They Don't Think Like Us

[DanaC]

You said that in an arranged marriage, both parties have the option to say no. Have they usually met each other before, and had a chance to get to know the suitor, or would they be saying yes/no based only on a profile, including social status, family, etc?

Actually, one of the best representations of how arrangements often work within some immigrant communities is the film Bend it Like Beckham. The kind of pressure that parents often put on their children is often the result of a culture clash between the parents' tradition and their child's national culture.

If you grow up in a culture that assumes marriages will be arranged by parents and professional match makers, then you will more than likely just assume that's how people progress forwards in life from unmarried child to married adult. That same culture will most likely have stories which glamourise through tragedy and romance those who try a different route, but then we are all comfortable with the idea that much of what happens in stories doesn't apply to real life. In reality within that culture being found a husband or wife is something you have a right to expect of your parents. It is their parental duty and one which is often felt very, very keenly. I think the closest many western cultures come to that is the responsibility that most parents feel to ensuring their child's education (how many people open a college fund account as soon as their first kid is born?).

Though the system is open to abuse, (and since we live in a world where women represent the weaker and less valued sex in much of the world still, this usually means that women suffer...but the men too at times), if you were to actually ask most young people in countries where arrangements are the norm, what they thought about it, they'd consider it perfectly acceptable.

When the first generation immigrant gets to the new country though, their children are raised within two cultures and those assumptions are often weakened, or at the very least put under stress. They've been educated and raised in a society that places individualism at the core of its value system and in which an assumption that individuals are best able to judge their own emotional commitments is dominant.

Bend it Like Beckham is specific to the Sikh faith, but there a lot of similarities to other Asian communities.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Arabs.

[DanaC]

Yes I know Bruce, but that was directed at the question that had been asked about arranged marriages in more general terms.