Arranged marriages have been quite popular in the past and even in our current age, there are some countries in which the concept of arranged marriages is still practiced today. There are several pros and cons of arranged marriages which we will examine in detail in this article. Since family members or other professional matchmakers choose a partner for the bride, there might be a higher chance that those people match with each other since they might share similar views on the world and might have the same goals in life.
Therefore, if experienced family members search for a suitable partner, the chances that the fit between the marriage couple will be quite decent might increase. Since parents have much more life experience than their kids, they might also be better able to decide which partner might fit for their girl or their boy and which would not. For instance, in many countries, parents try to find a partner for their son or their daughter which has a high social status so that their children can marry up and have a higher social status themselves, which often also translates into a higher overall quality of life.
Many marriages, especially arranged marriages, are not done due to love, but due to the fact that one partner wants to improve his or her wealth level. This was the norm rather than the exception only one century ago and until now, the financial component related to marriages is quite important. Another benefit of arranged marriages is that partners often have quite similar backgrounds and cultural values. Most often, parents choose partners for their kids that have similar cultural values so that they will also fit well into the family.
Similar values also make it more likely that the marriage works out since there might be fewer conflicts between the partners in the long run. In general, arranged marriages always come from a rational standpoint and emotions do not play a role at all.
This can be regarded as either positive or negative. The positive thing about rational decisions regarding marriage is that all the different aspects people are getting into are seen from an objective standpoint and also all the dangers can be evaluated better. Therefore, arranged marriages may also lead to better decisions and to a better overall quality of life for the respective partners compared to marriages that are based on love and emotions rather than on hard facts.
Another upside of arranged marriages is that the connection between different families can be strengthened quite a lot. In many cultures, the connections between families are quite important in all areas of daily life and good connections to family members may also be beneficial when it comes to future career prospects. Arranged marriages make it also more likely that people have the same ethics since they often come from similar cultural backgrounds and have been taught the same things when they were young.
Thus, due to those similar ethical perspectives, the chances for a marriage that works out in the long run might be higher. Since parents will actively search for partners with similar backgrounds, the religious fit can be assured and therefore, it might also be more likely that partners get along with each other since they might share the same attitude towards religion and life in general.
In general, partners that met each other due to arranged marriages are quite likely to share similar values since their parents make sure that the value of the partner will fit the family values in order to assure a peaceful and harmonic coexistence. Even though people who had been forced into arranged marriages will never have the opportunity to actively date other partners, they may still live in a certain kind of bubble.
Since they never experienced the fun of dating, they will also not know what they are missing out on and therefore, those people might live in a kind of happy bubble and might even be happier than without this arranged marriage construct. Many people around the world may get quite broken due to a breakup with a partner and may suffer from serious emotional pain.
Yet, through arranged marriages, this problem will be gone since there will not be the opportunity to search for a partner and therefore, the possibility for lovesickness is also eliminated.
It is pure romanticism to claim that marriages must be love matches or they should be stopped. To allow arranged marriages leads to unacceptable pressure on those involved. They are often reliant on the parents who wish them to take part in arranged marriages for their futures as well as their current welfare. To protect from the latter we must stop the former. The law can help children who are often seeking bargaining chips to help them evade the pressure to marry from their family and community.
Arranged marriages do involve choice. The difference is merely that whole families are involved together in both considering the best options and in helping to achieve what is wanted.
This is particularly fitting in a social system which places high value on the way in which the extended family work together, and ensures that there is family support and shared expectations which contribute to the longevity of the marriage.
Many of what we would call arranged marriages are actually either parents just introducing their children to potential partners, or effecting the negotiations necessary for marriage after their children have already chosen a partner. Most importantly, it is totally illogical for the government to intervene to stop people having the marriages that they and their family have chosen in the name of freedom of choice. This is exactly why the distinction between arranged and forced marriages is so important in providing protection for those who really need it without authoritarianism creeping in.
Arranged marriage is bad both for the individual women concerned and for women generally in society. In the former case this is because they are very vulnerable. The lack of a support network, the language to appeal for help or knowledge of their rights makes women in arranged marriages disproportionately likely to suffer abuse. In the latter case, arrangement commodifies women who are bartered between the male heads of houses.
This is not acceptable within an egalitarian model of citizenship and does not fit with a western model of rights. Arranged marriages in Europe and North America have idiosyncratically low levels of abuse and marital violence. The institution of marriage always creates interdependence and therefore scope for abuse and danger and the police and outsiders always find it more difficult to intervene where violence is within a marriage. The vulnerability of those without language skills is an accepted fact of immigration policy, again it applies to all immigration and not to arranged marriages.
They gain prestige and authority through their role. What you are really saying is that Islamic societies are patriarchal and that Muslims have arranged marriages. The latter does not in any sense cause the former. They are discrete social facts. The practice of arranged marriage separates communities, helping to stop integration and encourage distrust between communities. To varying degrees, each arranged marriage is influenced by filial and social pressures on the agency of the prospective couple.
But so are Western marriages, in form. In romantic love too, social class, education, profession, religion factors that are deeply influenced by family , all mediate and shape attraction and compatibility.
The social reality we are raised in shapes our freedom to choose partners, even to feel desire. For Badiou, love becomes meaningful when it is subsumed under anticonsumerist politics.
Others find meaning in different ideals. Couples in arranged marriages often find romance in family-initiated introductions because it speaks to their broader value system. For many, it is a smarter, more spiritual form of love because it prioritises collective will and emotional labour over sexual impulse and selfish individuality.
This is perhaps one reason why couples in arranged marriages express high levels of satisfaction in their relationships, sometimes more so than couples in love marriages. Another common criticism of arranged marriages goes something like this: arranged marriages are not built upon informed desire.
Since partners lack familiarity with each other, they cannot be expected to possess any genuine feelings for each other. But as the British psychotherapist Adam Phillips has observed, the romantic euphoria we feel towards a desired partner is not always derived from our knowledge of them, but from prior expectations of meeting someone like them: In Missing Out , he writes:.
You recognise them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. This sense of dreamed-up familiarity inspires people to pursue real intimacy. Arranged marriages work in the same way. I t is hard to universalise notions of love because it is such a dynamic, delicate and complicated experience.
What Western observers often forget is that people of other cultures are constantly carrying out subtle transgressions against the lazy stereotypes in which they are viewed.
Postcolonial feminist theory has demonstrated that women who opt for arranged marriages are not passive subscribers of patriarchal traditions, but engaged in negotiating the practice to shift the balance of power in their favour. This misunderstanding and limitation poses real dangers in our current political climate.
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