Arranged Marriage or Love Marriage

The debate of arranged marriage and love marriage is not new in India.  Both concepts have their own merits and demerits.

 Arranged Marriage:  In arranged marriage normally parents scouts for the probable candidates for bride or bridegrooms.  With active consent of their son/daughter parents usually fix up matrimonial proposal.  In India, this practice is mostly common.  As a tradition, it is assumed that when the girl enters new home, she automatically becomes member of the new family and her acceptance in the family becomes more strong.  Love and emotions take back seat.  But with the passes time, the strong bonding take place between husband and wife and their offspring become the source of their inspiration.  In this way they tend to remain as a happy family.

However, the strong negative point about this system is that there might never be actual love between boy and girl.   Still they  live together because of the social compulsion.  Love might not be there because their differences in thoughts, different social backgrounds, different economic status of the family and so and so forth.  Therefore, there is risk of unhappy family or breaking of the marriage.

Love Marriage:  In Love marriage, normally boys and girls know each other for a fairly long time.  They understand each other habits, thoughts, cultural values and family back ground.  The element of marriage takes place only when they feel that their relationship or courtship should result into marriage.     It is therefore expected that this will be a serious relationship.  They will have strong love and bonding for each other.  There will be more respect for each other.  More free space and less possessiveness will be the order of the day.

 

But many a times, we have seen love marriages in India proved to be a disaster. The “made for each other” tag vanishes as soon as they enter into a family life and they start realizing the difficulties of practical life.  The girl is not able to accommodates when the boy gives time to his parents, share his income with them, giving importance to his own brothers and sisters or rationalizing his own expenses on wife for which he was unmindful till marriage.  Perhaps we may call this as marriage as the result of   infatuation   and not love.

 The moot question is which method is better?  I think both systems are equally good.  We have to adopt both the ways in the present context.  In case of arranged marriage also both the boys and girls should get enough opportunity to interact so that they can understand each other.  It is rightly said “MARRY IN HASTE AND REPENT AT LEISURE”.   Parents still think that if the boys and girls meet quite often before marriage then it may prove negative and their engagement might not last.  But I think this is not correct approach.  Let them share their ideas about  post marriage family life. Let them develop a good bonding for better tomorrow. 

 Love may not always accidently happen and therefore, somewhere need for Arranged Marriage will always be there.