In Favor of Arranged Marriages

Compared to “love” marriages (marriage after falling in love), arranged marriages have a much lower divorce rate. In the United States, about 50% of marriages end in divorce.

When a person marries for love, they see one side of a person before marriage and there is really no way to know how they will act after marriage or during parenthood. Often times people believe the signs of being in love are lust or that excited butterfly feeling. After being with a person for a long time, that feeling may go away. If a couple got married based on that feeling of “love”, once it goes away they don’t know how to be together, or they believe that this means that they must not love each other anymore. If you put that together with arguments and hard times, it is easy for a couple to say that they are not soul mates and they were not meant to be together, leading to divorce.

Arranged marriages do not start the same way as love marriages. They don’t begin their relationship with that excitement. They first learn to live together.

In addition, arranged marriages usually move a young woman to a young man’s home where conditions are very similar and her lifestyle will be alike in her new home. The same for the man: his lifestyle does not change much. When these two people get married, they are at a state in their life that it is easy to adjust to this new routine. On the other side, in the United States, people are encouraged to be independent and learn to live on their own before they choose to co-exist with another human being. This can make it more difficult for a couple to adjust to a new lifestyle of being together.

***This picture is us taking an elephant ride around the Mysore palace.