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Comment by randomwalker | Hacker News Reader

Or, maybe, here's a radical thought--the next time one of these men meets someone he likes, he could ask her out.

The whole arranged marriage nonsense is a blight on the Indian community. Needless to say, it often leads to loveless marriages; further, the fact that you're making life decisions based on scant information results in bizarre situations like the consultant in the article who can't find a wife because they all think consultant means unemployed.

I can only welcome any development that forces people to change.

//Indian person. Fortunately distanced from the absurdity.

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I think you generalized a lot of things there. I personally am arranged married, and I couldn't be happier. I have a lot of friends who are in the same situation (even ones who are 10+ years into marriage). I also know people who married in 'love' that are not so happy today.

Additionally, arranged marriages need not be 'see someone for 10 mins and say yes or no'. There is a large variation in how the whole thing can potentially be set up. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage#Arguments_for... for a list of pros and cons that gives you both sides of the story.

A brief aside: One of my favorite features of the Internet is the disintermediation of anthropologists.

Not that I dislike anthropology. But it's more fun as a game that you can play from home.

I learned what you're saying here from an anthropology anthology in college. But somehow it's a lot more credible coming from an unedited, contemporary person.

"I think you generalized a lot of things there. I personally am arranged married, and I couldn't be happier. I have a lot of friends who are in the same situation (even ones who are 10+ years into marriage). I also know people who married in 'love' that are not so happy today."

Of course. If you didn't have the choice of who to marry then you resign yourself to the notion. But if you made the decision yourself then you'll always wonder if maybe you could have chosen someone way better for you. There was a TED presentation about this some time ago...

(Not saying it's not possible that the particular arranged marriage may have matched you with the best person for you anyway)

You're right; nobody would ever suffer long-term anger and resentment at decisions that somebody else made for them; it doesn't make sense. It was out of my hands, so I'm totally okay with it! That's why teenagers and their parents get along so well, why women didn't really want the vote, and why working in a bureaucracy is so good for your mental health.

No no, seriously. There was a TED presentation about this unintuitive phenomenon. It was posted here a while ago.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...

edit: Fixed the link, it wasn't the one I meant to link to.

Yeah, I know you're serious. I'm just pointing out that there's a difference (and evidently one that is important psychologically) between a situation where there is only one possibility and a situation where there are many possibilities, but somebody else chooses for you. I know people who stayed angry for years because their parents made them go to a certain college or their boss canceled a product line they created.

Arranged marriages takes anywhere from two to six months to materialize and now, it has become customary for the both the parties to meet and asses each other.

When it comes to arranged marriage, people don't rely on scant information, they have a network of people to cross verify all the cited credentials.

That seems much more reliable than the modern, Western one on one method.

If it wasn't 4:30 in the morning, I'd dig up some info about the relative success of arranged marriage vs love marriage. Plenty of Western marriages end up loveless, and divorce is rampant here. It's not clear to me which system would seem more efficient to a hypothetical man from Mars (but as a not-so-hypothetical white American, people I know would think I'm insane for even entertaining the idea that there could be redeeming qualities of arranged marriage).

Marriages in America frequently break up over money, i.e., one partner wants to spend more than the other. I wonder if the Indian system helps avoid this problem. (Of course, India is a massive and diverse country, and there is no singular "Indian system", but whatever...)

> people I know would think I'm insane for even entertaining the idea that there could be redeeming qualities of arranged marriage

It's a sad state of affairs when people condemn you just for being willing to look at the evidence.

Marriages in America frequently break up over money, i.e., one partner wants to spend more than the other. I wonder if the Indian system helps avoid this problem.

I don't know about the Indian system, but I know in some East Asian cultures it is normal for the wife to run the household finances. That means the primary spender is financially literate, has a feeling of responsibility, and knows the couple's financial status. Contrast that with the US, where wives often have a very vague grasp of the couple's finances, yet are in charge of most of the spending. American wives can run a man into the ground and then blame him; East Asian wives take pride in maintaining healthy household finances. The downside is that a man can become financially irresponsible if his wife's level of control makes him feel emasculated. The ideal is a true feeling of joint responsibility, and neither system ensures that. It has to emerge from the trust and good faith of both spouses.

How do you explain the very high divorce rate in societies with non-arranged marriages then? Should such societies not have a very high success rate, since the individuals make their own choices?

You're joking, right? The logical flaw in that question isn't poking you in the eyeball as you type?

Whenever a society is permissive of divorce, the divorce rate rises.

When a society strongly disapproves of divorce (or makes it legally tough), well, that's another matter.

There's a high correlation between societies with arranged marriage traditions and a disapproval of divorce. (A->B not necessarily B->A.)

You're right, but at the same time you are not directly addressing the question: Societies where marriages are based of 'love' have a very high divorce rate. Divorce in America or Europe is not easy, it's a long and expensive process. But there is still a 50% or so divorce rate.

What the question really boils down to is this: Are people happier in general in societies with predominantly arranged marriages or in societies with love marriages. It would be great if we had this dataset directly, but without the data, we can say that about 1/2 of every marriage in non-arranged cultures end up so unhappy that they break up. We do not have corresponding data for societies with arranged marriages if what you say is taken into account.

But in general, if so many of these non-arranged marriages are dissolving, it seems to show to me that simply letting the young people choose without any vetting process is not leading to good results. A 50% failure rate is not acceptable.

Your argumentation bypasses the fundamental issue.

Well, you're using data that doesn't reduce to what you want it to.

Divorce is only one possible indicator of unhappiness, there are lots of people who are unhappy and do not or cannot divorce.

You also assume that divorce leads to decreased happiness overall and I'm not convinced that's true either.

Moreover, I think it's pretty remarkable that almost 50% of people make a "successful" choice of a life partner. (Exclusively in the sense that they do not divorce.)

Considering how horrible people are at decisionmaking in general, and how vague and slippery the idea of "happiness" is, (see Stumbling on Happiness, and/or Mistakes Were Made for a great layman's overview), it's pretty remarkable... or merely a great indicator of how much people are willing to withstand/fool themselves/constrain their nature.

> Societies where marriages are based of 'love' have a very high divorce rate. Divorce in America or Europe is not easy, it's a long and expensive process. But there is still a 50% or so divorce rate.

Since those exact same societies had a low divorce rate not too long ago, it's unreasonable to blame the high divorce rate on what didn't change between then and now (love-based) and ignore what did change (ease of getting a divorce and stigma).

Yes, US divorce is expensive and can be long, but it is also socially accepted and easy to start. The latter is more relevant than the length and expense of the process because said process keeps itself moving. (The expense and length is also a choice - the choice to fight, which has nothing to do with "ease of divorce" or love vs arranged.)

But there is still a 50% or so divorce rate.

This is actually a statistical fallacy. The divorce rate is not that high in the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html

"Divorce in America or Europe is not easy, it's a long and expensive process."

That depends strongly on jurisdiction and the particulars of the divorce. I had a mutually-agreed divorce last year, and it only took a coupla months, and was less than $1K. The legal and financial part of the divorce were by far the easiest parts of it.

Nearly half of marriages fail, but not half of all first marriages. A simple example to illustrate: consider a sample of 4 happily married men and one guy with 4 ex wives. Half of the marriages failed, but 4/5 guys are happily married.

If you want to avoid divorce, don't marry a divorcee.

Incidentally, while divorce == FAIL, unhappy marriage == EPIC FAIL. But I guess the latter is hard to measure, so lets just focus on the former.

A 50% failure rate is not acceptable.

Based on whose criteria?

In any case, what you see as a "failure rate" I see as a correction. Defining every marriage that ends before death as a "failure" is a statement full of personal bias.

Does the person who after a year of marriage discovers that the institution isn't for him fail because he gets divorced? Has the wife who gets divorced because her husband beats her nightly failed in some way?

Applying engineering terms and analysis techniques to human relationships is a horse that's lost before he even got out of the gate. We're people, not robots!

It's funny that none of the replies here seriously address the issue of happiness in arranged vs. non-arranged marriage face-on. I'm inclined to believe that there is an inherent bias against arranged marriage to begin with and so certain angles of reasoning are simply not considered.

I will say, very frankly, that I believe arranged marriages have the ability to make marriages, on average, more happy. Before any of the free-choice fanatics decry this, here is why that does not work here: happiness is purely perception. If you change the parameters of the environment, the equation for happiness does not remain the same, as in, more freedom does NOT imply more happiness as many people would like to believe.

If you are starving, anything edible tastes good. If you are a slave since birth, any reward is enjoyable. If you are resigned to an arranged marriage, you are less aware of the pains of opportunity costs, therefore it is very plausible that you try to make the best of the marriage.

> Divorce in America or Europe is not easy...

Yeah, sure, to Americans and Europeans.

Lots of women (and thus men) live in countries where they are unable to divorce, or able to divorce in only a few very specific and constrainted circumstances... otherwise, tough shit.

And if you want to think about "tough," think about Syria, where apparently the man has legal guardianship of children post-divorce no matter what, even if the kids live with their mother, she cannot make any decision about their lives (such as which doctor to see).

It's my theory that in arranged-marriage lands, there's more social support; the husband and wife play slotted roles, more, in a larger social millieu. In the West, the couple is on their own more, they're each other's /everything/. The demand on each is higher, the fit has to be better.

I'd have to disagree with this. The change of a marriage going sour would seem to be almost independent of whether it was arranged or not.

I'm not speaking from experience here, but I would guess any marriage requires a lot of compromise and understanding, regardless of how they came together.

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