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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Arranged marriages are equally happy as marriages "for love". http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/J_Myers_Marriage_2005.pdf

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45 arranged marriage individuals in the study. 24 of them over the age of 45. Not sure how this satisfaction study can be considered conclusive in any context.

My point is, I'm not aware of any evidence that arranged marriages are in general a crappy deal for both sides. I found that paper while looking for a full text of this one http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1985-19991-001 which demonstrates that objective measures of love increase over time with arranged marriages and decrease with marriages for love. These papers have small sample sets because they're exploratory and pointing directions for future research, which as far as I can tell, never happened on a large scale.

Assuming you're comparing arranged marriages to "love marriages" I wouldn't even bother. In the US the divorce rate is somewhere near or above 50%.

Logically "love marriages" make plenty of sense but the data proves (in the US at least) that it doesn't work. At least not once the human factor is taken into account.

People from cultures where arranged marriage is not acceptable seem to have a very hostile view on it. There's good and bad but having come from that culture as I grew older I began to see the benefits.

>proves

No, it doesn't. To actually prove love marriages do not make sense, every single love marriage should fail. Anyway, 50% is a pretty damn good success rate, I think. I don't think I could choose someone to spend the rest of my life with correctly on my first time. It's perfectly natural to fall out of love - that doesn't mean that love marriages don't work, it just means that some don't work.

He's not saying it makes no sense. He's saying arranged marriages have just as high a success rate, if not higher. Personally, I can see that intuitively as well. Expectations are low, and there's not as much "passion". Not a lot of passion sounds bad to a lot of people, but it's better than having tons of passion, and having it turn sour.

It's not just about finding "the right person". Lots of external factors can have a huge effect on marriage success, like religion http://www.edivorcepapers.com/divorce-statistics/christian-d... or local culture http://www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rate-japan.html or even changes in culture over time http://www.edivorcepapers.com/divorce-statistics/divorce-rat... eta: 50% is not a good rate.

Isn't religion/culture/whatever just one aspect of finding the right person?

If it was, I think it would just be finding someone with similar views. It's interesting that different groups have different success rates.

I'm not saying we search for those who have the same views, I'm saying we search for those whose quirks won't be a problem down the road. For example, I'm non-religious, and I have dated extremely religious people (i.e. she attended church every day). Surprisingly, it wasn't an issue at all.

Agree that it doesn't prove anything.

Disagree that 50% should be considered a good success rate though.

> Disagree that 50% should be considered a good success rate though.

Perhaps this is just a signal that society may be moving past "Till death do us part". I don't think this indicates anything bad about society, except perhaps people forgetting how serious society once treated marriage.

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