Couples get married through love marriages or arranged marriages. Although love marriages sound romantic, unmarried people usually find it difficult to meet good partners.
As far as I know, arranged marriages had been common in Japan before the World War II. My grandfathers and grandmothers both on my father's and mother's sides got married through arranged marriages. Love marriages were very seldom at that time.
However, love marriages started to prevail in Japan after the World War II. This is partly because the U.S. infused the concepts of freedom of love and freedom of marriage into Japan at that time. The concepts must have motivated youngsters to get married due to love.
As for modern times, love marriages have become frequent. Unmarried people tend to avoid searching potential partners through arrangements. Love marriages are common in Japan now. However, my friends living in India said otherwise. Many couples in India get married through arranged marriage. There seem to few barriers to arranged marriages in India.
When I heard it from my friends in India, I though that there were more freedoms in India than in Japan. Even though people can choose between arranged marriages and love marriages in Japan, Japanese society implicitly forces unmarried people to choose the love marriages.
Love marriage can be a war; whoever gets a beloved partner wins...:-) Although I blindly believed love marriage is better, when I see most of Indian people living happily in arranged marriage, I think it is also a good and peaceful idea. I only know very few people getting love marriage even in cosmopolitan Mumbai.
ReplyDeleteI also derived a similar idea to yours from talking with your colleagues at the restaurant in Mumbai. Your colleagues, who got married through arranged marriages, seemed to be satisfied with thier marriage life. On the other hand, here in Japan, arranged marriages are regarded as inferior to love marriages.
ReplyDeleteI remembered a famous maxim which learned in my university days.
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth." by Albert Einstein.