it seems to work for them, and for any number of Indian couples whose cases I’ve worked on. And it’s a far cry from forced marriage - these women have choices.

Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal