Arranged Marriages

Arranged Marriages

We are all familiar with the story: boy meets girl, boy falls in love

with girl, boy and girl get married. For the majority of the western

world, this is our ideal image of a great beginning to a perfect

marriage. But it is important to realize that while India is very

modernized in some aspects, they still keep to the tradition of

arranged marriages. Marriages formed out of love AKA "love marriages"

do happen in India but it is not the norm. It is an accepted fact that

a person's family will play a role in picking the marriage partner.

Often the most important aspect is the bond between the two families,

rather than the relationship between the couple being married. This

tradition has carried into the western world and still undergoes

nowadays.

While to many people raised in the west, this might sound odd. It is

important to remember that in Indian society an arranged marriage is

seen as an act of love. Since marriage is one of the most important

decisions a person will ever make and because divorce is not accepted

among most Indians, it is imperative that the marriage choice is

carefully thought out and planned. How can a young person make such an

important decision on his/her own? Instead, the family (usually the

parents) look for certain traits in a marriage partner. Some desirable

traits looked for in both male and female are: matching levels of

education, matching cultures, close parental cities, matching

religions, and matching vegetarians/non-vegetarians just to name a

few.

Often, this turns into an interview process where photos are provided

of the boy/girl in question along with bio-data about ...

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... a commonly held belief that brides are the embodiment of that

family's honour and pride, the girl must be from good family and have

good manners. She should be respectable and have no taint on her name.

Does she have the makings of a good wife and mother? Does she want to

work after marriage or stay at home?

All these factors put together cannot really decide whether arranged

marriages should be acceptable but it has been and will always remain

a strong tradition in the Indian society. It can go two ways, there

are many arranged marriages, which are complete disasters, and there

are also many that start out based on infatuation and grow stronger as

time passes. But I think that as long as one looks for the right

characteristics in a potential spouse, then, arranged marriage or not,

it should all work out in the end.