Love doesn't always triumph, the reality of arranged marriages

I had an arranged marriage like most people of those days. A week after the marriage, we met a Swiss couple, and we were asked the most obvious question that married couples are often asked: “How did you two meet?”

“We had an arranged marriage,” we said in unison.

“My parents replied to the ad given by his parents,” I said truthfully.

The Swiss couple’s mouths dropped open, their eyebrows raised. The concept of arranged marriage was alien to them, but for us, back then and even now, that’s how marriages happen. We considered ourselves progressive because we were both given a chance to voice our opinion about our prospective life partner, something that many didn’t even get.

In India, 90% of marriages are arranged, and 90% are successful—at least they appear so. In India, if a husband and wife are staying in the same house and going out together, it means they are a happy couple and their marriage is successful. Whatever happens inside the four walls is no one’s business and shouldn’t be.

But nowadays, arranged marriages have a twist. The boy and girl meet mostly in the presence of their parents, and if they think they would like to consider the possibility of tolerating each other for the rest of their lives, they take the alliance forward and meet a few more times to gauge their compatibility. Even parents agree that they must meet to get to know each other better.

But the moot question is: where do they meet? In their parents’ living room? In a restaurant, park, hotel, café… where? What about the moral police? In some states, the moral police are so powerful that they have the authority to arrest a wayward couple sitting in a park. Oyo in Meerut has barred unmarried couples from staying there.

So what should this boy and girl do? Play blind in marriage? “Love is blind” is a cliché, but are marriages too blind? Ironically, we think nothing of men peeing in public. All we do is turn our face the other way and turn a blind eye to it.

Most of the content we watch on TV and OTT platforms has vulgar dialogues and obscenity on display. Cuss words are considered rather cool, and if these cuss words are not part of your everyday vocabulary, then you are not a cool dude but an old aunty. At times, the content is so obscene that even married couples can’t watch it in the company of their parents or children. We are okay with that.

Such obscenity doesn’t corrupt our minds, doesn’t disparage our values and culture, but watching a man and woman kissing or holding hands in public will corrupt our minds. Seriously!

Image credits: Internet