Outrageous! Arranged Marriages Outrageous! Arranged Marriages
by Karen Elmore
We all know the typical story: boy and girl meet, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl get married.
For a most of the westernized world, this would be your ideal beginning to a perfect marriage. One must realize that there are still cultures out there that do not have the same traditions and customs as we do here in the United States.
It is important to realize that India, which is extremely modernized in other important aspects of life (for example, India leads the world in students' science and math scores, and also is the producer of the largest amount of engineers in the world), in many cases still keeps to the strict tradition of arranging marriages. As the norm in India, arranged marriages have been performed for many generations of Indians.
An arranged marriage is when parents, or the eldest male in a family, choose a spouse for a young boy or girl. As in everything, these types of marriages have positive and negative points.
When Indian parents go looking for a spouse for their child, they look for beauty, ethnicity, religion, education, social/financial status, and horoscopes, with ethnicity and religion being the most important factors in arranged marriages.
Matrimonial classifieds are put in newspapers or families seek the help of marriage brokers who are used to help find suitable suitors for their children.
Arranged marriages are established among the high-caste and high-class people. These are the people who want to protect their “status." People of lower classes don’t normally care about this very much, one reason being that they have nothing to lose.
Thus the arranged marriage system seems to be a product of the caste system. It has developed over time to promote racism and classism, and it is not based on any spiritual value.
The main drawback of an arranged marriage is that the two to be married do not get the chance to get to know one another before they get married; it’s not important in this culture. The boy and girl that are to marry often only get to meet with one another a few times, with the company of both families and/or a chaperone.
Traditionally in arranged marriages, the decision is made by the parents of the couple to be wed and the couple has to abide by that decision; age is sometimes not very important, and girls as young as 12 can be forced into arranged marriages. Sometimes, there is so much fear and pressure involved in being forced to marry that some Indian women take drug overdoses to escape from the marriage to someone they do not love. This is made worse by the fact that many Indian daughters hesitate to defy their parents’ wishes because they fear being disowned or even killed by their own family.
Once an Indian couple has joined in union, an exchange of the family dowries come into play. The dowry system is set up to provide for the bride if something were to happen to her husband, such as divorce or death. This system’s original intentions were to provide some kind of wealth for the nonworking bride outside of the home. But in recent years, the husbands’ family has taken the dowry given to the bride from her parents and used for their own benefit, leaving the bride with nothing.
Indian people believe that by marriage, a woman enters into bondage, meaning that the woman is as a slave, she is not free. Indian women lose their consent and desires are no longer important. Arranged marriages decrease the rights for Indian women, and often the women have to move far away to live with the husbands’ family, which puts them at greater risk for neglect and abuse.
Although Western societies tend to deride arranged marriages as outrageous and uncivilized, there are positive aspects. Indian people believe that people get married based on practical reasons regarding financial and family, and work on building affection later. Strong characteristics like these are very conducive to building love and affection in Indian culture. Arranged marriages are often longer lasting as well. Good arranged marriages occur when the parents give their child the freedom to give their own consent while allowing them to seek out their own desires.
Finally, I want to leave you with a final question if you favor arranged marriages: do you think that YOU could have happily jump into a sexual relationship with a stranger to whom you are married and bound to?
---Karen Elmore, June 2004---
Editor's Note--The opinions expressed here belong to the author of the article and are not necessarily endorsed by the Editor, staff, or institution of X Culture Magazine.
