Essay On Arranged Marriages

Marriage is the legal or formal recognized union of a man and a woman as partners in a relationship, Arranged marriage is a marriage planned and agreed to by the families of the bride and groom, who have little say in the matter of who they will be marrying . The views on these types of marriages and how they affect people describes one of the ways that our culture has changed over time. Over the last about one hundred years, there has been a decline in the amount of people that get married or people getting divorced. According to the New Yorks Times, 40-50 percent of marriages in America end in divorce ( Lee, "Modern Lessons From Arranged Marriages"). In the past marriage was seen as important because there may be cases when a family would marry into a family that is wealthy and reap the benefits of what they had. Now a days though people have become more self-sufficient so marriage isn’t seen as the true goal of numerous people. In the 1930’s though there were times when people as young as sixteen would be arranged to get married to someone much older than they are so that their family would gain the wealth of their spouse. These arranged marriages tend to affect how the person that is getting married off to see their family. Even marriages that aren’t necessarily arranged can affect a person negatively, even if they aren’t the one that got married. Arranged or regular marriages can have a positive or negative effect on one’s relationship with their spouse, their family, and their friends. To begin with, it is clear that arranged marriages have a strong effect on the two people that are married together. According to ABC News, sixty percent of the marriages that happen in the world are arranged (Toledo, “First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Love”). A positive that comes with arranged marriages is that both partners are on equal terms when it comes to education, social status, and family status as stated in the article used above (Toledo, “First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Love”). The book First Comes Marriage, makes a similar point where it says that parents that arrange their children to get married look for specific factors such as age, religion, and pictures of what the spouse will look like (Reva, 8). In the book it also says that the family doesn’t take into consideration factors such as love or intimacy (Reva, 7). The marriage between the two people doesn’t just affect themselves, but their families as well. In the article, one woman says that her parents helped in growing in a relationship with the person that she was going to get married to (Toledo, “First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Love”). Due to the circumstances, the ones that have been arranged to get married to become closer because they see each other as equals and grow to like what they see in the other. It is stated that only about 5% of arranged marriages end in divorce, compared to 50% of “love” based marriages in America (Toledo, “First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Love”). This may be due to a lack of parent intervention on developing relationships between the couple. The high divorce rate may also be caused by a lack of positive interactions between a married couple which in turn causes unhappiness and a want for separation(Magai and McFadden 26).As marriage plays a part …show more content…
Janie believed that she should love someone before she gets married. Her grandmother believes that she should not worry about marriage, but she should rather worry about being financially stable and be wealthy. Her grandmother’s ideology is similar to that of many cultures that believe in arranged marriage as the ideal way for people to get married. The arranged marriage of Janie and Logan Killicks can be seen as a failure when it comes to arranged marriages, which are statistically proven to be efficient.. After Janie met Joe Starks and decided to tell Logan that she was thinking about leaving him, he responded by saying terrible and hurtful things about Janie and her family, especially her mother and grandmother (Hurston 51). Her marriage to Joe Starks may be seen as just as bad or maybe even worse than her marriage to Logan