Arranged marriage

Arranged marriages take place when parents or relatives choose a spouse for a young man or woman. This is a common practice in collectivist cultures in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Sri Lanka, and China. A common rationale for arranged marriages is that young people are too immature to choose an appropriate partner; parents or relatives who know them well and love them will have a better idea of who will be suitable. Cultures featuring arranged marriages as the societal norm believe that a person has a responsibility to parents and relatives, and they are obligated to marry the person that their loved ones choose. Marriages where individuals choose their own spouses are called love marriages, although the partners in arranged marriages frequently do fall in love. Arranged marriages have both positive and negative factors.

Background

Since ancient times, arranged marriages have been an important part of the cultural foundation in many countries, with people entering into such unions for political, social, and economic reasons. In ancient Egypt, one of the goals of arranged marriage was to keep bloodlines pure. Toward that end, many Egyptian kings and queens, such as Akhenaten, married their sisters and brothers. King Tutankhamun himself married his half sister to preserve royal bloodlines, as did Cleopatra more than a thousand years later.

The Romans also practiced arranged marriage because daughters were considered currency that could be used to form strategic alliances and strengthen the family’s military and political positions. The European monarchs used their royal princesses as the same kind of collateral well into the nineteenth century. In many cases, parents arranged the marriages when their daughters were babies; often the marriages were performed when the princesses were still children, and they remained at home with their families until they reached a more suitable age. Young princesses and noblewomen were frequently married to older men who lived in distant countries. Queen Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary arranged the marriage of her daughter Marie Antoinette, who traveled to France in May 1770, to marry the crown prince of France who later became King Louis XVI. If a woman’s husband died, the husband’s family often remarried her to another useful man.

Arranged marriages have been part of India’s culture since the fourth century CE when they were used as a method of uniting and maintaining upper caste families. Eventually, lower caste families adopted and used the system for the same purpose, and marriage was considered an alliance between two families instead of a union between two people. In his book, Marriage, the Family and Women in India, Rao Prakasa states that some of the benefits of arranged marriages include helping maintain social satisfaction in society, giving parents control of the family, preserving and continuing ancestral lineage, and facilitating the consolidation and extension of family property. The practical considerations of arranged marriages in India differ between Hindus and Muslims.

Overview

One of the differences between arranged marriages and love marriages is that an arranged marriage is established prior to the husband and wife establishing a relationship, and a love marriage is considered the culmination of an existing relationship between the bride and groom. In an arranged marriage, parents select a mate for their son or daughter with little input from the prospective bride or groom. If a child refuses the parent’s choice, the parents either respect the child’s wishes and choose someone else, or they rely on family and traditional pressures to convince their child to marry the selected person.

Physical attraction plays a major part in selecting a mate in Western societies, but arranged marriages are predicated on other factors as well. These factors include the reputation and the vocation of the family. A good reputation and some form of wealth makes families view prospective brides and bridegrooms favorably. Religion, traditional values, and compatible horoscopes are other important considerations.

Physical appearance and health are also primary considerations in arranged marriages. The absence of hereditary disease is an increasingly important factor; this is because many royal families often choose cousins or other close relations as spouses in arranged marriages, which allows such diseases to be passed to offspring. Queen Victoria of Great Britain passed hemophilia to her son Prince Leopold Duke of Albany and to her great grandson Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, Tsarevich of Russia.

By 2014, reports consistently showed that couples in arranged marriages divorced much less frequently than those in love marriages. Though the New York Times published findings in 2014 from expert studies that showed a decrease in the American divorce rate in the 2000s and stressed that the well-known 50 percent statistic was inaccurate, several sources still reported a divorce rate of about 4 percent for arranged marriages in 2023. In early 2015, a Washington Post article stated that the divorce rate in India, contrastingly, was only just over 1 percent. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), arranged marriages make up 90 percent of unions in the country. Opponents of arranged marriages argue that figures regarding arranged marriages are artificially low because cultures supporting arranged marriage make divorce much more difficult to attain than Western countries. Some news stories about arranged marriage emphasize its downside, reporting on families that kill young women for not accepting the partner they have chosen or forcing them into arranged marriages. In 2015, Canada passed a law that made forced marriage a criminal offense carrying a prison sentence of up to five years. Many other countries have also made forced marriage illegal.

In 2013, UNICEF issued a press release about the concerning trend of arranged marriages involving children under the age of fifteen. The organization reported that if the trend continued, between 2011 and 2020 more than eighteen million girls under the age of fifteen would become brides. In 2023, UNICEF reported that each year, at least twelve million girls are married before the age of eighteen; in the least developed countries, 12 percent of girls are married before age fifteen. Citing issues such as the violation of human rights, health endangerment, and the loss of education, UNICEF emphasized a need to reduce the practice and stated that pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading cause of death for girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen in developing countries.

A major advantage of arranged marriages is that they are usually built on a set of moral values and a similar belief system. Arranged marriages produce a workable equality of educational, financial, and world outlook, even if gender equality is skewed. Both partners tend to be of equal stature. Some people argue that arranged marriages relieve a lot of pressure because a pre-selected husband or wife frees people from the constraints of dating and allows them to be themselves.

The biggest negative of arranged marriages is relinquishing the freedom of choosing a marriage partner to someone else. Another disadvantage is the possibility that love will not grow between partners and the union will turn out to be disastrous.

In 2012, psychology professor Pamela Regan and her research colleagues at California State University conducted a study of the marriages of fifty-eight Indian Americans living in the United States. Twenty-eight participants said their marriages had been arranged by relatives or professional matchmakers, and the remaining thirty described their marriages as love matches. The researchers had the two groups complete questionnaires on love, relationship satisfaction, and commitment and found no differences between the two groups.

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