Essay about arranged marriage

Submitted By hawraa321
Words: 841
Pages: 4

Arranged Marriages
Hawraa Hamey
College of Southern Nevada

The burden on me to find a husband started very early. When I was about twelve years old, I fell down stone stairs in Lebanon and hit my head on a sharp rock, leaving me with a scar on the top right of my forehead. I remember my mother’s highest concern was: “What boy will marry her when he finds out?” And it just escalated from there. Many women, muslim or not, whose parents have had a deep, strong marriage hope we will too, while dreading that maybe we’ve made everything hopelessly worse by expecting too much. Our proposed husbands have to be wealthy and culturally keen, sophisticated but sensible.

The thought of arranged marriage can sound absurd to the Western world, but in the middle east, it’s expected. There are many pros and cons that are linked with arranged marriages. On the affirmative side, arranged marriages gives the parents full supervision over family matters. They would obviously try to get someone who they would think is the best for their son or daughter. However, that could be on the negative side as well, because some parents might not always know exactly what their children want. They will most likely choose someone who will look out for their own needs rather than their children’s. Over the years, arranged marriages have issued to be more like a deal than a nice tradition.

According to the essay “Arranged Marriage: Advantages & Disadvantages” from Study Mode, they said “Arranged marriages tend to have a much lower divorce rate than marriages based on romantic love.” They said that some reasons for that includes the precedent cultural compatibility. This is somewhat true because of the fact that when parents are arranging their child to be married, they try very hard to pair them with someone who makes almost the same salary. This avoids the couple having to argue daily about money issues. They also said, “Love grows over time and stems from meeting the challenges that any married couple faces together.” However, the fact that it will take the arranged couple some time to fall in love is also really bad. Not because of the association itself, but more because some people may have personal animosity against other people who might look a certain way or are of a certain cultural level.

Articles like “Ideology and Changing Times” by Anne M. Jennings, and “Pros and Cons of an Arranged Marriage” by Lori Phillips, all say that over time the arranged couple will be more content together, and will most likely not end in divorce. However, do any of these marriages stay happy? Amy, a 45-year-old house wife, was arranged to marry Steve, a 50-year-old business man, when she was only 22 years old. At the beginning of the marriage, the couple was fairly happy, and they had 6 children together. After the 6th child, the couple started drifting apart. Amy focused more on taking care of the children, while Steve focused on his businesses and making money to care for the whole family. Once Steve started facing problems with his business, and wasn’t making enough money, he would go back to his home and blame all his failures on his wife, and his mother for arranging him to marry her. Now the arranged couple have been married for 23 years, they sleep in two separate