Perhaps not in the case of the article in Slate, but usually when it is on the news, it is from a culture that also wouldn’t mind giving a “blind eye” to an unfaithful husband. So even if he is reluctant in the marriage, it won’t be “as bad” for him to find someone else as it would be for her.
Also, the OP asked why mothers would continue it for their daughters, going with the assumption that the fathers would be OK with that. I remember reading an article about child brides (which is where the objection really should be, not in the arranged part), and it mentions a couple of the fathers marrying their daughters away reluctantly. The rest of the family needed money/food to survive, or the father was too much in debt and had to give his daughter away. In either case, the fathers would’ve wanted to have kept the daughters for longer. Yes, eventually arranging their marriages, but at an older age.
It’s important to remember that “arranged marriages” is an umbrella term.
This same thread has people using it to cover forced marriages and those where the bride and groom haven’t met or barely so, but both have agreed to go forward. Parents or a pro acting as a matchmaker? The difference between that and friends, siblings or coworkers doing so isn’t in who does it, it’s in what range of responses the matched couple can realistically have.
I don’t know why I felt compelled to add this but my dad recently died, he was married to my mom for 45? years in a love marriage.
My mom has shown nothing I can identify as grief, when I asked her if she doesn’t miss him she said things are easier now and she can get much more done. She even mentioned specifically not having to get ice cream for him which was apparently a pain in the ass for her.
Totally within the realm of “normal”, especially if the deceased spouse was dependant or just high maintenance. Sometimes you see recognizable grief months or years later, and sometimes not. Sometimes they’ve already done their grieving before the death, privately or publicly. And sometimes denial, bargaining etc just aren’t part of a person’s process.
The thing about an arranged marriage is that a potential partner is scrutinized by at least one person who is NOT in love with him/her. This is a good thing. When we are in love, especially if we’re young, we tend to overlook danger signs that are obvious to others. And dispassionate observers can see that he’s a party animal who’s not happy unless he’s got a group of friends to have fun with, while her idea of a good time is to pray and meditate all by herself. And possibly the observers will notice if one or both potential partners are not really mature enough for marriage.
On the other hand, if the goal of an arranged marriage is to pair up people without regard to their individual quirks and whether or not they are compatible, I think that’s a recipe for a lot of really unhappy people. It seems that in societies that practice arranged marriages, divorce is not really an option, although as noted, frequently male infidelity is winked at.
I think that it really all depends on whether or not both parties have the option to say “no, I don’t want that person as my spouse” or “no, I don’t want to get married”. It seems that in most societies that practice arranged marriages, there is incredible pressure to GET MARRIED, whether or not you love or even like the other person. Not getting married, or waiting to get married, is not considered an option, at least for women.
But that’s not the choice facing the groom. His choice is whether picking his own spouse is “as bad” as marriage to a woman he doesn’t know. Why is he perpetuating the system?
And his kids. Will they model this behavior or reject it?
Eva Luna’s anecdote makes me wonder whether the men who go home to submit to arranged marriages are disproportionately those who are lacking in dating and/or general social skills.
Although men too end up in arranged marriages in those countries and I’m not sure they have always that much of a say in them, either.
The only person I knew well who had an arranged marriage had never met her husband before. It’s not like he was an elder guy who wanted a sex toy and domestic servant and picked the pretty 14 yo down the street. Basically, he was her age and was told that his family had found a good match and he went along with this, seeing her for the first time when they got married, as I wrote.
They had an acceptable marriage, had a son, moved to France. Some years later, he became batshit insane and she divorced him.
My high school classmate got into an arranged marriage at 19. I figured the parents sought a husband as soon as they could so that she wouldn’t get Westernized ideas in college. She said she accepted it and that it’s adequate for her. Sure there are no fireworks, but that he was a good husband who provided for the family and herself.
I saw a Dear Abby entry recently of a guy who confessed to his wife he only married her to have kids and not of genuine love. Guess he was just one step near an arranged marriage that he arranged himself.
It’s a well-known psychological thing. Once you do something, it becomes more acceptable to do that thing. We look for reasons to justify what has happened. We want to make our ideas of other people congruous–our family is a loving family, but they did this one thing we disagree with, so that one thing becomes less disagreeable.
And, yes, there’s a lot of correlation implying causation. The results are never going to be as bad as you feared. You’ve grown to accept your life. So your son or daughter will, too. You had an okay outcome, so the action itself must be okay, and, thus, you must have been wrong.
Note, I’m just talking about forced marriages, not all arranged ones. An arranged marriage does have benefits. I’ve sometimes caught myself wishing I came from such a culture. It does seem like these people more often than not do eventually fall in love.
Well, the guy in my example wasn’t my best friend or anything, but he seemed pretty normal, isn’t at all weird or antisocial, and has a pretty large circle of friends. I never got any chauvinist pig vibes from him, and though I certainly didn’t date him, I have pretty sensitive radar for that sort of thing. He was in his late 20s when he got married, which wouldn’t be at all unusual by U.S. standards, but by Indian standards from everything I’ve heard it was time for him to settle down.
The funny part was when I was talking to my mom about how glad I was that the culture of my origin has left arranged marriage behind as of 3 - 4 generations ago, her response was “oh I don’t know that it’s such a horrible idea - I’d like to think I would have picked with your best interests at heart.” Which was pretty funny considering that she and my dad were divorced by the time I was 10 years old, and he wasn’t her first husband. And she’s a feminist Birkenstock-wearing hippie.
Interesting you should mention this. (How many readers of this thread were thinking of it?)
Yet, in that (fictional) story, it was the opposite of this OP’s premise: The arranged marriage actually worked out well for Tevye and Golde, yet Tevye supports his daughters when they want to marry for love.
In some countries, having your parents hobnob and make arrangements IS dating, and may be considered a safe and comforting variety of it. If you’re not familiar with the frustrating and terrifying institution of western-style dating, why would you be desperate to try it?
Part of your happiness in marriage (the much longer part, it seems to me) comes from how you and your family get along with your in-laws. With an arranged marriage this problem is solved, or at least addressed by someone with considerably longer experience with these practical matters.
Not to say there probably aren’t unhappy or abusive arranged marriages, or that some people probably desparately know they want someone different. But IMO they do have a lot going for them, and should at least be an option.
Tevye supports his first daughter’s desire to marry a man who they all know well, and consider to be part of the family, because Tzeitel is in love with him. Tevye also is not fond of Lazar Wolf, which probably helped Tzeitel’s case. Tevye is unhappy that his second daughter marries the scholar (even though he approves of scholarship), but accepts it in the end. He disowns his third daughter when she marries the Christian, but in the end he wishes them well under his breath.
I think that while Tevye did support Tzeitel wishes, he was not supportive at all of the other two. And I’ve GOT to find that book and read it.
Personal anecdote time! My parents disapproved of my husband when we were dating, and didn’t want me to marry him. We’ve been married for 36 years. My parents approved of my sibs’ spouses, and both of my sibs are now divorced.
My parents loved me, but they never truly understood me, nor did they understand my tastes. My parents were always suggesting this or that to me, or forcing me to take classes that I hated and didn’t need. I shudder to think who they might have regarded as a suitable match for me. If I couldn’t rely on them to pick out even a blouse that I’d like, or a class, how could I rely on them to choose a life mate for me? Now, I’ll grant that I got married too early, and to the wrong man…but the man I did choose for myself was a better choice than any they would have come up with. And I’ll be fair, my husband’s parents weren’t too terribly fond of me either.
Arranged marriages can work…if the parents really understand the child, or if the consequences of not being married outweigh the consequences of a poor match. In Tevye’s society, an unmarried woman was a failure, and likely to starve to death. Women couldn’t really earn their own living. Yes, the matchmaker collected her fees, but she was also shameless in taking any food that she could get her hands on. I got the impression that she was living very much hand-to-mouth, scrounging a meal or snack from whoever she could. Tevye loved his daughters very much, but he absolutely could not afford to allow them to remain unmarried, and their prospects were very, very poor.
Yep. I went overseas with him, got pregnant (and couldn’t get an abortion because we were overseas) and felt obligated to raise our child with him. Now it’s too much trouble to housebreak a new man.
My parents arranged a date for me with the son of some sort of business acquaintance. It was an unmitigated disaster, the dude more or less tried to date rape me in the back room of a bar that my band was playing at [I figured that we could have dinner before the gig and hang out after the gig] and my drummer had to pull him off me and the bouncer threw him out. I am pretty sure he showed up to pick me up drunk, he was certainly a violent and surly drunk at the bar.
Next day I called my parents and told them about my wonderful date and informed them that if they ever set me up with anybody again I would stop speaking to them.
My mom wanted to set me up with a guy who later went to a party and killed a few strangers and then himself, for no known reason. I like to remind her about that every once in a while when she bugs me about the men I date. At least I don’t date mass murderers!