By Mirra Ghosh
The institution of marriage is shifting.
South Asians have developed a new system of ‘arranged love’, are opening up to the idea of cross-cultural unions, and are willing to accept differences between partners in age, income level, and education.
Maybe marriage is no longer about matching two suitable people, similar on every level, families joined in wedded bliss. We’ve started to find that maybe love really is important, that it doesn’t always have to come after marriage, and that independence can be a virtue.
But there is still a gap to bridge. And while we embarked on a journey to dismantle this divide between parent and young adult, we found that that’s not exactly where it exists. In fact, on the ‘wedding spectrum’, our beliefs seem to be most closely tied to another factor altogether: being married or unmarried.
With exception, we found the following pattern:
Being unmarried=while understanding the practical factors when choosing a potential life partner, we still place love, respect, and trust above all else.
Being married=whether love or arranged, marriage has taught us there are an infinite number of factors that are important in order to make a union last, factors we initially never considered.
But all is not lost. Regardless of where we fall on the scale, we seem to be speaking the same language. From our conversations with South Asians across the ages, across the world, we found that when we talk about marriage, we all keep coming back to the same words.
Here’s how:
