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Home  Blog Arranged Marriages and Reality
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Arranged Marriages and Reality |
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Monday, 12 May 2008 |
"Arranged Marriages", the topic that gets a lot of Desi youths scared or tingling. In the US, UK, and in the rest of the Western countries, love marriages are more favored than arranged marriages. The youth of the West wants to be in charge of their own lives and they want to decide initially who they want to spend the rest of their lives with. But are arranged marriages all that bad? In my opinion no, they're not.
I used to be a big advocate of love marriages and I would degrade anyone who put arranged marriages on top. I thought love marriages was the best, and boy was I wrong. I fell in love and I was in the path love marriage; however, I experienced the struggle that people have to go through when it comes to love marriages, especially when it comes to convincing the girl's parents that she has found the one.
What happens nowadays?
Nowadays the ideal scene is a groom from abroad would go to Bangladesh, Pakistan, or India and spend half to the entire summer in South Asia looking for a bride with his parents, aunts and uncles, or cousins. The groom's family mostly relies on aunts or female cousins to find a girl. Sometimes the uncles (or male adults), conduct partnerships in businesses by having their children married.
Do the bride's looks count?
If I said yes the looks counted, then I would be lying to you. Looks aren't on the top of the list of the adults, looks are just a minor factor when searching for a bride. The main things that the adults on both side look for are status, education, occupation, and wealth; it's shallow but it's how it is. The bride's family search for those quality when they look for a groom for their daughter; they do so because they don't want a bad future for their daughter, they want to secure their daughter's future.
Be Fair or your Market Value is Low
Light skin tone, it's the main thing people look at after the qualities listed above. If a girl was white as Jessica Alba then she would have proposals thrown at her left and right. It's a cruel world for all those dark skin people of South Asia; if they were born dark skinned then they would not be favored by society. Fortunately someone found a solution for that and sacked themselves in riches. Being light skin is a big thing for girls when it comes to marriage. In India such products like Fair & Lovely allows a person to lighten up their skin by slowing down the skin's pigmentation. For guys being fair is not all that serious but gives them a boost in their "market value" to get approvals. However, for girls being fair is a very big thing in society. Light skin girls are favored more than dark skin girls. If you're like me, then we would both think that Desis are the most racist group of people, and I wouldn't be surprised if we are. Check out the video above to see an Indian commercial that encourages people to be light skinned.
For example, last year one of my Pakistani friends went Karachi and spent 3 months there and got married before returning to the USA. And Karachi is in the desert so it's hot an humid there, he told his wife to use Fair & Lovely to prevent herself from getting darker, go figure.
Do arranged marriages work out?
Surprisingly, it does work out for the most part; the divorce rate for arranged marriages is A LOT lower than love marriages. There are rare cases in which it doesn't work out because the couple were pressured to marry each other for the sake of their family reputation. In some cases girls are emotionally blackmailed to get married to the groom of their parents' choice. I don't quite know exactly how it is in Pakistan, but in India (thanks to Bollywood's motto of "follow your heart") and in Bangladesh, the idea of forced marriages are disappearing. In Bangladesh this type of marriage can now be considered as "semi-arranged marriages" in which a boy and a girl gets introduced to each other by their parents or elders, and they spend time together to get to know each other (in public places), after 3 months or so, sometimes the time varies, they decide if they want to get married. So in "semi-arranged marriages" the final word comes from the couple.
Tell me what you guys think.
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