Love Marriage and Arranged Marriage - Essay Example

There are two fundamental types of marriage; love marriage and arranged marriage. In the former, two people fall in love with each other and decide to enter the contract of marriage. In the latter, marriage between two people is arranged by their parents, relatives, friends, or family members. In a love marriage, the partners generally know and understand each other very well whereas in an arranged marriage, they might be completely strangers to each other when they are married.

• Which is more successful; love marriage or arranged marriage?
• Which spouses love each other more; those in a love marriage or the ones in an arranged marriage?
• What are the determinants of successful marriage?
• In what ways love marriage and arranged marriage are similar?
• In what ways love marriage and arranged marriage are dissimilar?

Marriage is one of the most important decisions in every person’s life. Particularly in the contemporary age, when the financial and emotional implications of unsuccessful marriage are numerous, many people tend to cohabit rather than marry to avoid commitment and its implications. Marriage is a very sacred institution. Many problems in our society like negative birth rate and teenage pregnancy result from a decline in the trend of marriage. I am personally approaching the age of marriage in near future, and would like to have a detailed study of the pros and cons, conveniences, and complexities of marriage. This imparts the need to carry out an in-depth analysis of both types of marriage i.e. love marriage and arranged marriage, so that the one that has conventionally been more successful and has yielded more favorable results for people can be identified.

Determinants of successful marriage, be that a love marriage or arranged marriage vary across cultures. For example, a marriage is declared good in Japan in which the man is the bread earner whereas the wife does not work whereas the ability of a husband to financially support his wife is not the measure of a good marriage in the USA (Lee and Ono). “Education has a strong and consistent association with marital quality, indicating that the greater the education the greater the marital quality” (Allendorf and Ghimire 18).

To find out the answers of the above questions, a detailed literature review would be conducted for the secondary data. People who have done either love marriage or arranged marriage will be interviewed. Since this topic relates to the field of sociology, the qualitative research would be more suitable for the data collection and analysis than the quantitative research. Responses of the research participants will be analyzed and conclusions would be drawn.

Marriage is of two basic types; love marriage and arranged marriage. There are certain drivers of successful marriage that differ between the two. The two also differ in their level of success in the past. This paper determines the factors that lead to successful marriage and the similarities and differences between love marriage and arranged marriage.