Anatomy of arranged marriages

I do not know whether there's any point in my exploring the dark and exceedingly diminishing world of arranged marriages. Dark because it's really, really dark out there. No one really knows what one has to end up with... Diminishing because, thankfully (some) people of my parents' generations have begun to accept the idea of a mutual understanding and feeling of love between the people getting married rather than a burdening alliance between two families.

It's two people unaware of the presence of the other on this earth, unaware that the other is going to mean their life for the rest of it, who meet over a cup of coffee, and decide whether this other is the person they really want to spend their rest of the life with. It's two people who come together not because they were attracted to each other because of so-and-so similarities, or not because they were attracted to each other because of their personalities differing like the north and south pole; it is two people who come together because their families are alike in status, money, and fame, and maybe, because they have a common connection to a third family responsible for the alliance. It is two people who decide to walk besides each other no matter what. And it turns out that in arranged marriages, no matter what" literally means that.

True that arranged marriages (usually) are more successful than love, but what that tends to mean is that people bound in arranged marriages are not divorced, and nothing above and beyond that. That is all the statistics count, isn't it? For one, there are no expectations from each other in arranged marriages just when the blissful years of married life start and thus, since day one, you take to observations and recording of reactions. It's most philosophical to claim that people with least expectations are the happiest. For another, there is also no comparison between the pre-marriage and post-marriage outlook of the other person, which I think avoids a fair amount of hassle. Those two reasons specially hold strongly against people who are tied by the strings of love marriage. In the latter case, there are mutual dreams about the post-marriage life, and definitely there are those expectations and comparisons.


At times, an arranged marriage drags on unhappily, for life, just because the word divorce was never introduced in our dictionaries... What a shame it is that two individuals (or at least one) are let to suffer for life because of mistakes made by their elders. And sadly, they have to endure it all - yes, quietly definitely works best. The world pities them, but no one really dares to take a step forward and free them of the superfluous binding. I mean, I am a believer of Dalai Lama's quote "The purpose of life is to be happy". What exactly is any one getting by torturing those poor souls and robbing them of THEIR life? Guys, you cannot benefit out of their lives!


Anyway, that was an extension of a semi-personal episode, which I have become familiar with recently. Every person should be responsible for what they do, and they should be given enough freedom to live the kind of life they want, and bear the consequences of their actions. People who get married aren't kids anymore dammit! And people who mistreat their "better-halves" should be screwed.


Not that I am against arranged marriages, but I am definitely not for them. They're extremely flawed. People who are responsible for these marriages' going hay-wire will never take the blame for it. And people who are not responsible, are the miserable sufferers. Other than that, life's more of an adjustment for ever, and there's actually less of the substance called life that remains when it turns out to be an adjustment...