Finding Love in a Non-“Love Marriage”
Updated 1:24 p.m. August 18, 2019
By Irene Chen
Shunyi Chen and husband Hsiencheng raise their ceramic teacups against the backdrop of an elegantly minimalist Japanese eatery, sharing a toast to 30 years of happy matrimony.
This, they say, was a marriage born out of practicality and not the butterflies, a love story that found its origins in muted interest and friendly impressions rather than the spark of romantic chemistry.
“Our letters to each other weren’t embellished with flowery ‘I love you’ phrases like they are in the movies,” said Chen. “We never hid our true selves from each other and because of that, our transition from dating to marriage never encountered a need to reconcile who we thought the other person was and who they really were. Instead, it was in daily life that our love grew.”
Shunyi and Hsiencheng’s relationship, a mutual arrangement between the families, may come as a surprise to people who view arranged marriage as a forced and loveless union between two strangers.
But according to some relationship experts, arranged marriages can be as loving and lasting as — if not more than — other relationships.
In a February 2019 article for Elite Daily, dating writer Rebecca Strong cited a 2012 Psychology Today study that revealed “no difference whatsoever” between arranged and free-choice marriages on the basis of four measures: passionate love, companion love, satisfaction and commitment.
The American media carves out a model of arranged marriage “that differs so dramatically from our brand of romance,” said Strong via email.
“In the Western world,” she added, “the most romantic thing in the world is to find someone at random and choose to spend your life with them — to fight for ‘The One.”
Huda Al-Marashi, Iraqi-American author of First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story, agreed.
“TV and movies don’t really show us a lot of how people navigate a long-term relationship,” she said. “And so, we’re all kind of misinformed. We’re all kind of going into this a little bit blind.”
The label, not the relationship, is the problem, according to Al-Marashi.
To her, the “loaded label” is used exclusively for marriages in Eastern cultures to reinforce the image that they “don’t have autonomy” against a Western culture that “celebrates independence and autonomy and choice.”
“If typical Americans met through a network of family friends,” she continued, “no one would call it an arranged marriage.”
The emergence of Muslim dating apps and online matchmaking services draws similarities between arranged marriage and more standard free-choice marriages in the U.S.
“We’re just evolving and modernizing at the same rate as any other society or religion is,” said Al-Marashi.
Many reporters and psychologists cite the global divorce rate for arranged marriages to quantify the success of these relationships. The figure was nearly 45 percent lower than the total divorce rate as reported in 2012 by Statistic Brain.
In an arranged setting, potential spouses are matched by factors such as social class, educational level and religion, which may predict long-term marriage compatibility.
Utpal Dholakia, a marketing professor at Rice University, wrote in a 2015 Psychology Today piece that trusting family “in the choice process pays off.”
“For most people,” he said, “it is difficult to figure out when to stop searching and just as hard not to begin again once they have settled for a chosen partner.”
However, not everyone is convinced.
Unchained At Last, the only organization devoted to ending forced and child marriages in the U.S., disagrees with this interpretation of the numbers.
Unchained uses “forced” and “arranged” interchangeably because some spouses in “arranged” marriages face familial and societal pressure, bribery, threats to their families or physical violence until they agree to wed.
Those coercive tactics are the same reasons that prevent couples from divorcing, according to Unchained founder Fraidy Reiss in an interview for the February 2019 issue of New Jersey Monthly.
“We like to say that puts the ‘lock’ in ‘wedlock’,” said Reiss.
Some expressed that although forced marriage is an issue that necessitates attention, it should not discredit the stories of individuals who are happy in their arranged marriages.
“I feel like most people conflate arranged marriages and forced marriages,” said Palveen Sekhon, a first-generation Indian-American student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Like many other young Americans with South Asian backgrounds, she sees arranged marriage as a consensual union between two people who knew each other in childhood or had already developed feelings and later ask for parental “arrangement.”
A 2013 Ipsos survey found that Young Indians aged 18 to 35 preferred an arranged marriage over a free-choice one.
Regarding her own decision to continue the tradition in her family, Sekhon cited the main factor as the fact that this type of relationship “has led to happy marriages” in her own experience.
“Arranged marriages are created on the foundation of two families with similar morals and backgrounds coming together rather than two individuals coming together,” said Sekhon.
Aammarah Idris, a Pakistani-American student at the University of California, Irvine, shared her perspective on the importance of family as a constant anchor from courtship to marriage.
“While the thrill of dating and having a boyfriend excites me, a reason why I stay strong with the tradition is that I find a sense of reassurance,” said Idris. “I know at the end of the day, it will be my decision and I know I won’t be alone in the inevitable process of having to leave my family and starting a new life.”
“Love can be a result of many courses of life,” she finished.
The difficulty of those in arranged marriages lies in reconciling their own stories with the Western perception of what it is.
In Al-Marashi’s memoir of her relationship, she describes searching for ways to prove to her American peers that she didn’t have an arranged marriage because in their eyes, it was “kind of the worst thing you could have.”
With time, she found direction as a published author: to challenge the label of arranged marriage in conversation.
“It’s not that the way that we’re coupling is in any way all that unusual or problematic,” said Al-Marashi. “It’s more all of the negative associations that come with it.”
When asked how couples in arranged marriages define love and express it in their relationships, many directed their answers to marital life and the process of learning to work around each other’s differences.
“We shared our ideas, perspectives and values — we shared a life together,” said Chen. “We have walked this road alongside one another, past all its thorns, and will continue to its end. And that is what I think true love really is.”
