Random Stories Of Arranged Marriages (20 items)

• (#15) Their Parents' Marriage Was A War Zone

  From Redditor /u/bthug27:

  Child of an arranged marriage. It is probably the single reason why I am socially, emotionally, and physically f*cked.

  They have hated each other since before they were married. They have had violent, and I mean violent fights. My fondest memories of my parents are them trying to kill each other. There are more days of my life where they are fighting and arguing than days they’re not.

  Basically, it’s like growing up in a f*cking war zone
• (#2) Theirs Has Lasted 20 Years

  From Redditor /u/city-of-stars:

  So my marriage was arranged. I'll give a brief rundown of my "courtship."

  First met my wife-to-be in Chandigarh, India. My grandfather and her father were both in the army and had been posted there, so our respective families had a get-together. This was right after I had graduated college (she was still in high school). I don't remember much, we both said "hi" to each other but that's about it. Around this time our families started the "process," for lack of a better term.

  Soon after, I moved to the United States to get my master's degree in computer science. I studied in the States for two years, and upon graduation, I accepted a job offer at Intel. I worked there for a few years and would visit India often. By now my wife-to-be was studying at Indraprastha College for Women at the University of Delhi.

  After working at Intel for a while, I moved to a better-paying position at IBM. At this time, my family and her family broached the idea of us getting married. By this point, I barely remembered my wife-to-be, having only met her that one time several years ago. We met in India, and at that point, we started "dating." She had graduated from the University of Delhi and was planning to apply to a PhD program.

  After a year of dating (that's essentially what it was), we got married in Telangana (both of us were Andhras). We knew each other relatively well at this point. Soon afterward, she joined me in the States, having been accepted into a PhD program. I continued to work for the next few years before we had our first child.

  We've been married for close to 20 years. Both of us are very happy in our marriage. Obviously, nothing is 100% perfect, we argue from time to time like any other couple. But she's been a supportive, wonderful companion for all of those years and I like to think I've been the same.
• (#6) This Mother Went Through Two Arranged Marriages

  From Redditor /u/dkasbux:

  My mom was in two arranged marriages.

  First one, the guy pretty much used her for citizenship and sex. She got pregnant. He went upstate to his sister's place and didn't come back for a while. My mom went after him and asked what he wanted and what was going to become of their marriage. They divorced. She [terminated the pregnancy]. She told me he was abnormally close to his sister. Maybe biased...

  The second time my mom really tried to make it work. 20-ish years later and two kids later, my parents had a nasty divorce. My dad was and still is somewhat of an alcoholic. Rehab on several occasions. Cheated. Done drugs occasionally. Possibly sexually abusive, my mother is pretty conservative and didn't want to divulge more. Emotionally and physically abusive and manipulative. My mom and dad really tried to make it work, but some people aren't made to get along. My parents are those people.

  It's not for everyone. There are bad endings. My parents are unfortunately that example.
• (#19) They Wish Their Mom Had More Opportunity To Choose For Herself

  From Redditor /u/Bucket_Amz:

  My parents had an arranged marriage - this was the early '80s. Both my parents are Indian and we live in the UK. My mother came to the UK at the age of four, grew up in Yorkshire, and moved to London with her family in her early teens. She loved school and had friends but was also caring for her younger sister, who was disabled, and helping her mum with the caring duties.

  At the age of 15 my mum was pulled out of school, taught to cook and clean, and had five pictures of men from India put down in front of her. These five suitors were all people her parents knew, her parents knew the men's parents, and a couple in there were also her first cousins. She picked a man just by looking at his picture; it was my dad. My mother's mum (my grandmother) told my mum that she needed to get married but couldn't leave London as she needed to help my grandmother look after her disabled sister. My father had family 100 miles away in the UK so my mother should have gone with him to set up home over there where his family was, but my dad was more than happy to live with his in-laws.

  She was engaged at 15 without ever meeting my dad. For the next five years she would briefly talk to my dad on the phone for a few minutes, but during these short conversations, she would be in the room with her family. My mum was 20 when my father came to the UK and they had a lovely wedding, but it took them a little while to get to know each other. My father is one of the best men I know; he has done everything he ever could to keep my mother happy. He has never laid a finger on her and it’s my mother [who has] the temper and who wears the trousers in the relationship. My father is a very humble man, he came from nothing and now has more than he ever could imagine and he praises my mum for this constantly.

  My mother is not happy though. She always says this is the not the life she would have chosen for herself - she wanted to carry on with her studies and become a nurse. My parents are foster [parents] and my mother has cared for people her whole life, and in a way is my role model because of how much she has done for others, but I rarely see my mum smile. I’m not sure if it’s because of my parents' marriage or because my mother was raised in an abusive household and her brothers were able to marry whoever they wanted even though [their partners] weren’t Indian or Muslim.

  My father still tries his hardest with my mum; he is a very happy man and very funny. My grandmother now lives with us and she is just poison. I know when she has been talking sh*t all day because my mum's mood is worse than usual... my grandmother is a very negative person and feels that women should be in the house constantly to cook and clean, and I don’t do that because I have a job and a social life. I am about to marry a man who isn’t Indian. My mother is extremely happy for me, happier that I am having a love marriage and have found someone myself. She is a lovely woman and her and I are alike in many ways. I just wish she wasn’t robbed of her teenage years and got to choose a path that made her happy.

  There was a time she resented me for my freedom and the life I chose for myself, which didn’t include cooking and cleaning, but she then realized she didn’t want me to live the life she had. I also know I can’t ever treat my future husband the way my mother has treated my father. As much as I adore my mother and have a lot of her characteristics, she has taught me what not to do in a marriage, whereas my father has taught me how to be humble and how to have a big heart. I love them both dearly, though.
• (#14) They Are Happy With Their Partner, Not The Way It Happened

  From Redditor /u/NinjaPyjama:

  My marriage was sorta against my wishes. I just wanted to finish college first. In my community, girls get married between 18-21 and guys between 24-30. I was already 22 and my parents were freaking out. I agreed to [an] engagement but not the wedding until I finished the fifth year of dental college (I was in the second year). I come home for Christmas vacation and my parents don't let me go back. Like, they physically restrained me. I threatened to tell my now-husband and his family that I was being forced to marry and for that, I was beaten up badly. I never went back to college.

  I texted with [my significant other] for a few months. The first time I saw him was at the engagement. Technically it was nikah, which meant we were legally married, but is [was] treated as [an] engagement. The wedding reception happened a year later, and afterward, we lived as husband and wife. I am happy with the man I married but I am not happy with the way it happened. We are one-and-a-half years into our marriage now. At first, everything was silently a compromise for me but now I love him and can't imagine being married to anyone else.
• (#5) They Had Arranged Dates For A Month Before Getting Engaged

  From Redditor /u/Yserbius:

  In Orthodox Judaism, there's no casual dating, no girlfriends or boyfriends. Dates are arranged by family/friends with the explicit purpose of checking each other out to see if they are viable marriage partners without any physical contact. They date for one to three months, then the guy is expected to propose. It varies from family-to-family, but there are some people who are expected to decide after only a date or three. I am not sure if there are still fully arranged marriages since Jewish law explicitly forbids it, but I do know that back in Europe many families would arrange for the bride and groom to meet once on the day of the wedding to get around the restriction. Leaders of communities where this was commonplace forbade this practice in modern times, but it's possible that some still practice it.

  Pretty much every religious Jew I know (and myself) have gone through this process, called "shidduchim." 95% of couples I know are very happily married. There are some divorces, but it's really far below the national average (even for people in their first marriage). I even know of a few who did the whole "one date and engaged" thing and they all seem pretty happy with their choices. I dated for about a month (I think we got together around 10 times and talked on the phone maybe another four or five times) and had a three-month engagement. We've been married nearly a decade and wouldn't change a thing about it.

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