Americans Suck At Arranged Marriages
You know that Internet time-suck where you click one sidebar link and end up in a gossip vortex? So yeah, I went there. This slideshow was about how long ‘Bachelor’ relationships last, Bachelor being the TV show that fixes up what looks to Asians like expensive and demeaning arranged marriages.
The length of a Bachelor/Bachelorette curated relationship seems to be a few months, with the exception of Season 1, which ended in marriage. So that’s a pretty bad run for arranged marriages.
In Asia, however, this rate of failure on an arrangement would be unthinkable. I think the difference is that the Bachelor (in the bits I’ve seen) builds up to marriage with traditional western dating events, in a sort of sporting format. The trouble here is that western dating doesn’t naturally end in marriage, the goal is usually sex. So it’s like having a series of 100-meter trials for a marathon final. Furthermore, the emphasis in these shows seems to be on the individuals and true love. As in, if these people click, you can throw them into a media maelstrom and they should be fine.
In eastern arrangements, however, the emphasis is on making the elements around the couple click – finances, career, families. These are the pressure points that break apart couples, often no matter how much they like each other. Aside from ensuring that the man is rich, the B shows make no particular effort to align the rest. They essentially throw a rich man into a harem and expect him to marry one. But that’s not generally how the harem model works.
If they actually wanted a better marriage rate, I guess I’d recommend hiring a few Asian aunties as consultants, and making it a family show rather than a bunch of pretty singles in a house. Have groups of families meet each other and have more than two people involved in the marriage bond. Seriously, no self-respecting matchmaker would allow half the shenanigans you see on these TV shows, and you’d see a lot more marriages. Babies even.
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Arranged Marriages are sign of a primitive unsophisticated undeveloped society. It shows lack of social skill and a weak society were people are not comfortable with talking with each other. In fact this can be used as a yardstick to determine development level of a country. The more arranged marriages than love marriages definitely implies weak undeveloped society.
and yet, its these “undeveloped, primitive” societies that have much stabler marriages. way to understand the point of the article, putha
In a strong society (Like US) it does not matter if the divorce rate is high. Since people are independent and socieity is advanced they can survice on their own until they find other spouses. Also there is no discrimination like here if you are divorced, especially for women. So it dosn’t really matter about stable and unstable marriages.
It does if children are involved putha.
A typical, undeducated sentiment
Not sure the producers’ motivation is a better marriage rate!
Over half of the arranged marriages amongst my friends have ended in divorce. These are second or third generation British Asians, subject to all the social support, but much less of the social stigma vis-a-vis their Indian contempories.
I’m pretty sure that if the majority in South Asia had the social, financial, religious and familial opportunities that most have in the West, there would be far fewer unhappy marriages and far more divorces.
The opposite’s probably true also: people give up on marriage in the West, perhaps earlier than they should. On balance, is happiness preferable to stability? I think so.
Disagree. SL buddhist style arranged marriages where the couple have a choice has a good track record. Not so sure about the others. But the process works well in most cases. Most British Asians I know want to marry white people so obviously being forced to marry another Asian would suck big time. So this is a mute point. The western model of marrying someone based mainly on your past good sex life is doomed to fail. As any married man will tell you the amount of sex you get after marriage is inversely proportional to the time married.lol.