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Modern Lessons from Arranged Marriages
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Rita and Deepak Sarma of Shaker Heights, Ohio, fell in love but married only after both their families approved.
By JI HYUN LEE
Published: January 18, 2013 Comment
WHETHER arranged marriages produce loving, respectful FACEBOOK
relationships is a question almost as old as the institution of marriage TWITTER
itself. In an era when 40 to 50 percent of all American marriages end
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in divorce, some marriage experts are asking whether arranged
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marriages produce better relationships in the long run than do typical
American marriages, in which people find each other on their own E-MAIL
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and romance is the foundation. SHARE
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Enlarge This Image Experts also ask whether there are
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lessons in how arranged marriages REPRINTS
evolve that can be applied to
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nonarranged marriages in the United
States. Among them is Robert Epstein,
a senior research psychologist at the 110 articles in the
past month All Recommendations
American Institute for Behavior 1. HANGING ON
Research and Technology in Vista, Calif., and author of a Life in the Red
new study, “How Love Emerges in Arranged Marriages.”
2. QUESTION MARK
He found that one key to a strong arranged marriage is the Why Am I Getting Mellower?
amount of parental involvement at its start. The most
Danny Ghitis for The New York Times important thing parents of the couple do, he said, is to 3. THE NEW OLD AGE
The parents of A. J. Khubani of Saddle “screen for deal breakers.” Study: More to Meal Delivery Than Food
River, N.J., sent him to India to meet
his future wife, Poonam, 27 years ago. 4. Ohio: Child-Phobic Teacher Sues School
“They’re trying to figure out whether something could go District
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wrong that could drive people apart,” Dr. Epstein said.
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2. Parental Involvement Can Help in Choosing Marriage Partners,... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/fashion/weddings/parental...
Some couples who have entered into satisfying arranged 5. WELL
marriages do attribute the success of their unions to the The Fallout of a Chance Medical Finding
involvement of their parents. A. J. Khubani was 25 in 1985 6. SQUARE FEET
when his parents tried to get him to visit Inder Sen Israni Amazon Drives Seattle Office Market Surge
and Maya Israni in Jaipur, India, friends of the Khubani
family, and meet the couple’s daughter Poonam. 7. This Was Supposed to Be My Column for
Yana Paskova for The New York Times
New Year’s Day
Another New Jersey couple, Neil and “I just refused,” said Mr. Khubani, who was not keen on
Patty Hwang, met via a matchmaking
service, which her father paid for. settling down because he had just started Telebrands, a 8. Warning Signs of Violent Acts Often
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was so important that I had to fly across the world to see
Share your thoughts. one girl,” Mr. Khubani, now 52, remembered. 10. MOTHERLODE
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Ms. Israni, now Mrs. Khubani, was not ready, either. At the Harder Than It Looks
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Getting them to meet took some prodding: Mr. Khubani’s father, knowing that his son was
going to Asia on business, offered to pay his way if he stopped in Jaipur. The young man
and woman both relented, with the casual assumption that they would just please their
parents “and that would be the end of it,” Mrs. Khubani said.
When they finally met, neither was impressed. Mrs. Khubani recalled, “It wasn’t love at
first sight at all.” Love did not kick in until Mr. Khubani became sick and the young
woman he had just met stayed by his bedside to care for him. “Nobody understood his
accent because he was so American,” she said, and so she was his translator. For Mr.
Khubani, her caring and elegant manners sealed the deal.
“Spending a couple of days in the room with her, alone, I fell in love with her,” he said.
They have been married for 27 years.
Arranged marriages can work “because they remove so much of the anxiety about ‘is this
the right person?’ ” said Brian J. Willoughby, an assistant professor in the School of
Family Life at Brigham Young University. “Arranged marriages start cold and heat up and
boil over time as the couple grows. Nonarranged marriages are expected to start out
boiling hot but many eventually find that this heat dissipates and we’re left with a
relationship that’s cold.”
He also credited supportive parents.
“Whether it be financial support for weddings, schooling or housing, or emotional support
for either partner, parents provide valuable resources for couples as they navigate the
marital transition,” Dr. Willoughby said.
But does it really take a village to build a strong marriage?
“I don’t think love marriage and arranged marriage are as different as we make them out
to be,” said Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor in the department of sociology at
Stanford University. “The people we end up married to or partnered up with end up being
similar to us in race, religion and class background and age, which means that they might
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not be all that different from the person that your mother would have picked for you.”
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Divorce rates have climbed in countries like South Korea, Iran, China, and even in India,
where parents traditionally have had a strong hand in the marriages of their children. And Many Jews Believe in God
while India may boast of having one of the lowest divorce rates in the world — below 3 But Not All. Secular Jews Affirm
percent by some estimates — divorce there still carries a great stigma. It is also a country Jewish History and Jewish Culture
in which divorce sometimes is not an option for many women and those seeking citycongregation.org/Non-Theistic
dissolution have encountered violence.
In the United States, both parents and young adults still value marriage, Dr. Willoughby
said. Their differences, he wrote in an e-mail, “are in sequencing and timing. It’s more
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about parents and children disagreeing about how they get to marriage and when it
happens.”
With “free-range” marriages predominant, this approach discourages parental
intervention.
“We celebrate autonomy,” noted Dr. Epstein, which, he explained, is why adult children
bristle at the idea. But given the speed at which couples meet, greet, cohabitate and
separate these days, he said, he thought there was some logic in trying a method that has
worked for so many couples and in so many cultures.
Orthodox Jews in the United States are known for arranging marriages, with some parents
using professional matchmakers.
“In the secular world, a lot of the times a couple will fall in love with each other and then at
that point they lose objectivity,” said Rabbi Steven Weil, the executive vice president at the
Orthodox Union in New York. In arranged marriages, however, “there is a lot of
homework, a lot of energy spent, before a young man and woman fall in love with each
other. For that reason, the parents are involved. But obviously it’s the decision of the
young man and woman, but a parent knows a child.”
For many Korean mothers, the prospect of marriage for their children is not a wait-for-it
option. These parents also call in professional matchmakers to direct their career-minded
children into becoming marriage-minded.
Diane Kim of Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking in New York reported that some 40
percent of her clients in the agency’s Asian-American division are mothers calling on
behalf of their sons. Many have a “demand” list of expectations Among them: the woman
must be beautiful, have an Ivy League education, come from a good family whose
members are also educated, and have professional goals similar to their son.
“And then they say, ‘Can you find somebody that fits that mold?’ ” said Ms. Kim, whose
matchmaking fees start at $5,000 and include 12 introductions. “My job is not just about
setting people up; it’s about educating the parents.”
Bringing about these mother-tested, child-approved marriages is not easy. “I have
instances where parents pay without the knowledge of their children,” Ms. Kim said, “and
I would have to contact the children and tell them, ‘Hey, this might be a little awkward —
and a big surprise — but your parents have signed you up. Don’t freak out.’ ”
It was through the efforts of Ms. Kim, while she was employed at another matchmaking
service, Duo, that Neil Hwang, 34, a management consultant for a Manhattan investment
firm, married his wife, Patty, last July.
“My mother was very proactive about getting me set up to meet women,” said Mr. Hwang,
who also noted that both his parents were members of a social club that those in Mr.
Hwang’s age group had nicknamed Korean Parents United for Unmarried Children.
Mrs. Hwang, a social studies teacher at a public high school in Bergen County, N.J., had
also reached the crisis age of 31 and was under pressure from her parents. She was gently
coerced into trying out a matchmaking service at the recommendation of her father, who
had already paid for it. When the couple married last summer, Mrs. Hwang recalled her
parents saying with some degree of triumph, “We knew it was going to happen!”
When his first marriage ended in divorce, Deepak Sarma, 43, a professor of religious
studies at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned a valuable lesson in doing
things in accordance with family approval. When it came time to make a second go at
marriage, he approached his parents, asking, “Who’s out there for me?” But as an Indian-
American divorcée who was not a doctor, lawyer or engineer, it was clear to his parents
that his “low desirability” would make any marital arrangement difficult.
Once, while Professor Sarma was in India, his parents arranged for him to meet with a few
prospective fathers-in-law. Although his offer implicitly included “a passageway to
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America,” he said they immediately discarded his candidacy as a groom.
“I wasn’t good enough,” he said.
Instead, he met a woman at a networking event in Cleveland in 2004. She was an internist
at a clinic nearby and happened to see Mr. Sarma, a Hindu, on a panel speaking about
Jainism, a religion practiced by her family, who had long insisted on her marrying within
the faith. Hearing Mr. Sarma talk about a world that had closed her off to so many people,
that woman, now his wife, Dr. Rita Sarma, felt a connection.
“I could hardly stay in tune with the lecture itself because I was thinking, ‘Who is this
guy?’ ” Dr. Sarma said. “He was looking kind of dash. So I lingered around, and I kind of
waited.”
The two bonded over their experiences in the culture of American-born confused Desis,
slang for Americanized Indians.
“It was serendipitous,” Mr. Sarma said. But he still had to persuade her father, and
ultimately had to call on his own father to intercede on his behalf. It was only after all of
the in-laws passed one another’s criteria that the green light was given.
Dr. Epstein admitted that the tradition of arranged marriages had no hope of gaining wide
acceptance in this country.
“We celebrate rugged individualism that is antithetical to the arranged marriage culture,”
he said. He argues instead for deeper parental involvement. “When you realize what it is
that the families are doing, it makes excellent sense,” he said.
Which is not unlike the experience of the Sarmas, who found an American-style “love
marriage” with a familial twist. Mr. Sarma now revels in the fact that he is living what has
long been held up as an American marriage ideal.
“The great irony is, like, I came back here and I married a doctor, right?” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 20, 2013, on page ST13 of the National edition with the headline:
Modern Lessons From Arranged Marriages .
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