[DanaC]

Queeq I thought your response made a lot of sense.

Not all marriages are arranged, and this might come as a shock to you, but the arranged couples almost always fall in love with a bond just as strong as any westerner. They just go about it a different way.

Anecdote: my friend N was born in Pakistan (he's now in his early fifties) and at the age of 16 was married to a girl from a neighbouring village by an arrengent which was actually made when he was 14 and she was 12. They had a few difficulties at first as they got used to being a couple. Their families helped mediate when they fell out (he tells a story of an argument they had when she walked out and went back to her family's house. They split up for five days. Then he went to the house and waited outside for her to come back from collecting water and they made up.

She died this New Year past, a few minutes to midnight, after a long and debilitating illness (massive stroke, after massive stroke) she was 50 years old. N had spent nearly ten years taking care of her, with the help of a couple of nieces and their two sons. They were totally devoted to each other.

After she died, a couple of months later, N, myself and another friend L, whose husband had died a month after N's wife, were sat talking and the subject of remarriage came up. N was saying it was too soon, but friends and relatives were encouraging him to find another wife as he isn't the kind of person who suits being alone. He listed some criteria as to the circumstances and kind of woman he'd consider (including that she not be young enough to have more children) when the time came. He didn't mention love.

L pointed that out to him in gentle humour and he said.

"Oh no. R was my love."

That's a single anecdote about a single couple. I have many friends and contacts amongst the Asian parts of our community and have known some arrangements which have led to love and some which have been disatrous...at roughly the same percentages as my white friends' love-match marriages. I have also known people who fell in love after the arrangement then fell out of love. It happens.

N's eldest son was married at 18 by arrengement (like most arrangements both parties had right to say no and once each party had agreed that this was the suitor they were most interested in arrangements were made. It didn't work out. They stayed together for four and a half years had a daughter and then got divorced (bear in mind this is a fairly traditional community in terms of faith, respect for parental authority, dress codes and many assumptions and gender roles.) now she lives across the road from N, with her daughter, N's son lives with him and his second wife and little girl. They all are in and out of each others houses and seem to get along quite well. She chose not to remarry, despite the fact that a divorcee from another family was interested.

Just because we can't understand the way others do things, means that we automatically superimpose our own value system onto their decisions and this can lead to a gross misreading of the situation.

We tend to think of the forced marriage when we are really talking just of arrangement. We tend to think of force and coercion where often it is merely cultural pressure, something which we are also subject to in different ways. When they look at our way of doing things, I wonder if they have in mind the aggressive violent male and the passive and disrespected female that characterises a view of an abusive marriage. The numbers are there. An outsider could easily make a case for the danger of love matches just by looking at the massive problem of spousal abuse in our culture.