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Artist Information: @a_sleepless_mind
Illustrations by Dawn Aquarius
Although marriage in the United States has been declining over the last century, it still remains a steady topic of conversation as well as a life goal for many people of various ages. Our media—whether via scripted and reality television, cinema, literature, social media, or other forms—has influenced generations of people to not only to seek true, steadfast love and prioritize romantic relationships but also to have certain thoughts of what courtship, i.e. dating, and marriage should look like. Ideas of “tradition” often arise both in conversation, usually regarding who can participate, and implementation, or how people go about the dating and marriage process.
Because of these notions of tradition, people might assume that it implies that the current practices we ascribe to here in the States have always been this way, and that perhaps we carried them over from our European forefathers’ traditions. While this is partially accurate, the reality is that this interpretation of tradition doesn’t account for the fact that much of what we practice in contemporary times is the result of thousands of years of marriage evolution. As various societies throughout the ages have adapted to different circumstances—from personal factors to communal or national occurrences—so, too, have their needs and desires for marriage. Around the world, other countries and cultures practice forms of marriage that in the West look unfamiliar or, in some ways, downright contrary. In other words, the state of marriage has been in flux since its inception and to pinpoint any one iteration of marriage as the ideal model not only disregards the fact that different societies have distinct customs and needs that fit their community, but also doesn’t account for the ever-changing nature of the world.
Function of Marriage in the Past
To understand how we arrived at our current marriage customs, first it’s important to recognize that for much of history, marriage had little, if anything, to do with religion or even love, for that matter—marriage was a way to organize society. According to the leading voice on the topic of marriage, Stephanie Coontz (2006) explains in her book Marriage, A History that:
For centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people’s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property. Most societies had very specific rules about how people should arrange their marriages to accomplish these tasks. (p. 9)
During this time, arranged marriages amongst both the upper and lower classes predominated society in the East and West and was used primarily as a way for families to create alliances— economic, social, and political—that either reinforced their social class or forged upward mobility as well as was a method of preserving family property and for, as Coontz (2004) explains, “deciding what claim, if any, children had on their parents, and what rights parents had in their children” (p. 4). The “claims” that Coontz (2004) mentions refers to inheritance and other benefits that the extended family, parents in this case, had access to through the marriage of their child to another family. Although the matters that concerned either class varied—concerns of war for the upper class versus farming duties for the lower class, for example—the purpose of the marriage remained the same: wed a person that will secure the social, economic, and political future of not just the nuclear but also the extended family. In fact, arranged marriage as a tradition persists to this day, though declining, in collectivist cultures in many parts of Asia, such as China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, India and the Southwest Asia and North Africa, or SWANA, region.
Arranged Marriage
Although the world has changed in many ways from when arranged marriage initially began, there still remain similarities. In contemporary arranged marriages, typically one party will communicate to their parents that they feel ready for marriage. The parents, together with their child, will then create a list of attributes—from physical traits to career requirements, religion, astrological compatibility, and more—to send to a match-maker or other pertinent elder so they can consult their registry of potential spouses. Naema Tahir (2021), a human rights lawyer and writer, explains in her work “Understanding Arranged Marriage: An Unbiased Analysis of a Traditional Marital Institution” that in collectivist societies, they tend to be hierarchal not necessarily in a vertical way, but more like a net. Everyone has their personal role that they understand and respect that holds the whole of the family together. She elaborates on the roles regarding marriage saying:
Elders, given their status and rank, are considered most able, equipped, wise and well connected to undertake the grave and delicate task of mate selection. It is their proper place to screen and select mates and it is the proper place of the young to trust and respect the judgment of the elders in this regard. (p. 13)
When they find a match, depending on the culture, a date or two is arranged for the couple to meet. Otherwise, there are instances when the couple only meet on their wedding day. Based on the date(s), if the couple feels compatible with their match, they decide to wed.
The timelines for these types of marriages are rather swift, so falling in love is not a primary concern. Instead, the couple is encouraged to foster love for each other after their wedding. The thought process behind this approach is that by selecting a partner who is compatible in myriad ways beyond such a fleeting and unsteady emotion such as love, each person has prioritized attributes that will affect them in their day-to-day conjugal union, such as religion/faith, career, compatibility, worldview, etc. Therefore, the idea is that the pair will work as a team every day to both fall in love and commit to a lasting harmonious marriage, not because of a feeling, but because of a decision. Alternatively, if the pair doesn’t feel well suited for each other, they don’t move onto marriage.
Forced Marriage & Violence
Contrary to common misconceptions, arranged marriage does not mean the couple must wed against their will—consent from the couple is necessary. If there were a lack of consent, the union has crossed into forced marriage territory and there are various laws against this practice in many countries. However, forced marriages do continue to happen despite the fact that it’s a blatant human rights violation against the men, women, and, sometimes, children involved. In addition, because of the severity of this trauma, there are many instances of women trying, without success, to either decline the marriage or end it through divorce. As a result, because of societal norms regarding family honor, sometimes these attempts to evade the marriage end in violence. Specifically they result in murder committed by the victim’s family. In these cases, the victim is murdered for the perceived shame they have brought upon the family and the crime is a way for the family to “recover” from it. Also, though women are often the victims of these types of crimes, there have also been instances of men experiencing the same violence.
Apart from the physical violence that people suffer due to attempting to escape forced marriage, those who cannot flee endure extreme emotional and mental distress. This is also true of queer people who are forced to marry someone that doesn’t align with their sexuality. Oftentimes in these situations, the individual must keep their sexuality hidden because queerness in some cultures is not only not tolerated nor accepted, but in some countries actually illegal. As a result, the individual often suffers twofold: once for having to hide their true identity and twice for having to endure forced marital relations.
Similarly, children who are forced into marriages suffer exponentially by being subjected to child sexual abuse and isolation. Girls are more likely to be affected by forced child marriage. As a result, if the child sexual abuse results in pregnancy, it can have devastating consequences such as death due to pregnancy and childbirth complications. Further, because of the isolation, the marriage often ends a girl’s education, which affects her potential to become economically independent. It also increases the probability of her suffering domestic violence throughout the duration of the union. Again, though the two are often conflated in the West, arranged marriage is not forced marriage.
Understanding Western Bias
Despite this distinction, to many in the West, arranged marriage may still seem outdated or archaic, even unethical, especially because the values and demands of life in the United States, for example, are structured vastly different than those of other countries. Most notably, Westerners of today tend to prioritize individualism and personal liberty as a self-governing attitude. Because of these values, the individuals themselves find their own match and, to a large extent, center their partner selection on love, which leads to what is called autonomous or love marriage. However, to examine arranged marriage through the lens of individualist culture is to view it in a Eurocentric or Western bias as it doesn’t take into consideration the customs and other social structures and attitudes of the collectivist culture that practices it. Péter Berta (2023), an interdisciplinary social scientist, points out in his work “Conceptualizing Arranged Marriage - From Binary Oppositions to Hybridity, Processuality, and Contextual Dependency” that:
[N]umerous public discourses position this type of matchmaking as a negatively defined key marker of one’s ethnic, cultural, or religious identity and—through the strategies of essentialization or iconization—contribute to the process of othering, stigmatization, and marginalization of (often migrant) populations practicing arranged marriage.” (p. 6)
In other words, Berta (2023) points out that because of Western bias, many people, often migrants, experience discrimination because of how their traditions are perceived and they become othered—i.e. attributing negative ideas about a person or community based on perceived ideas of difference and thus treating them as not worthy of respect. By becoming aware of these biases, and recognizing that it’s not a neutral one, we get one step closer to being able to examine the arranged marriage system and recognize its value for many people within that culture rather than holding Western standards to non-Western societies.
Understanding Collectivist Cultures
To understand further how these cultures are structured, Tahir (2021) explains that collectivist cultures don’t center their values on individuals, but rather on the community as a whole. She writes:
Typical of group cultures is that ‘[i]ndividual choice […] may be constricted either through requiring that a person be bound by group decisions or by demanding that individuals follow the rules accompanying their station in life.’ The individual is ‘sacrificed.’ ‘The tradition-directed person […] hardly thinks of himself as an individual.’ He is a ‘collective being’ not a ‘particular being.’ But such sacrifice ‘is more than offset by the advantages of fulfilling one’s role within the family…’. (p. 13)
In other words, group-culture minded people don’t live their lives the same way we do in the West. Rather than acting in ways that prioritize their individual needs and desires, they put their community first. They honor and respect themselves by honoring and respecting their role in the family. It’s a different mindset and therefore they experience marriage differently because it serves a different purpose. In fact, when interviewed, the adult children often express that they don’t even want the responsibility of choosing a mate because they believe the elders have more wisdom in this domain, which demonstrates that the members involved share the same value system. Tahir (2021) furthers, “The arranged marriage is fundamentally rooted in the sociological principles of collective belonging, parental guardianship and the protective, provident authority of elders in match making” (p. 20). Basically, the arranged marriage system is a clear example of how members of a family, or community, find a sense of belonging within their group as each individual has their role that contributes the whole. So, by understanding this system of collectivity and of values, one can understand the role that arranged marriage plays in these family dynamics. Otherwise, as Tahir (2021) warns:
Set against the autonomous marriage, the arranged marriage then becomes the other, deficient, deformed, a marriage of shortcomings, a marriage lacking in freedom and a marriage that is catching up and trying to prove it is not as traditional, thus not so backwards or rigid as analysts of the arranged marriage suggest. (p. 10)
If arranged marriage is constantly scrutinized for how it compares to the autonomous or love marriage, it will always be seen as a marriage to be looked down upon, no matter how much honor or fulfillment people in these marriages feel by following through with their traditions and value system. By seeing it this light, people outside of the culture can, at the very least, understand that there isn’t a single iteration of tradition—there are many. Also, people who don’t follow tradition, in any culture, can also recognize that both following and not following tradition are both choices and each a demonstration of free will.
Blurred Lines in Arranged and Autonomous/Love Marriage
At the same time, Berta (2023) touches on the concept of the near impossibility of complete autonomy for any kind of marriage, whether it’s the choice to pursue an arranged, autonomous/love, or hybrid one. He argues that “the claim that individual choice/consent can be exercised in complete freedom, independently of the contextual circumstances, is misleading and simplistic” (p. 9). Here he refers to the fact that most people are influenced by outside contexts, such as family, friends, religious leaders, therapists, etc. that affect the initial phase, as well as subsequent phases, of partner selection. Consulting with any one of these people outside of the self increases the chances of influence, and, in some instances, external pressure. He explains Kimberly Brackett’s points from The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies saying:
These considerations may be linked to sociocultural expectations regarding suitable marriage partners (among other things, to religious, gender, race, ethnic, class, family, and community preferences and patterns), to regulations backed by law concerning the age and marital status of the future marriage partner, and to coercion and pressure from parents or other relatives. (p. 9)
Considering this perspective, Berta (2023) points out that although we might have the idea that in the West, we have the complete individual freedom to choose our partner without having to rely on a parent or elder to do it for us, the reality is that there have been many instances where societal and/or familial pressure has coerced people into marrying for reasons outside of desire. He also points out that for many people, this coercion is not a singular event but rather has oftentimes been ongoing since childhood. For example, many people feel pressured to marry due to religious concerns and/or pregnancy. So, in the same way that arranged marriages create expectations to follow societal norms that don’t center the individual, so, too, does the culture of love/autonomous marriage—the conditions and contexts simply look different.
Similarly, on the notion of arranged marriage, Tahir (2021) brings up that the cultures that practice them “are traditionally systems of community, hierarchy, guardianship, and authority.” However, this description is an ideal that doesn’t take into consideration human nature and that we don’t live in a utopia where all events unfold as they are “supposed to.” She quotes sociologist William J. Goode saying:
“The notion that parents will always act in the child’s best interest is […] based on an idealized interpretation of the parent/child relationship and assumes that adults will be altruistic whenever they relate to children with love, care and empathy.” Elders may not always understand what guardianship truly entails. They may confuse parental authority with the exercise of parental power, force even. (p. 18)
In essence, the line between arranged and forced marriage runs the risk of being crossed due to the way the parents perceive their role as the authority over their child and, because of the child’s sense of duty toward their family, the boundary between responsibility and obligation or intimidation is also compromised. For these reasons, assessing the value or ethicality of a marriage, whether arranged or autonomous, based solely on the degree of freedom and/or autonomy involved can be a precarious task as the line between coercion and total autonomy isn’t as stark as one might have initially thought.
Marriage History in the United States
In the West, many of the matters we have come to accept as the norm, such as marrying for love and roles within the marriage itself, began to formulate during the Industrial Revolution. During this time, Coontz (2006) explains that marriage began to transition from arranged marriage into autonomous marriage due to two main factors. She writes, “First, the spread of wage labor made young people less dependent on their parents for a start in life. […] Second, [s]tarting in the mid-seventeenth century, some political theorists began to challenge the ideas of absolutism” (p. 146). By this time, more people had access to labor that would create financial independence, which meant that marrying for reasons such as upward social and financial mobility grew unnecessary because the individual could achieve that alone. Without this incentive, it freed the individual to pursue marriage for other reasons, namely, for love.
Also during that time, philosopher John Locke began to challenge the notion of a ruler’s absolute authority, an idea that eventually came to influence conversations about home life. Coontz (2006) explains:
If a ruler exceed the authority his subjects granted him, he could be replaced. […] English writer, Mary Astell, pushed Locke’s theories to what she thought was their logical conclusion. “If Absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State, […] how comes it to be so in a Family?” She answered that not only was absolutism unnecessary within marriage, but it was actually “more mischievous in Families than in kingdomes” [sic] by exactly the same amount as “100,000 tyrants are worse then [sic] one.” (p. 148)
By comparing absolute rulers to men’s roles within the family, Astell pushed for the foundations of women’s sovereignty. Prior to this, men held all of the power within their household, from delegating labor to sexual relations. Women were subjugated to their husbands whims and demands. Though men were not necessarily encouraged to use severe violence toward “disobedient” wives, they certainly were compelled to use whatever force necessary to make sure their wives did what was expected of them, from household duties to the bedroom.
By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, these ideas had reached the minds of prominent figures such as John Adams, who would later become the second president of the United States. Coontz (2006) quotes his wife, Abigail, who wrote to him saying:
“[I]n the new Code of Laws which I supposed it will be necessary for you to make, […] remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. […] Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. […] [I]f particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” (p. 151)
Although his response was less than favorable, other men during the time agreed with her. Two days after the Declaration of Independence, New Jersey granted women the right to vote, but no other states followed suit. In the subsequent years, women would gain and lose rights until ultimately women were again relegated to be subordinates of their husbands, but this time under the guise of needing their “protection.” So began the idea of the man being the provider of the family.
Around this time is also when the idea that each gender had their own “distinctive character” began to emerge. Rather than being compared as superior or inferior, they were meant to be valued on their own terms. Coontz (2006) explains that from this view, women were no longer seen as inferior, but rather had “a unique moral worth that had to be protected from contamination by involvement in men’s mundane spheres of activity. Therefore, the exclusion of women from politics was not an assertion of male privilege but a mark of respect and deference to women’s special talents” (p. 153).
It’s also important to note that this evolution didn’t apply to the over 500,000 enslaved people of this era. At the United States’ inception and for 200 years, millions of enslaved people, freed people, and Black people faced different marriage laws that changed over the years owing to the committed efforts of activists. At the time, enslaved people were considered “property” and in the eyes of the slavers, “property can’t get married.” As a result, marriage trends among Black people have a disparate history that are not reflected in the mainstream chronicles of the past.
Globalization and Modernity
As the world has grown more connected, ideas and traditions have continued to spread, just as they have done throughout history and as a result, over time, concepts of freedom and autonomy have become synonymous with modernity. In collectivist cultures within and outside of the United States, there has been a rise in hybrid marriage, which is a marriage in which the elders as well as the young jointly decide on a spouse. Here the adult child has the freedom to exercise personal selection and autonomy while also honoring cultural tradition. Social scientists and people within the culture attribute this hybridity to developmental idealism, which is a belief that modernization theory contributes to this change.
For people in the United States, defining modernity in this way has meant that we no longer practice arranged marriage nor is there a strict enforcement of gender roles in the family as earlier eras practiced. These days, marriage has become as diverse as the communities that practice it. For many, and especially those who practice some form of Abrahamic faiths, they often follow more traditional methods of marriage that are in line with their beliefs and values. Others don’t follow any sort of tradition and opt to create their own models of marriage. As more conversations arise regarding what defines tradition for modern Americans, it’s worthwhile to remember that tradition is based on culture and on values. When people start to debate issues regarding the “sanctity” of marriage or other matters relating to who has the right to wed, all of these factors depend wholly on which tradition they are applying to the debate. Disputing the particulars of a practice is futile when the definition of marriage in question cannot be reduced to a single iteration, as evidenced by the many versions of it throughout history and the world. Consider that oftentimes when people lament about an abandonment of “tradition,” they are likely referring to a specific time of their lives they wish to return to for which they feel a certain nostalgia. It implies that tradition up until that point had always been that way and suddenly turned into something else. But, history proves that untrue—traditions constantly evolve alongside society and marriage is not exempt from that trajectory.
Maybe a more constructive endeavor would be for people to reflect and understand what version of marriage fits in with their own values, beliefs, culture, community, ethics, and future and live accordingly. To prescribe ones own tradition upon others ignores the most valuable thing about freedom—it looks different for everyone.
References
Berta, Péter. Arranged Marriage: The Politics of Tradition, Resistance, and Change. Rutgers University Press, 2023.
Coontz, S. (2006). Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Penguin Books.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The World Historical Transformation of Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 66, no. 4, 12 Oct. 2004, pp. 974–979, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-2445.2004.00067.x.
Tahir, N. N. (2021). Understanding Arranged Marriage: An Unbiased Analysis of a Traditional Marital Institution. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, 35(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/lawfam/ebab005