I have had many non-indian friends ask me of how arranged marriages work. After I joined the lab two labmates have got married arrangedly.(I dont know if this is a proper word!!) And after every such event the non-indian labmates are shocked as they dont understand how can it possibly work. Actually my labmates are awaiting my visit to India this december:).
Here I would like to put forth some facts which would explain the high success rates of arranged marriages. OK, my arranged marriage doesn't include child marriages or something like that. My definition of arranged marriage is subject's parents (or some omnipresent matrimonial aunty) find a girl and then the subject meets the girl two-three times and then based on the consents of the individuals the marriage can go ahead.
Now for the reasoning part. The human brain is very good at identifying personalities. The brain very quickly makes judgement regarding wheather the new aquaintance is going to be helpful or harmful to us. And more or less we reach the same conclusion after staying with the person for a long time. We see much more in a first impression than we realise.(Read the book "How to move mount Fuji?" to know more about the significance of first impression.) That cute smile, firm handshake, graceful walk, hair falling over shoulders, confident talk, husky voice, deep eyes - all this hits us together and the effect is much more than their combined sum. Our body says a lot about our inner self than we can imagine and surprise, surprise our brain can read all this. The marginal information that we gain is much less as we spend more time with them. So, the amount of information that you receive in those first n seconds more or less decides your relationship with the concerned person.
Now you guys will ask then why the two three meetings why not the first look itself. I knew this would come. The answer is "People excel at reading facial expressions quickly, but only when a countenance is genuine." . I guess in the first meeting people may be different from their trueself (voluntarily or involuntarily!!!). To bring out that inner personality we require a few more meetings.
Incase people have questions regarding all this can happen in love marriages also and this is no arguement for arranged marriage against love marriage, please read I never said I will do that. I only went ahead to say why arranged marriages work as well as they do.
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6 comments:
panda getting married :))
kya yaar dec mein shaadi kar ke aayega kya(love/arranged)...
hmmmm....!!! bahut oonchi soch hai...!!
happy marriage....!!
I would argue that in order to know how you feel about a person, you dont just have to know them from first impressions, or second or third. You have to know how they react to situations and you have to know how they change with time. I.e. you have to know not only the x but the coefficient of the dx/dt (yay hopkins nerds!). For me that is the reason why you need to spend a lot more than time than the 2-3 meetings.
One of the reasons arranged marriages work is cos when things go wrong, people don't feel responsible. My daddy chose, mommy chose bullshit. Pretty soon they just get used to the companionship and couldn't care enough to change things.
I totally don't buy the 2-3 meetings and then we realised we were made for each other bullshit cos everytime I here that it is with the first female/male the guy/girl met. Either people are just very very lucky or they have really low standards or, most likely, they just fool themselves.
I also think that many marriages I have seen are just relationships of convenience and fraudy.
Kram
you can't test the subject's "object" before an arranged marriage
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