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Are arranged marriages a good tradition or an outdated notion?
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| Outdated | 73% | 1115 votes | Total: 1519 votes | |
| Good | 27% | 404 votes |
Outdated
by R.A. Scott
Created on: June 27, 2008 Last Updated: April 18, 2009
Love is a many splendored thing; or so I have heard. Eyes meet, hearts beat, birds sing and the world gets turned upside down; unless of course you have an arranged marriage. Then only the parents are happy and while we all want our parents to be happy but at whose expense?
For centuries marriages were often arranged and in many cultures they still are. Perhaps there was a good reason for peoples of the east to arrange marriages. Today, however, the only reason to continue arranged marriages is because of tradition; it's not even a good tradition at that. Simply because you can trace a tradition, any tradition, back hundreds or thousands year is in no way a good reason to continue a tradition.
Celebrating New Years Eve in Times Square New York is a good tradition. It's a good tradition because no one ever gets injured celebrating New Years Eve. Arranged marriages can hurt and they deny a person certain civil rights. I know that there are plenty of cultures where there are no such thing as civil or human rights but that does not make things right.
Arranged marriages are a tradition of a by gone era. Arranged marriages are a great way of controlling people, especially women. Around the globe there has been a custom or tradition of subjugating women. As with many cultures from eastern cultures and religions they believe it is their right to make women 2nd class citizens. Control by its very nature suggests a 2nd class citizenship. It also means much more, like controlling a life. If you have a desire to control women and to control their lives start with the marriage.
In western societies we tend to frown upon that kind of control imposed upon women. Women tend to frown upon that as well. Any kind of control over anyone is frowned upon. The term frowned upon is actually a very mild term, there are many much more venomous terms that would be more appropriate.
Some eastern cultures and religions have an entirely different view of women. Historically this has been true also; they have almost always had a different view of women. You can see in the media how women today are treated like 2nd class citizens in Eastern societies.
There must be a certain lack of respect for both the bride and the groom in arranged marriages. These marriage ideas might be old but that by no means suggests that they are good traditions.
Some traditions should be destroyed faster than a Scotsman can clean out a free bar at a wedding reception. Arranged marriages are one of those traditions.
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Good
by Colette Georgii
Created on: July 18, 2010
In times past many cultures embraced the arranged marriage but today only a few cultures still honor the arranged marriage so possibly the arranged marriage is an outdated notion, however it still remains a good tradition in some cultures and actually stabilizes the marriage unit.
Marriage in times past was meant more to increase the family fortune or keep like-minded families together, but today most people want to marry for love or at least choose their own mate for similar reasons such as increasing the family fortune or marrying into a similar culture or lifestyle.
Marrying for love is actually a fairly new concept. Going back into literature, married people often had lovers to satisfy the love aspect. Marriage was an arrangement or contract between two people that produced children. The more children one had the more help there was for farming or working in the family's designated occupation.
In the marriages of royalty, it was important for royal men or women to marry within royalty to increase land holdings and power. Love was not thought of as a proponent of a good marriage. For love a member of royalty sought out the mistress or the lover.
As to arranged marriages, it was usually the woman who rebelled against the arranged marriage. The arranged marriage was just another way to keep a woman subservient and in tow. She was a chattel, or like a piece of furniture owned first by her family and then owned by the husband.
Since most cultures have done away with owning women rather than loving women, they have also stopped the arranged marriage. However among the rich, you can still find some forms of the arranged marriage where a father may try to marry his daughter off to another rich family in order to join families, increase family fortune, or keep the daughter or son out of poverty. Or within certain cultures, the father may wish to marry his children off to someone within the same culture to keep the family tradition.
In some ways the arranged marriage was a good tradition. You learned to love the person you were married to, preventing such things as divorce and separation and domestic violence.
All to often today, people marry for what they think is love, but find out a few years down the road that what they thought was love was just an illusion or they think their love has burned out, so they divorce. And so in today's society, there are way too many divorces and broken marriages, with the children being caught in the middle, causing them anguish and hurt.
Surely if modern man and woman want to have good marriages they should learn to love their chosen mates, just as though they were in the arranged marriage.
So yes, although the arranged marriage seems like an outdated notion, the newer marriages for love should have some rules and values as did the traditional arranged marriages in order to keep families together and increase the love they once felt for each other instead of reducing their marriages to nothing and destroying lives through the process.
Therefore a lot can be learned by the arranged marriages of the past and arranged marriages that still exist in some cultures. Arranged marriages can also be marriages of love, and marriages for love should adopt some aspects of the arranged marriage. The arranged marriage was and is a good tradition.
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