Friedrich Nietzsche opines “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages” while Oscar Wilde has said “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry”. So between the two of them one wonders what is the “to be or not to be” rather to marry or not to marry. Practicality suggests to marry, and brings us to the BIG question especially in India- Love or arranged marriage. A statistic that whoppingly supports arranged marriage is in india divorce rate is only about 1.1% with 89% marriages being arranged, vis a vis the 6.8% divorce rate globally, where only about 54% marriages are arranged. This essentially makes it a no brainer in terms of longevity of marriage. But closer inspections of a certain scenarios that control the divorces need to be made before passing the judgment. In India, where society is traditionally conservative, marriage is an institution and an understanding between two families more than between two individuals. Consequently a marriage holds social standing and its dissolution stigma, particularly for the women and her family. Thus more often than not social pressures make unwilling partners cohabit, and often drag on a relationship which is actually nonexistent. Archaic laws and the utilization of the same to benefit one party often make the other party compromise and drag on the marriage unwillingly. Given a choice a huge percentage of these marriages would dissociate if the ramifications of the dissolution were taken care of. On the flip side these bindings have often breathed in the lease of life required for the parties concerned to make in that much more efforts to sustain the marriage, however small the percentage is. Thus while the figures be taken with a pinch of salt, it is undeniable that in India, arranged marriages do work more than love marriages.
When we look at a love marriage, by this term we mean a marriage between two people who have mutually come together and decided to stay together in union as man and wife. This marriage is usually preceded with a period of courtship where the individuals come to know each other, find appeal in each other’s company, develop feelings of care and compassion towards each other, so much so that they decide to take it forward to the next level i.e. a lifetime of togetherness through marriage. An arrange marriage on the other hand has two families negotiating an alliance with or without the consent of the actual bride and groom. If with consent, there may be a period of brief exposure to each other, which cannot be exactly called a courtship, and is more often than not chaperoned. Post the marriage the couples are indeed allowed to find love.
If we look into both scenarios there are essentially individual flaws in both setups which are contradictory. In a love marriage because the partners are exposed to each other prior to the marriage, there is a high degree of expectation from each other, more often than not from earlier associations of promise and delivery. Thus when a partner takes care of oneself during sickness cause he/she promised to, and then is unable to fulfill a promise to go on a holiday as part of a shared dream due to financial compulsion, the trust developed from the previous association gets betrayed. A mature person would of course take this in his/her stride after understanding the realities and differences of the situation. With each crack in the trust, the succeeding one is quicker to form and in fact a deeper one, so on till there is an actual fissure in the relationship. In an arranged marriage on the contrary, due to a limited exposure of the partners, there is essentially no trust. Consequently issues which need a genuine leap of faith really do not take off, and sometimes are the reason for a serious parting of the ways from the very inception. A newly married couple from an arranged married living in Mumbai for example, where both partners are working in Mumbai, is necessitated to move away from Mumbai, because the husband has a very lucrative job say in dubai. The wife here might feel wronged, having to give up her existing career, her existing social circle to accommodate her adjustment, complying with the shift in a very reluctant fashion. Again this can be taken in stride pretty easily if both concerned happen to handle this in a mature manner
The very essence of an arranged marriage is that it throws in two individuals from varying milieus into one common pot, and this has succeeded more often than not, because the parties have come to the marriage with little or no expectation and a willingness to adjust and compromise with each other. In a love marriage however due to the time spent together, the partners are usually more in tune with each other’s needs and whims, reactions and tantrums, highs and lows strengths and weaknesses. Life becomes easier through the predictability.
It is thus probably fair to assume that in successful love marriages one marries his/her best friend, while in successful arranged marriages one finds in his/her spouse the best friend that was always sought for. While the debate on which works better is a who came first egg or chicken question, the mantra of success in marriage is probably the ability to fall in love many times over with your partner. The only difference in a love and arranged marriage is that the first love in a love marriage started before the marriage, while in an arranged one it starts after the marriage.
