Love marriage or Arranged marriage ?

     
                                                       Love marriage or Arranged marriage ?

 This has been a never ending debate since centuries. Ask a person about this, and he/she would strongly support any one of these two and would have lots of valid reasons for supporting that. Before sharing my views about this debate, let's discuss the different aspects of  love marriage and arranged marriage.

•  In love marriage, you marry someone whom you already love, and in arranged marriage you have to marry and then love someone whom your family members have chosen for you. And here comes the most crucial part. In some families, they give importance to the opinion and choice of the boy or girl, but in our country most of the families decide who would be their son-in-law or daughter-in-law, according to their choice, and this happens especially with girls. And it is really tough to love someone whom your parents have chosen for you as per their choice. It's true that the parents never want their son or daughter to be unhappy after marriage. They do everything according to their assessment, what they think to be right and appropriate. They choose a family which they think is compatible with theirs..a family where their daughter would be able to adjust easily, or the would-be daughter-in-law from that family would be able to adjust with their family. But compatibility between two families should never be a deciding factor about the compatibility of a man and a lady who are going to marry. To some extent, a family can give idea about the son or daughter of that family, but this is not always true. Each person is unique with his/her own personality and attitude towards life. As a person grows up, he/she acquires knowledge from the other people in the society, and develops his/her own opinion about everything. A man or a lady from a conservative family may be ultramodern, and vice versa. So sometimes it happens that a family is arranging the marriage between a boy and a girl who are actually just opposite to each other. 'Opposites attract' - this may be the theory of love and marriage to some people, but from a practical point of view, it's very tough to share one's whole life with someone who has just the opposite opinion about everything, and is not ready to modify his/her opinion. This may be the reason for conflict in case of arranged marriage. In love marriage, you get time to know the person whom you decide to marry, and can decide how much you are compatible to each other. One person's every opinion can not match with others, but you get time to know how much your views about life are adjustable and decide about your future according to that. And if your family is not ready to accept your love marriage, it is your duty to convince them without hurting them. You cannot escape from them, they are your well-wisher, and they will eventually understand your point of view.

Marriage is always a new thing to everyone who's marrying for the first time.. After marriage, a girl has to leave her parents home, go to a new house, and live with a new family in a whole new surrounding. Things get a little tough if your life partner is also unknown to you.  

•  In case of arranged marriage, a lady has to share her life with a guy about whom she knows very little. She has to adjust herself with her life-partner, the members of her in-laws family, with their habits, their rituals and customs, and their family traditions. If we think about that guy who's married to that lady, he also has to share every day of his life with a lady whom his family members have selected for him and he had only seen her or had talked to her once or twice before marriage. In this situation, it is definitely of help if you would have known your life-partner for quite some time before marriage, about his/her habits and nature, likes and dislikes -- and that is possible only in love marriage. Two individuals need some time to know each other, and this is not possible in arranged marriage, where you get to know each other only after marriage. Even if some people talk over telephone, chat online or meet a few times before an arranged marriage, that is not sufficient to know a person in such a short time.

Whether it's a love marriage, or an arranged marriage, there are few things I would like to discuss. As far as relationship with the life-partner is concerned, marriage is a completely different thing.. After love marriage, many couples complain that their partners have supposedly changed to a different person after marriage than they were before marriage, and they feel that they had loved someone and married someone else. 

•  In few cases it may be true that a man or a lady is not able to assess the person whom he/she is going to marry. This happens especially in ultra-short-duration relationships and long-distance relationships, where you don’t get enough time to be together and to know many things about your partner, his/her nature, habits (both good and bad), because you can only see whatever has been projected by your partner to you, and everyone loves to project only the admirable qualities in him/her. If a man is chronic alcoholic, and he does not consider it to be a bad habit and is not bothered about that habit; or he’s not conscious that it is harmful for him and his partner; or he is conscious but he’s not ready to quit drinking, will he tell it his partner about that? Never, because no girl ever wants to marry a chronic alcoholic man. On the other side, if a girl is kleptomaniac, she will also never tell it to her boyfrind, whom she is about to marry. Until someone else tells you about these problems before marriage, you get to know about these kind of habits only after marriage. 

• But in most of the cases the person is blamed wrongly. Responsibilities change after marriage. The same boy who used to go out with his girlfriend anytime during his college-life, may not find that much of time after marriage, because now he has to take care of his family, earn a good amount of money for their well-being. The lady, who used to call his fiancée several times a day before marriage, may get busy in daily household chores in a new family after marriage, and may not be able to call him that much. The wife and the husband must understand it.

I would strongly support love marriage. There may be pros and cons of love marriages, but there is one thing. And it's always 'better the devil you know (than the devil you don't)'. If you marry according to your parents choice, and you are not satisfied with your marriage, and not ready for separation, then you would spend rest of your life blaming your parents, and would always think that life would have been different and much better if you had married as per your own choice. But if the same thing happens after love marriage, you are the one solely responsible for that, you have no-one to blame. And when you can't blame others for something that has happened to you, you try to solve your own problem by yourself. It's your own duty to make your marriage work, because only you know about the qualities in your beloved partner, for which you had thought that you are compatible with him/her, and for which you decided to marry him/her.

The ultimate truth is- love can happen in any marriage, whether before or after, if both of the partners are ready to fall in love. One may feel out of love even after love marriage, if one or both of the partners take each other for granted. So whether it's a love marriage or an arranged marriage, there are a few things that must be done- be loving, faithful, understanding, sensitive and caring for your life-partner, he/she actually deserves it.

This post is part of the contest Love Marriage ya Arranged Marriage  (Official Facebook page)on  IndiBlogger