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Arranged love: India's newest export to West
Madonna may be divorcing her husband Guy Ritchie seven-and-a-half years after marrying him for love but your average Joe may soon be routinely meeting and marrying Jane from next door, who his mother invited to dinner. After yoga and software professionals, here is India's latest export to the West: the arranged marriage. Reva Seth, whose recent book 'First Comes Marriage' is catching the West's fancy, argues that the developed world needs a different method of finding a spouse in an age of uncertainty. There are signs that some are listening. Elaine McCabe, 33, a physiotherapist in Michigan, USA, has just permitted her father to invite men he thinks eligible to meet his daughter with a view to their marrying. McCabe, who took her cue from an Indian friend, says, "Any of us with Asian friends know if someone could save us from all those terrible nights next-to-zero hits and nearly-all misses, it would be wonderful." But she adds, "This does not mean I am supporting the kind of marriage in which the parties are left with no choice. The word is arranged, not forced." For Seth, champion of the great Indian arranged marriage, it may be one way of preventing divorce. Just last week, she told The Times, London about her own happy, (arranged) marriage and the blissful arranged unions of more than 300 others. Seth claimed that divorce rates only ever rose to a maximum of 7% for arranged marriages. It is a view that finds some favour with Marian Salzman, New York trend spotter and partner at PR firm Porter Novelli. She says the arranged marriage has to flourish in this economic downturn, which Time magazine describes as "new hard times". She says the cost of courtship -- and god forbid, divorce -- is so high that people increasingly want the institution of marriage to have more structure. "In these hard times, lust wears thin." This is why, says Salzman, the West "is beginning to realise that the partner they choose may not be enough to sustain a relationship socially and economically (and that the arranged marriage may be a way to find) happiness as a family and a community. Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Varkha Chulani agrees that the arranged marriage could be a popular, if unlikely export to the West because its very basis shared values and similar backgrounds are more likely to sustain a union than the heady idea of romantic love. But is the arranged marriage quite as Indian as it is portrayed? History records that the West once encouraged a system of arranged marriages in order to safeguard property and inheritance. There is evidence of arranged marriages in Western societies as far back as the 1500s and in the prim Victorian era, which encouraged a union for cultural and economic reasons rather than mere love. Ask any married person and they will tell you that marriage is a unique bond, whose strength lies in commitment, responsibility and the law and it has little to do with being madly in love with one's intended. Posted by: Fred 2008-10-19 |
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