Gori Girl

Hello all,

I just wanted to start a new post since this one particular subject has been on my mind for a while and I am actually going through some rather scrupulous situations with my parents.  First off, for those who don't know me, I'm an Indian-American (full-blooded American, according to my Selective Service form) and was involved in an intercultural relationship, until my gf had to break it off since she was the more mature of the two of us and saw that a heavy confrontatoin loomed on the horizon with my parents.  The topic I want to bring forward to the table, whether it has been already discussed or not, is that of arranged marriages.  I would like to get everyone's individual opinions, thoughts, and experiences on arranged marriages.  Let me begin with my thoughts and experiences:

Let me first begin by saying that what I KNOW (note that the word "know" implies absolute certainty in one's affirmations) to be correct and true is that arranged marriages are illegitimate.  To be honest, I really don't see how anyone in their right minds can make a decision such as holy matrimony based on some bio-data that they peer-reviewed with their parents or a suitor or suitress that their parents brought before them.  I think, it is healthy and important to get parents' imput on who you are marrying and the relationship that will blossom henceforth, but it is a decision that has to be entirely autonomously.  Arranged marriages are a complete sham and I know that for sure when I look at various couples in my family and how their social life doesn't measure up to their private lives.  For example, my mom will whine and grip about my father, obsessively so, and keep complaining about how she was jipped when it came to the interview that she had when she got married to my father in their village.  She will do so behind his back.  I know that most marriages are difficult and none are perfect, but this is ridiculous.  Interviewing for a job is one thing, interviewing to be one's spouse is an entirely different ordeal. 

Regretfully, my cousin just recently got arranged to a "proper Indian woman who is in the medical industry" from India.  I sincerely doubt that he knows what he is getting himself into.  He has barely just started his career and he is making such a foolhardy move as this.  Unfortunately, his parents are "politely" suggesting that he get married.  It is more so that they can save face than him benefiting from such a union.  The nightmare doesn't just stop with him.  He and I are the last ones in our family to be single and not yet married off.  When he finally gets in front of that RIDICULOUS fire pit and says his vows under the rose-encrusted altar, I shall be left standing alone against my family.  I don't know about everyone else here, but at least in my family and from where I come from, if there is a guy or girl who is left unmarried after a certain age, it is considered a disgrace to their mother and father.  It is so much worse for the girl.  It is only after reading forums such as these that I have come to accept a very sobering and morbid perspective on just how hard life is for a girl grown up in a patriarchal backward and plebian culture as the Indian culture.  Many have even lost their lives because they refused to subject themselves to being married to someone that literally purchased the authorization, not to ask, but DEMAND the girl's hand in holy matrimony!  It disturbs me to several subtle levels when I read on popular magazines and blogs about American couples here in the States discussing the redeeming qualities of arranged marriages and that arranged marriages have a much lower divorce rate.  This leads me to my second point…

The ONLY reason that arranged marriages don't end up in the same number of divorces as typical marriages here in the US is because the social pressure that brings a man and woman to become husband and wife is ever present once they have said their vows.  Meaning, that both husband and wife would be socially ostracized if they were to even consider getting a divorce.  So it is not out of a sense of wanting the marriage to work, as it is from a sense of obligation and abject slavery to be in the marriage to keep up apperances for the sake of the family.  Does that honestly even sound like a logical option?  You leave your fate to chance if you don't even know about the person you are marrying.  Especially if you are basing your decisions on just the surface stuff that you read on their bio-data and first impressions that you perceive off of preliminary meetings.

Those are my two cents on the subject.  I look forward to hearing back from others.  I would actually like to take it a step further and start an online activist group against this kind of insult to legitimate marriages everywhere.  I can appreciate that this is how things are done in other countries and the spiel about tolerance but that is also the same type of pluralistic drivel that leads people to say "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."   It leads me to ask this one question… Is it a much harder undetaking to remain standing alone than it is to either cave into family pressure in hopes of appeasing my parents or pursue a relationship with someone I have chosen to fallen in love with, knowing full and well that the final battle will be bloody with lots of hurtful thoughts, dark expressions and broken hearts? 

I know, that was a whole LOT of stuff to read, but it was really heavy on my chest and I feel like this is an excellent outlet to share one's thoughts and experiences regarding intercultural relationships, especially those involved East Indian and Asian cultures in general.

Thanks,

Kratos

Forgive me for jumping to conclusions but it sounds like this post is more an anxious reaction to your cousin getting married and thus being the last unmarried child in your family and age group.  I know this is stressful and reaches beyong Indian families, I too as a white American reaching the age of 29 and unmarried, feel the pressure of being the only single person left.  Luckily that pressure exists in my aunts and uncles and my parents just want me to be happy.  What I would suggest is being open and firm with your parents, if marriage is something you desire, make sure they know you want to be married but are waiting until you are as sure as you can be about the woman you will marry and although in the short term, their son being unmarried might be a source of some sort of shame, that ultimatly when you are married to a woman you truely love and you are truely happy, your joy will be a source of pride and happiness for them.  If marriage is not something you want, help them to understand that your happiness is ultimatley something they can take pride in, that they raised a son so sure and secure with himself.

I do wish you luck and I can tell you are a very strong man and this will work out.

I would be very hard-pressed to come out against all arranged marriage, especially because the parents of my best friend and my fiance are arranged, and arranged is still the norm in my fiance's family (I think still the norm for friend's family in India, probably more rare in US). I agree with others who say it is not "arranged" in the strictest sense – at least not among the professional classes (from what I gather). I'm sure there are still icky, pressure-filled arranged marriages (a friend describes some couples as having "bad arranged marriages and their parents are completely OK with that"), but there's also weeks-long visits at the family home before settling on an engagement. 

Another thing to consider is that modern love matches are a very recent idea, even in Western culture (that whole centuries-of-figuring-out-that-bathing-daily-is-a-good-idea thing didn't help us Whities out much…Abhai delights in teasing me about what "his" people were doing while "my" people were working on that one). Don't get me wrong, the companionship, passion, and commitment that make our relationship are fantastic, and I feel privileged to experience it. I even wonder if those in arranged marriages with lots of caring and commitment but less personality compatibility (and to clarify, I don't think all arranged marriages lack personality compatibility, especially those that empower the couple to be part of the decision…but I also know some arranged couples that are essentially content but that I seriously doubt would have hooked up on their own) ever feel like they missed out on something when Abhai and I clearly just enjoy each other's company more than that of anyone else in the world.

However, when I've talked with others about arranged versus love matches, I repeatedly come to the conclusion that both can be awful and both can be wonderful. I think it depends on the person, and the family, and circumstances.

I do think that some of the hyperbole in the original post here would be very hurtful to those who are truly content in their choice to have an arranged marriage, and in fact it is hurtful to me because people I care about have made such choices and others are currently considering it. I believe that you can more effectively express your experiences and opinions by focusing on the specific instances and issues. I do agree with several of points (such as artificially low divorce rates – reminds me of early fusses in the US that couples who live together have much higher divorce rates – when something is very taboo, only the daring are willing to do it – now that it's not so taboo, the latest research shows equal divorce rates for those who do and do not cohabitate), and I encourage you to continue making them, but I disagree that arranged marriages are an "insult to legitimate marriages everywhere."

I'm very on the fence about arranged marriage myself.  I see good things and bad about it.  I do think it is a lot harder to be in an arranged marriage in America than it is in India where the general society accepts the idea.

I wrote a post about it at my blog, I'll copy it here:

A lot of people in America think arranged marriage is a horrible and exploitative thing no matter what. It sounds awful and archaic to them. I cannot think that way. I am of two minds on the subject.

For some background, within the community that I grew up, arranged marriage was highly valued. I think for the most part no one expected it to happen, but if a girl might be brave enough to try it, people were very impressed. I can't imagine that the people who joined, my parents generation, expected their children to be taught some of the things we were about marriage.

Starting when I was about fourteen, I got lessons in being a good wife. The key lesson was that who you married was not as important as the West tends to think. As long as it was a "good man" (i.e., someone who was spiritual and tried to practice our beliefs), we would come to love anything or anyone that we served. Service was strongly emphasized. 

One of the highest up people in the organization, someone I admired very much and tried to emulate, had an arranged marriage. When she began teaching some of my classes, I saw arranged marriage as the ultimate proof of my devotion to our way of life.

There was another girl my age, whose father had betrothed her. She was very much admired and people really respected what a "good girl" she was. I wanted to be a good girl too. I wanted to be praised for my devotion. I struggled with jealousy.

I asked my parents to arrange my marriage. I think they were shocked. They didn't know how to go about it or what to do. They tried. I went on one prospective date, but that man ended up marrying another girl in my class a year later. 

When actually faced with the possibility of marrying this man I didn't know much about, terror did set in. Yet I was still consumed with jealousy that he didn't choose me. Strange, conflicting emotions.

I more or less gave up on it after that, but really in my mind I thought that I would "let God arrange things" (in those days I was much more blindly religious and now I am more spiritual). I was 18 and I went off to college, despite messages that a girl ought to stay at home and live at home to go to college and live at home until she is married. I don't think my parents completely bought into that message, though we never talked about it. So my idea was that I would marry the first man to ask me on a date.

(At this point the only date I had ever been on was the prospective marriage one and I had never been kissed). I really believed that it didn't matter who it was because marriage was not about happiness or personal fulfillment, it was about duty and religious devotion.

That set off several years of very bad relationship choices and a terrible confusion over how a relationship should be.

I know that story will probably reinforce the idea that arranged marriage is a terrible thing, but it isn't. Not when it is done properly. 

In college I got into an argument with a girl in my class about this. She was very opinionated and sure that she was right about the way the world worked. She also thought that arranged marriage was barbaric. I fought hard for the idea that it is not always about politics or sending your daughter away to just anyone. Sometimes it happens that way, and that is a tragedy, but in general, parents love their children and want them to be happy. This is true of parents in every culture. 

I think one of the keys here is the culture in which the arranged marriage takes place. I watched a news program doing a story on arranged marriage. They had one that worked out fine and then one girl who chose a "love match." But the trouble with the story was that it was not even. 

They told the arranged marriage story of two Sikhs who married in India. There the practice is still very common and people have very different expectations of how love in marriage works.

The other story was about a girl of Indian descent in America. In America, the culture at large does not support arranged marriage and that makes it much, much harder to sustain. Here we are under a lot of pressure to find a love match and have it be really romantic, etc. This girl found a white man to marry. At first her parents were uncertain, but they quickly warmed to him. One of the things her relatives were uncertain about was the cultural differences between she and him. She pointed out that she was American and they had more in common than different. They both "grew up eating Lucky Charms in front of the Saturday morning cartoons." (This goes back to the previous post about American children of Indian parents).

The girl I knew growing up ended up divorced from her arranged marriage. I don't know the details, but I can image that it must be almost impossible to be a "normal" American, interacting in an American society, with no support for having a very different type of marriage.

One thing to remember is that there is a lot of love in arranged marriages. There really is something to the idea that your love for someone grows as you are close to them and work out problems with them. The expectations that people have going into an arranged marriage are that it is going to take work and compromise and they have trust that they will come to care for each other deeply. That attitude leads to a much lower divorce rate than couples who marry with a "Cinderella" idea of marriage solving your problems.

People in arranged marriages are not thrown into a lifetime commitment with someone random. Again, when done right, parents look for the signs of compatibility. Being older, experienced, and wiser, means that parents can find true compatibility and not just surface attractions.

The point I am trying to make is that this is an issue that one cannot make a snap judgment about. It is a place where Westerners tend to fall into the trap of assuming that their way of doing something is more refined, more cultured, and better for everyone in the world. We are all guilty of this sometimes (both Westerners and those in the East). But it is okay to have an open mind about arranged marriage.

In the end, I am glad that I did not get married when I was 18. To be 27 (28 next month) and not married, makes me very much an "old maid," but I have grown and changed a lot in the last ten years. I have come to understand myself much better and I have been able to become the person I struggled to be as a teenager.

I was noting to my boyfriend recently that the girl I was at 18 would hate the person I've become (she was much stricter about following rules, very hard on herself, and hated when people said they were more spiritual than religious. She saw things extremely black and white). Should I be upset that I disappointed my 18 year old self? Not at all. Because I am immeasurably happier now than I was at 18. When I stopped trying to fit in or be normal, and just let myself be myself, I found a partner who totally supports my wacky self and I could not be happier.