Marriages – Love or Arranged

Lot of people advise me to go for love marriage. When I try to tell them that I feel that arranged is the choice for me, they seem aghast as if a great crime has been committed! (I can count so many people who were almost shocked on hearing my words) Well, they did try to rescue from this ill decision. Most people think arranged is a decision forced on kids. However it is not that. It is often with veto powers both with parents and kids. It incorporates the maturity of parents and contemprory understanding of kids. It takes the family along long way.

I do not think that every case of arranged marriage is better than every case of love marriage. I know it is not since I have seen good cases on both sides. However, what I know is that on the whole system of love has low score on success. Hence, I think people need to reflect and improve on where it is going wrong for many people.

It is a logical world and so it is normal to point to performance indicators. Bad performance indicators, as logical people call them, mean there is something wrong that needs to be fixed. However, many of us are so brain washed by romantic epitomes in Hollywood and Bollywood movies that we fail to recognise some of the critical shortcomings in romance/love. However, I present here some indicators that shed light on shortcomings that are too stark to ignore and too critical to be brushed aside. Some may think that I am saying here is love is not good. That is not my intention. My intention is to bring to light the problems the system is facing in many countries and avoid those by knowing about them. While my majority of stats will show problems, some countries are still doing pretty well with system of love and present an opportunity to learn. Unfortunate thing about those doing good is that they do not know for sure why they are doing good and they are progressively sliding toward those who are doing bad. I encourage readers to be candid about this and facts based. It is not a war between systems. It is an attempt to explore problems and solutions. I am not proposing arranged as solution of all ills. I am saying arranged is not bad. In fact, with changing world, arranged may get wiped out completely from world systems of marraiges. And it may also face new problems due to a changed world and may need to understand and solve those in order to be a success. However, love and any system we choose should be improved according to what would be good both for the individual and the society with development and adoptation of improvements being an individual decisions. However, like business best practices are promoted by many business magazines/journals, the family best practices could be promoted by magazines.

What are the evidences that system of love is not all that perfect as shown in romantic movies? In most developed countries more than 50% of all love marriages fail. And more than 60% of second marriages also fail. Over that, in america, according to a govt survey, only 33% of kids have both a father and mother at home (even counting step father and step mother). All this is result, inspite of choosing your own partner yourself (while ignoring your parents and family participation in it)? Is it not? Then with such dismal records how can people come to tell me that it is indeed love which is a great system? Can a system be good if it’s results are so poor? Should we continue to believe what Hollywood and Bollywood packs and provides us for entertainment ? Or, like very rational people we are, we should challenge the assumptions.

On other hand, arranged marriage in India, have been a long tradition. Along with it, has been the tradition that divorce has been an unheard term. Also, that means majority of kids have both father and mother at home. This will definitely help in kid’s development in growing stage. I know that times are changing and so to keep up with it, it is important for people to change. However, it does not mean that we leave what is good for what has a dismal performance history. I feel we need to innovate to incorporate the good of arranged and good of love together. Not a random mix but a mix that gets the strength of both.

So, we have seen how the longevity and good family makeup have been two strongholds of arranged marriage. Moreover, it provides for a system where kids in their formative stage have relatives who can protect and guide them. So, it is good even in social terms in providing a good nurturing of kids and providing socially healthy next generation to society and a generation that can learn and work hard due to good guidance from their previous generation. So, in three key performance indicators of longevity of family, care for kids and providing a good next generation to society, arranged marriage outperforms love one. A marriage that is not even stable itself, how can it provide stability to kids or society?

Some of my friends say that arranged is hipocrasy. How can you marry someone you do not love ?

What is honesty then ? Marrying someone you love ? Then how come all over the world it fails with 70% probability ? I think why 30% succeed is that they realize that continuous perfection is not possible, there will be times when you will feel frusrated, angry or doubtful and yet people continue. Adjusting sometimes is not hipocrasy. It is being honest.

However, if you take out the concepts of perfection from love, it is not much different from arranged. Afterall in arranged you do not marry someone random.

“A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe, whose men outnumbered his own. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, “You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!

They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a BURNING DESIRE TO WIN, essential to success. “

Napoleon Hill calls this idea – Burning Bridges. And I call it committment. And I assert that while in some extreeme cases it is good to have retreat bridge but extreeme cases only occur 5% of times and we could be quiting too easily.

I think marriages are not same as romance and love as shown in movies is faulty since we are dealing with humans with human follies and differences of opinions will happen when we share common consequences of life with someone… Fiction can show people and relations as perfect. Real humans, relation and situations are unlikely to be as good. It could be improved with soft management training for all people of world. It becomes useful in those 10% of communications where we have negative aspects like disagreement. However it is management of these occasional differences of opinions and conflicts that becomes quite important to relations. Then also people would not become super communicators and managers. Most real humans will have insecurities, jealousy, communication problems and scientifically proven to be biologically there in every human being, the “fight or flight” (also see : this link on fight or flight ) response. Protagonists in love movies do not have these fallacies. Somehow, they are superhuman and super communicators. One can say romance time people do not have these fallacies also. That is because at that time both are wooing each other and validating each other. At that time they do not need to adjust or settle disagreements on major issues like one invariably have to after marraige. Hence, the fallacies of human beings are less apparent during courtship. However this perfection of courtship and movies leads to wrong expectation levels. So, most of people go into marraiges with wrong level of expectations. I think it would be good to keep expectations realistic, where movies and romances may not help.

I agree that my whole analysis is based on today’s scenarios and it is quite possible that love could be modified to incorporate the strengths of arranged by making it a mix between the two and the strengths of the two. However, that is beyond scope of what I am discussing here. Maybe another day I will analyse that too. Also, I am no expert. Some of my claims might be wrong. I am just making a case for reflection into the system. To pause and think. You see, in singapore the performance of love marraiges is exceptionally better than US and UK (only 30% failure rate compared to 75% failure in UK and 66% in US). But I do not know the reason. And unless we know the reason, we can’t learn.

These statistics gives us chance to re-evaluate what may be the ways to strengthen relationships. Moreover, as you will agree with comment of Veena (see the comments of this post by clicking here), past success of arranged marriages also do not ensure success for arranged marriage system in future. Things are changing and hence one needs to revaluate the reasons and ways to make one’s own relation succeed. One thing pointed by Veena and that I agree very much is to give your spouse a chance to know you better. Not to put the burden of expectations from romantic movies on your spouse.

I think it is in our interest to challenge our sense of invulnerability. To make efforts to avoid the pitfalls where people before us have fallen. It is upon us to make a working system that gives a better future for us and our society.

Shishir

References

I am providing these as cases of facts that point to a broken system in system of love. Do note that if love was as good as movies show it, this should not be the case (70% failing). Something must be wrong that inspite of the seeming rightness of choosing a wonderful person for yourself does not work as well as movies show. Obviously the present love marraiges in US and UK are doing something really wrong. However, note that they do not even realize what they are doing wrong, or that they are doing something wrong. And if that is the case, then it is case of skilled incompetence (as a famous management researcher, chirs argyris calls this kind of process), or a case where people are so used(skilled) to failing that they do not consider it failure at all even in face of evidences. Singapore is a puzzle. Inspite of being a country where marraiges are based on love, my manual calculation of success rate came out quite better than UK and US. It is these KPIs that I use to assert that though individual case to case might be different but system of love is a failure on the whole to find a good marriage, provide stable family for kids and giving a good next generation to society. Lets come with strategies, like businesses do to avoid failure and improve KPIs. Maybe even learn what arranged was doing right that it was so successful.

For US
Divorce Rate – 66% of first marriage fail http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf (thick PDF, look at page 26, fig 16)
Children having a mother and a father at home (considering even step mother and fathers) – 33% http://lifestyle.msn.com/FamilyandParenting/NontraditionalFamilies/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=25248>1=6961

For Singapore
Divorce Rate – 30% (calculated myself, so may be inaccurate) http://www.singstat.gov.sg/keystats/surveys/marriages.pdf

For UK
Divorce Rate(first marriage) – 70-80% (not enough patience to find more details of second and third and fourth attempts)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1502007.stm

For China
Divorce Rate – 20%
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-03/01/content_420456.htm

For OECD (Avg of 30 Countries In Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia, See countries here)
Avg Divorce Rate (per 100 marriages, including remarriages) : 41%
Avg Crude rate for first marraige: 56%
Avg Percentage of people disillusioned with marriages in these countries since 1970 (% reduction in marraiges) : 40%
(which means that if in 1970, 100 people used to go for marriage on an avg in these 30 countries, now a days, only 60 go for it. Rest 40 maybe go for cohabitation, live bachelor etc)
http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,2340,en_2825_497118_2671576_1_1_1_1,00.html
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/28/34542290.xls

India
Divorce Rate – 1.1%
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501040405/story.html

Skilled Incompetence
The article is available at harvard business online here

Group Think (Are we in a case of massively popular groupthink ?)
See the concept at
http://www.groupthinkfilm.com/
Buy highly acclaimed movie about it at http://www.crmlearning.com/groupthink-2nd-edition (or view in your nearest library)

Fight or Flight
http://www.stressstop.com/articles/article1.html
http://www.pertinent.com/articles/communication/kareCom8.asp

Interesting Article – Great Expectations
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040301-000002.html

Q 1. Why are only roughly 44% of first marraiges succeeding in 30 countries in OECD inspite of wonderful guidance by movies ?
Q 2. Why are more and more people getting disillusioned with marriage (40% decrease since 1970 in 30 OECD countries) ?
Q 3. Why do those who succeed, succeed ? Why do you think those who fail, fail ? Specially for libertated countries like America, UK, Australia, Sweden etc why is the rate so high ? Does liberation mean that two people can’t stay together for life ?
Q 4. Why are birth rates falling in these countries to appaling levels ? Someone gave us gift of life, is it not our responsibility to pass the favour if possible ?
Q 5. Can one get disillusioned with partner after marriage ? Then how can love be perfect like movies show? Then are movies not just for entertainment and not realistic most of times ?
Q 6. Can one find a perfect match ?
Q 7. What do you think can be done to improve the KPIs ? Is it worth improving it ?
Q 8. Do people need to adjust in marraiges ?
Q 9. Is being individualistic same as being selfish in short term and buying all new ideas that movies show you as real and call yourself individual becuase you do different things which may or may not lead you to your aim ? Do you critically analyse thoughts given to you for making realisitic sense ?
Q 10. Is the whole question of being happy ? Then is it not better to have more realistic expecations from relationship ? Have you gone to a good movie with high expectations to find it worse than if you had gone with realistic ones ? We are same. It is much about setting the right level of expectations. Remaining single and kicking/rocking might be easy way out … but is it the right way ? Would you like the human race to finish so early?
Q 11. Sounds dismal ? Now do you think the arranged marraiges YOU have seen were really that bad ? They gave the couples partners to share life with for life, even if there were small troubles now and then which required some adjusting, was it as bad as what you see happening in world ?
Q 12. Do you think that 44% of first love marraiges that succeed (in 30 OECD countries) do not adjust to each other and become more mature with time ? So, is life all about thinking of the personal ego ? What is in it for me (in immediate sense) ?
Q 13. Are facts not pointing to Arranged being followed by love, that followed by live ins, followed by single and kicking, which will be followed by possibly extinction of human race ? Who said diansours died due to ice age? I think they became individualist. Individualistic people (which you are not) it seems can’t maintain relationships, be it with parents, family, friends… Coz society today teaches us to only prove that we do not need anyone to live happily. We will prove it. Won’t we ?
Q 14. If only we could love humans and not want to love the image of perfection from movies… maybe we would be better off… Would we ?
Q 15. If you will, can love be defined as that undying committment that will not waver whether rocks fall on it, fire try to burn it or god tries to come in between. Then that committment and trust is love. Rest what you see in movies is rubbish. Then in a arranged is love not possible ? Then in love is love not possible ? I say we need to accept humans as humans and improve our own communication skills. I say we need to keep family intact including parents of both husband and wife. Children also want more well wisher and parents also deserve a good treatment for having taken care of us when we ourselves could not. For when they sacrificed many things for us.

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