This is misleading. Correlation does not equal causation. Arranged marriages are more likely to take place in much more traditional societies and families with much harsher divorce taboos and stricter patriarchal structures where women have few exit options in terms of supporting themselves, custody of kids, etc. What keeps people together in an arranged marriage is not always a happy marriage—it’s often the much higher price of divorce. There’s also the question of local laws and how difficult divorce may be in certain places and the correlation with local practice of love/arranged marriage.
Also, if you want to bring statistics into the picture, the country with the highest divorce rate is the Maldives—and arranged marriage is still fairly widespread there. The only two Muslim countries on the list of the ten with the lowest divorce rates are Libya and Turkey----and arranged marriage as practiced in Pakistan is definitely not the norm in Turkey, although arranged and semi-arranged cousin marriages are still the norm in Libya. On the other hand, arranged marriage is much less common in many Muslim countries other than Pakistan----Syria, Morocco, Palestine, Indonesia, etc.—yet these countries still retain relatively low divorce rates.
So love vs. arranged may be a cultural correlation in some countries, but it’s clearly not a causal relationship.
Expectations are clearly important in any marriage. An arranged marriage in which there’s an unrealistic expectation that one family is going to provide endless wealth and social connections for the other is just as doomed to conflict/disappointment as a love marriage where the couple have some bollywood-esque thought that every day they’ll be singing and dancing together in the kitchen interspersed with picnics in the Swiss Alps.
My marriage was a love marriage and the love hasn’t ‘fizzled’, nor will it. That’s because the love between my husband and I is based on a realistic idea of the other’s strengths and weaknesses, respect for differences, and a set of common goals for life that we determined in advance of our marriage. All of these things are important for lasting love but can be and often are neglected by people in both love and arranged marriages in favor of other sorts of social glue----family expectations, kids, etc.–in which case you get either divorce or people tolerating an unhappy situation in order to satisfy other people.
I’ll keep my love marriage.
Wow, brilliant post.
Just wanted to add another point to what snowy_winter believes, that arranged marriages have lower rates of ‘failure’ than love marriages. Has he heard about the divorce rates in Saudi Arabia where the majority are also arranged??
‘**Given the enormous rise in the divorce rate in the Kingdom — the second-highest in the world **— the head of Jeddah’s marriage court, Sheikh Saleh Ahmad Habad, has called for urgent steps to address the issue.’
More here: Alarming Divorce Rate ‘Must Be Addressed Urgently’