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All marriages are arranged

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev in The Indian Express

Arranged marriage is a wrong terminology, because all marriages are arranged. By whom is the only question. Whether your parents or friends arranged it, or a commercial website or dating app arranged it, or you arranged it – anyway, it is an arrangement.

The idea that arranged marriage is some kind of a slavery – well that depends on whether there is exploitation. There are exploitative people everywhere. Sometimes, even your parents themselves may be exploitative – they may be doing things for their own reasons, like their prestige, their wealth, their nonsense.

Recently, someone asked me about choosing a girl for their boy. One girl is well-educated and pretty, but another girl had a wealthy father. They asked me which they should choose. So I asked a simple question, “Do you want to marry the girl or someone’s wealth?” It depends on what is your priority. If your priority is such that someone’s wealth by marriage becomes yours and that is all that matters to you, that is fine. Well, that is the kind of life you have chosen.

Arranged marriage and divorce rates

The success of something is in the result. Luxembourg, a small country which is held as one of the most economically prosperous and free societies, has a divorce rate of eighty-seven per cent. In Spain, the divorce rate is around sixty-five per cent; Russia is at fifty-one per cent; United States, forty-six per cent. India: 1.5 per cent. You decide which works best.

Well, people may say the divorce rate here is low due to the social stigma associated with divorce, but definitely how it is arranged is also an important factor. When parents are the basis of organising the marriage, the success rate is a little better because they will think more long term. You may just like the way a girl is dressed and you want to get married today. Well, tomorrow morning you could realise you don’t want to have anything to do with her! When you are twenty, due to various compulsions or peer pressure, you may take decisions which will not last a lifetime. But sometimes you really hit it off with someone and it may work out – that is another matter.

Everything is an arrangement. You may think so many things about it, but it is arranged by your emotion, your greed, or by someone. It is an arrangement. It is best that it is arranged by responsible, sensible people, by those who are most concerned about your wellbeing, who have a larger reach. You cannot find the best man or woman in the world because we do not know where they are! With the limited contacts that we have, we can arrange something that is reasonably good. That is all it is.

If a young man or young woman wants to marry, who will they marry? Their contacts are very limited. Within those ten people that they know in their life, you marry one guy or girl. Within three months you will know what it really is. But in most countries, there is a law: if you make a mistake, at least two years you must suffer before you can divorce. It is like a jail term. Well, many religions have fixed it that you cannot divorce, that it is completely wrong. But where such religions are practiced, there the divorce rate is highest. So, neither God’s diktats nor the law is able to stop the breakups.

When parents organise a marriage, their judgement may not be the best, but they generally have your best interests in mind. If you have matured beyond your parents’ judgement or prejudice, that is different – now you can make your own decisions.

Conducting your marriage responsibly

When I married I did not know my wife’s full name. I did not know her father’s name. I did not know her caste. When I told my father that I wanted to marry her, he said, “What? You don’t know her father’s name? You don’t know who they are, or what they are? How can you marry her?”

I said, “I’m only marrying her. I’m not planning to marry any of the other things that come with her. Just her. That’s it.” I was absolutely clear about her potential and what she will bring to me, and she was helplessly in love from the first moment.

Though I never took anyone’s advice in my life, there are always self-appointed advisors who said, “You’re making the biggest mistake in your life, this is going to be a disaster.”

I said, “Whatever happens, whichever way it happens, it is for me either to make it a disaster or a success.” I knew this much.

Because who you marry, how you marry, which way it was arranged or by whom it was arranged is not important. How responsibly you exist – that is all there is. How you arrange the marriage is your choice. I’m not saying this or that is the way, but whichever way you do it, please conduct it responsibly, joyfully. You need to understand to fulfil your needs, physical, psychological, emotional, social and various other needs, you are coming together. If you always remember, “To fulfil my needs, I’m with you,” then you will conduct this responsibly. Initially, you may be like that, but after some time, you think he or she needs you; then you will start acting wantonly and, of course, ugliness will start in many different ways.

This happened. A young man and a young woman got engaged. So once the ring was slid on her finger, the young woman said to him, “You can lean on me to share your pains, your struggles. Whatever sufferings you go through, you can always share them with me.”

The guy said, “Well, I don’t have any struggles or pains or problems.”

She said, “Well, we are not yet married.”

If you think you are full of pain, struggles, and problems and need someone to lean on, there will be trouble. You know, they have been saying, marriages are made in heaven, but you are cooking hell within you. If you think someone else is going to fix you then there will be trouble for you, and of course, unfortunate consequences for the other person. If you make yourself into a joyful, wonderful human being, then you will see, your work, home and marriage will all be wonderful. Everything will be wonderful because you are!

 

The logic of arranged marriage in India 15 Mar 2009, 2226 hrs IST, Santosh Desai

Why does the institution of the arranged marriage survive in India in this day and age? The India I am talking about in this case includes the educated middle class, where the incidence of arranged marriages continues to be high and more importantly, is accepted without any difficulty as a legitimate way of finding a mate. Twenty years ago, looking at the future, one would have imagined that by now, the numbers of the arranged marriage types would have shrunk and the few remaining stragglers would be looked down upon as belonging to a somewhat primitive tribe. But this is far from being so. The answer lies partly in the elastic nature of this institution, and indeed most traditional Indian customs, that allows it to expand its definition to accommodate the needs of modernity. So today's arranged marriage places individual will at the heart of the process; young men and women are rarely forced to marry someone against their wishes. The role of the parents has moved to that of being presiding deities, with one hand raised in blessing and the other hand immersed purposefully in the wallet. The need for some arrangement when it comes to marriage is a very real one, both here as well as in those cultures where arranged marriages are anathema. The blind date, being set up by friends, online dating, the speed date, reality swayamvar-type shows are all attempts to arrange ways that one can meet a potential spouse. Here the idea of love is being not-so-gently manufactured by contriving a spark that could turn into the cozy fire of domesticity. The arranged marriage of today is more clearly manufactured but it also offers a more certain outcome. Online matrimonial sites are full of young professionals seeking matches on their own, knowing that what is on the table here is not a date but the promise of marriage. In the West, the curiously antiquated notion that it is the prerogative of the man to propose marriage makes for a situation where the promise of marriage is tantalizingly withheld by one of the concerned parties for an indefinite period of time. Indeed, going by Hollywood movies, it would appear that to mention marriage too early in a relationship is a sure way of scaring off the man. So we have a situation where marriage is a mirage that shimmers on the horizon frequently, but materializes rarely. The mating process becomes a serial hunt with the man doing the pursuing to begin a relationship and the woman taking over the role in trying to convert it into something more lasting. At a more fundamental level, the idea that romantic love is the most suitable basis for a long-term relationship is not as automatic as it might appear. Marriage is the only significant kinship tie that we enter into by choice. We don't choose our parents, our relatives or our children — these are cards that are dealt out to us. For a long time, in a lot of cultures, and even now in some, marriage too is a relationship we do not personally control. This view of marriage works best in contexts where the idea of the individual is not fully developed. People live in a sticky collective and individuality is blurred. A young Saraswat Brahmin boy, earning in four figures was sufficient as a description and one such person was broadly substitutable with another. As the role of the individual increases and as dimensions of individuality get fleshed out in ever newer ways, marriage must account for these changes. The idea of romance makes the coming together of individuals seem like a natural event. Mutual attraction melts individuals together into a union. In contexts where communities fragment and finding mates as a task devolves to individuals, romance becomes a natural agent of marriage. The trouble is that while the device works very well in bringing people together, it is not intrinsically equipped to handle these individuals over time. For, the greater emphasis on the individual has also meant that personal needs and personal growth come to occupy a privileged position in every individual's life. Falling in love becomes infinitely easier than staying in it as individuals are no longer defined primarily by the roles they play in marriage. So we have a situation where people fall in and out of love more often, making the idea of romance as a basis of marriage not as socially productive as it used to be. Romantic love seeks to extend the present while the arranged marriage aims at securing the future. It keeps the headiness of romance at bay, and recognizes that romance and the sustenance of a socially constructed long-term contract like marriage do not necessarily converge. Of course, the arranged marriage has its own assumptions about what variables make this contract work and these too offer no guarantees. In a world where our present has become a poor indicator of our future, the idea of arranging marriages continues to hold charm. Whether it is cloaked in tradition as it is in India or in modernity as it is elsewhere, the institution of marriage needs some help. The expanded Indian view of the arranged marriage functions as a facilitated marriage search designed for individuals. Perhaps that is why convented matches from status families will continue to look for decent marriages, caste no bar.

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