No, I would not.
Thank you, I thought I was going to be the only one to say it.
Relationships are complex and private. It is not my place to judge others on their relationships. I’m always astonished that people think they have that right and that level of moral superiority over others.
There is nothing that says an arranged marriage can’t be “voluntary and wanted by both parties” - it’s not the same as a forced marriage.
I’d be ok with it if the other spouse was ok with it, same as for a not-arranged marriage.
I voted No. I don’t have enough brain cycles to care about other people’s marriages. Though I might care or judge if I am personally affected by it, e.g., in case of parents’ marriage.
It could be more subtle than this:
[ul]
[li]It might be that the boy/girl has a partner in mind, but they still need to get a (nominal, in some cases) approval from their parents for the partner. A friend of mine met her husband in college and dated him for some time, but this might not go down well with all of their extended family. So the couple and their parents cooked up a story wherein they were just acquaintances, and it was the parents who suggested & OK’d the match. :smack: [/li][li]The groom might have more say than the bride in the marriage. Sad fact.[/li][li]The family might agree to some of the expectations of the boy/girl from the marriage, while overriding others. For instance, it’s not an uncommon scenario that marriage outside your economic class is fine, but outside your religion/caste is a no-no. [/li][li]The family might decide when to get the children married. For example, the boy/girl might be willing to marry, but not just yet. Maybe they want to enjoy a couple more years of independence before settling into a family. Some parents would agree to this request, some wouldn’t. Some would be ok as long as you are married by, say, thirty. Also, it is common to not marry a younger male child when he has an older brother; and same with sisters.[/li][li]Other minor things: whether the married couple stay with their parents or move out, etc. [/li][/ul]
At the end of the day, I think of it more as a long and protracted negotiation, with compromises from both the parents and the children. Who has more say in the process depends on a lot of factors: how independent the child is, whether they are earning, whether the parents are literate, whether they are liberal, etc.
(Specifically, an Indian settled in America would be more progressive, I expect, so your anecdotes are likely to be at least a bit biased.)
A few things:
- Yes, you can say no to arranged marriages in the upper class homes of India. It is a BIG FUCKING DEAL though, especially if there is no reason. I mean, if you find out he said he was a college graduate and he didn’t even finish high school, or his sister got pregnant out of wedlock, you can say no for those reasons easily. If you are just saying no because you don’t like him, well, you can, but be aware you have sort of a limited amount of vetoes, and after a while your parents will insist.
- Poorer houses don’t really get a veto.
- Every veto comes with a price. You are expected to do what your parents say. Every time you disobey them it drives a wedge. Now Westerners don’t care (and I consider myself Western), they (and I) think individual happiness is more important, but in India, the family comes higher than the individual. You are expected to live in this society and be a good team player. Parents who do not get their kids married off are considered failures as parents.
- Divorce is anathema.
All this being said, it does contribute very highly to a culture in which men cheat and women are expected to put up with it. I’m not saying all Indian men cheat, by any means, but there is a large subset that do so, and they are shameless about it. They will literally say to you “My wife was arranged, I don’t love her, I just married her because my parents said so.”
I’m 100% positive that some Indian women cheat, too, but they are not shameless about it - they cannot afford to be. So they cheat very quietly, inside their own homes, and rarely talk about it.
The question was do I judge them? It’s hard to be definitive. It is sooooo easy to say “just divorce” but the cost of divorce is heavy - isolation and disapproval of all your peers, shame of your parents, etc., etc. At the same time, I think all of that means precisely jack if you are not going to at least try to make your marriage work. I am not a believer in “Twoo Wuv” and think you can make a go of it with a lot of people in this world, as long as both halves are willing to try.
So I guess my answer is - it depends. It is not a black and white situation!
Arranged marriages aren’t necessarily forced marriages. Family vetting of prospective candidates is one thing, family insistence on this or that one quite another.
This.
I disagree. Most of these teen-aged girls are under the age of consent, and are, in legal terms, being raped. Their entire lives are subsumed by the relationship, and economic opportunities for the rest of their lives are cut short, especially if they become pregnant. Don’t get me wrong, teens are going to play, and that’s fine if it’s done safely, but these stats are about girls moving in with men (establishing households); they are separated from their support system and become financially dependent upon the man.
There are a precious few who are smart, strong, and supported (by family or the State) enough to break free, finish school. Those who do may manage to reach fairly high up the scale toward their full potential. But you really can’t believe that a 15 or 16 year old girl with a child is going to be able to take it as far as she could have on her own, can you?
It’s not a matter of moral superiority. Those of us who came to maturity as the AIDs epidemic was taking over the US media see these things differently. Look at Africa. 90% of the women who contract AIDs there get it from their husbands, who got it by cheating. The geographic regions where the spread was slowest were the areas where women have the right to say “no” to their husbands.
STDs are real, and many of them are for life. In most areas of the world treating them requires medicines that would destroy a family financially, if indeed the money could be found at all. In most of the areas we are talking about, syphilis means a long drawn out and horrific death. Chlamydia means pain, exhaustion, uterine and fallopian scarring, still births or premature births and all future babies being infected. HIV is a death sentence. Even in developed countries with good healthcare, herpes and genital warts will cause a lifetime of discomfort, and vastly restrict the social life of the innocent party going forward. Warts for a female can cause cancer later on.
If your partner has every reason to believe you are being faithful, and is making decisions like risking pregnancy or STDs with you under that assumption, what you are doing deserves censure, as surely as if you’d set fire to the bed.
Nicely put. Ultimately it comes down to this. Marriage is not a right or a choice, it’s a duty. And it’s your parents’ duty to get you married.
I am not against arranged marriage per se. In fact, I think the lack of choice (in marriage and in divorce) and the high stakes of the marriage forces the participants to at least try to make the damn thing work. (Obviously, when the marriage doesn’t work, the same lack of choice bites everyone, especially the couple.)
After thinking some more and after seeing Anaamika’s perspective, I think I should qualify my previous response somewhat. I still won’t stand in judgment of the cheater (hopefully), but I will not advice the cheated to keep quiet and put up with it either. If my opinion was sought*, I’ll encourage the cheated to evaluate their situation and their possible options, including counseling and/or divorce. No one should be forced to live an unhappy life because of another.
*Not that my advice are in any demand. 
Are you exposing your spouse to the risk of an infectious disease?
If the cheating results in a child, will supporting that child have an economic impact on your spouse?
There’s plenty to judge people on, regardless of whether the marriage was arranged or not.
The scenario you and Anaamika describe is absolutely terrifying for me. I don’t want to get married at all, and I didn’t ask to be born! With that said, isn’t the Times of India pretty influential? Here’s a piece in there: “Marriage is not for all women.”
It would matter more to me whether getting a divorce was an option for the cheater, and what the consequences of that might be, than it would how the marriage came to be. I also might give more leeway in a culture where there is a strong expectation that everybody should marry somebody than I would if staying unmarried were an option. Marriage isn’t for everybody. If both partners in the marriage had decided to have an open marriage, or to stay married in name only but live separately and see other people, I wouldn’t judge them at all.
Is that true for Indian men as well as for Indian women? I know there used to be a double standard in Western cultures where divorced women were generally judged much more harshly than divorced men, is that the case in Indian families that practice arranged marriage?