Love Marriage V/s Arranged Marriage

There is one great place where we wish, we all would like to be, but nobody can really be at that place in whole life time. That place is none other than our parent’s marriage! Right today, 13th of March, 27 years back, my parents were getting married and today is their anniversary. So I have complete right to finally talk today about marriages.

 Earlier whenever I use to talk with my friends, the topic usually use to be about movies, studies, software, downloads etc but now-a-days, trend has got changed. Now any time, when I talk with old friend, the topic is none other than ‘marriage’. List of questions would go like this, who got married?, who is going to get married?, whom are they marrying?, where is the marriage?, who attended?, love marriage or arranged marriage? Brilliant question!

So the question stuck to my mind, which is better, love marriage or arranged marriage? Personally, I would encourage arranged marriage is the best. The reason/conclusion is very hard to summarize and very much personal, but I’ll try my level best to convince with my thoughts, which may be completely wrong. These are purely my own personal thoughts and won’t criticize anybody or meant to hurt anybody. This is a clear disclaimer before I begin further.

Marriage is something which will freak out everybody out of their mind. Probable reason might be that, the one whom you are choosing and getting married will be the person with whom you have to survive and spend rest of your WHOLE LIFE. OMG. To write this sentence, I’m freaking out, how would generally people chose suitable person and get married!!! Ufff…. Hats off to those who crossed this freaking thought and are married and leading a wonderful happy life.

According to me, love marriage is something where SHE believes that HE will change after marriage and HE believes SHE will never change after marriage and get married. After so called love marriage ultimately both get disappointed. No offense to anybody please :)

I may not have experience about life after marriage, but I believe and am 100% sure (trust me, because the whole blog is based on this point) that you’ll have to face hard or unbearable habits, secrets, attitude towards several things, attachment towards several things etc etc of your life partner that will be intolerable for you and might have never imagined or observed before marriage. These are the things which if not taken care appropriately at appropriate time, might lead to serious issue like Divorce! The key point over here is that the above point is true irrespective of whether it is love marriage or arranged marriage.

Ultimately you have to try to modify them or should get adjusted to it. Few cannot even get adjusted nor they succeed in modifying and finally fail in marriage. I personally conclude the reason why they cannot adjust or fail to modify depends on whether it is a love marriage or arranged marriage! In this context when I mean love marriage, it is the one where two people decide for themselves without parents wish and get married. Arrange marriage is the one where parent’s wishes are involved. That’s all. Don’t take too much meaning of what I mean here by love and arrange marriage.

Have you seen Anniyan(Aparachit) movie or AaptaMitra(beautiful kannada movie). These two movies teach several things and one among them which I want to share here is, “To understand a person completely, you need to know person’s background perfectly”. Without knowing ambi’s background or nagavalli’s background, it would have been impossible to change/cure them. The most essential part is to understand the person’s background, i.e., why he is like that, rather than knowing he is like that!

This is the key difference in love and arranged marriage. In love marriage, you’ll be attracted towards the person knowing how the person is. You’ll just know the person and will like them. Here you’ll mostly not bother about, why the person is like how he is, which is the key ingredient to understand and deal with person after marriage. You may argue with me that, even in love, we’ll try to understand with unlimited talks over telephone or in infinite smses about person’s background knowing why the person is like how he is. But according to me, that’s not completely enough to know the person fully so as to deal with him after marriage.

When you start growing up from kid-to-boy-to-man (not making any partiality here, you can even consider the statement as kid-to-girl-to-woman), you start growing in the surrounding by keep on understanding the ways of life, the nature, who is god, the society, the relationships, the interests and make out your own definitions and draw a line of what is good and what is bad and what is grey. Your habits, your nature, your character, your attitude etc starts developing or starts cultivating out of this. During this interesting and fascinating journey of development, friends & family will be around you. No matter if anybody is there or not, parents will always be around you observing this development in you since childhood.

So it is very very important to consider parents point of view on why the person is like how he is. In love, and if your understanding is too strong, no matter, you might get to know the reason on why the person is like how he is from HIS own point of view but that isn’t enough. You always need the key factor, which is parent’s point of view also.

I don’t like those people who say, parents cannot decide about whom I should get married. I really don’t understand why? Parents, not at least equally, but play a role in guiding while choosing your better half. If there is some misunderstanding, then try to convince them or try to understand their point of view and discuss and finally come up to a decision satisfying you as well as your parent. Respect your parents [To measure the respect towards parent, read my blog on “Respectometer” ;)]. In the whole history till today, nobody has come forward by dis-respecting their own parents. Take any great person for example, I’m sure they have great respect for their parents, that’s why they become great :)

In arranged marriage, elders will try to decide a suitable better half for you, knowing how you are and how the other person is and will come-up with few options. You choose one among them after knowing complete background on how the person grew and in what situation person was brought up from their parents, by which you can possibly guess up the nature of person and why person behaves like how he/she behaves. By interacting more with them in personal and understanding from person’s point of view too along with parents, you can go ahead and make the decision to whether to tag or not with the person for rest of your life.

I would say, why to suffer through all this cycle, 1st making friendship, going out, feeling jealous, spending too much of time on call, smsing, facebooking, proposing, roaming, movies, parks, hanging out, breaking up, again re-uniting, again break-up, sleepless nights, useless infinite thoughts and stupid discussions on imaginary thoughts etc. Waste of such a useful precious time, money, energy and finally what may be the result of all this? Getting married and not able to adjust and breaking-up again? Main reason in love marriage is not knowing why the person is like the way he is. Just fall for the person by knowing how he is! This is not in case of arranged marriage. If you understood this point what I’m trying to convey, you can survive and sail throughout of your marriage boat no matter what all you discover about your life partner after marriage.

I’m certainly not telling that don’t fall for a person/love a person because I believe it is not in our control. It happens and then break-ups too. After this crucial period, your own definitions made up about what is life, love, relationship, society etc almost everything gets clear and updated! You’ll get a new way to look at life. Just thank the person for helping in discovering and updating your definitions and move on instead of piling-on and getting obsessed about the same person (thinking it is love).

Since from ancient times, we believed and continued with the culture & tradition of arranged marriages and so many families and life got settled without any issues. Since recent, when these love marriages were discovered, we started to come up with a new phenomenon called Divorce. This word didn’t have any meaning until love marriages were identified. These days divorce has become very common. I’m not telling only love marriages may end up in divorce. Now-a-days, even arranged marriage may end up in divorce. But a survey states that, divorces are found 87% from love marriages only!

Finally before concluding, one more thought stroke my mind. In case of love marriage, when you figure out some crazy behavior out of the person, you’ll not tolerate and try to mention of avoiding it. But when the same thing repeats, you will get disappoint and start thinking, earlier he wasn’t like this, now after marriage, why is this person behaving crazy like this? I didn’t marry this crazy person. I loved another person in him, not this crazy person and decide to walk out of marriage. This will be the kind of attitude in love marriage. Whereas in case of arranged marriage, the attitude of ‘I didn’t marry this kind of behavior person’ will not come. Instead the whole attitude will be different. Like, analyze why is person behaving like this and if possible find root cause and fix it or get adjusted and move on. But as I said, in love marriage, you’ll not have move-on attitude because before marriage, you thought you knew the person completely and now he’s not the same.

After long and crazy thoughts of mine, trying to convince what I believe, I would like to conclude that arranged marriages are better than love marriages (please keep in mind of what I meant by these two words in this context as mentioned earlier), but the ideal and the mind blowing marriage according to me is, love-cum-arranged marriage, where first you understand the person well and then convince parents and get their views and wishing’s and blessings and finally BOOOOOM.

PS: As I already said, these are just my views and may not be completely right. Please don’t take anything personal. Thank you for reading till end.