Arranged marriages still hold appeal

Letting parents pick relieves pressure of love connection

Love — who has time for that? Arshia Urooj Zaidi certainly didn't.

Up to her neck in a Ph.D. program, she knew that as much as she wanted to fall in love and get married, her schedule just didn't allow for a search for Mr. Right.

But Zaidi had a backup plan.

"I left it up to my parents. I said, 'I'll do my Ph.D. and you guys take care of this,' " she says.

A little more than a year after her parents found a promising suitor, Zaidi, 34, had both her degree and a husband she had grown to love. She owes it all, she says, to an arranged marriage.

Not to be confused with forced marriages, in which girls, often very young ones, are married off against their will, arranged marriages use family connections and parental vetting to match up adults, who decide for themselves whether they will marry.

Many immigrant groups have favored some variation of arranged marriage; in the West today, it's especially common among families from India, Pakistan and China.

Proponents say the process has some advantages over Western-style "love matches." Arranged marriage takes a lot of the guesswork out of picking a partner, relieves the stress of having too many choices, and puts your future in the hands of those whose experience you may trust more than your own: Mom and Dad.

"Your parents picked the person for you and all the things have gone through approval. So if something happens, you aren't the sole person to blame," says Zaidi.

Sumeet, a 36-year-old Indian who now lives in California, understands this concept firsthand. He prefers not to give his last name because, when he was younger, he went against his parents' wishes and made a love marriage. It didn't work out.

Arranged marriages also can turn out badly, of course. But to Sumeet, one of their pluses is that the spouses tend to have a lot in common. Parents are likely to find someone who shares their child's social class, religion, personality traits and culture. Those weren't things Sumeet was thinking about when he got married.

Lonely Western singles who wouldn't dream of marrying a stranger picked out by Mom and Dad can still imagine that might be easier.

"I think there's definitely a measure of arranged-marriage envy out there," says Marian Salzman, author of "Next Now" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), a book about business and culture trends.

Instead, she says, some of the benefits of arranged marriage are available outside immigrant communities in the form of hired matchmakers or Internet services, what she calls "assisted marriage."

What an arranged marriage actually is can vary, depending on the family. For some people, it means being matched long-distance with someone from their parents' hometown in India or Pakistan, and only meeting in person shortly before the wedding. In other cases, parents might introduce a couple, then leave them to a relatively average Western dating life.

Zaidi's marriage to electrical engineer Fawad Ali Naqvi was somewhere in between. Naqvi's parents contacted hers and set up initial meetings that were attended by both families; the couple was never alone. After deciding that they were going to marry, however, Zaidi and Naqvi spent a lot of time instant messaging, getting to know each other in the months between their April 2006 engagement and their wedding in June 2007.

Zaidi, an assistant professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, is a sociologist who studies South Asian communities in Canada. She wrote her master's thesis on perceptions of arranged marriage and says she was surprised she ended up opting for one herself.

"I was one of those girls who believed in the Cinderella story, the concept of love," she says. Many of the women she interviewed for her thesis agreed, she adds; 10 of the 16 women who told her they didn't want an arranged marriage now have one.

The reasons, say Zaidi and others, include social pressures and the fact that finding true love is harder than storybooks make it out to be.

There's also a desire for other perceived benefits of arranged marriage, which second- and third-generation immigrants often see among their parents: low divorce rates and a feeling that the success of your marriage matters to the whole community.