Does love last longer in arranged marriages? NEW YORK – Elke Thompson and Sam Quinn got engaged the old-fashioned way: their parents arranged it.
Quinn, 23, a quiet engineering student from Springfield, Mo., wanted to settle down, and asked his parents to play matchmaker. Through church friends, they found Thompson, an apple-cheeked 17-year-old from Manhattan, Kan. "We spent one day together, and then his dad said, 'Yes or no? We're leaving tonight with an answer,'" Thompson recalled with a giggle. Most of the courtship occurred among the parents. "I was very sure that I was going to take whoever they thought was right for me," Thompson said. "I didn't want to worry about what I want in a guy."
The Unification Church via Religion News Service Elke Thompson and Sam Quinn trusted their parents to find them a mate. They were married through the Unification Church. Fifteen months later, Thompson wore a wedding dress and Quinn donned a dark suit as they sat in a hotel ballroom in New York City, quietly fidgeting around a table adorned with white flowers, waiting with 42 other couples for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon to bless their union via a satellite video beamed from Korea. Thompson's high-school friends think she's nuts, she said. But in the Unification Church, arranged marriages are the norm. Moon teaches that romantic love leads to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies. Several religions practice arranged marriages. Hindu and Jewish matchmakers abound, for instance. But rarely does it rise to the level of dogma. Unificationists believe that marriages arranged through the church and blessed by Moon are "sinless" and foster the kingdom of God on earth, one happy family at a time. "This is the way to restore world peace," said Quinn. Arranged marriages — or lessons imparted by them — could also help lower the American divorce rate, according to research recently highlighted by the Unification Church. ...
In countries such as India and Pakistan, marriages are often brokered by families or professional matchmakers for religious and cultural reasons. In many of these marriages, expectations start low, love grows slowly and extended families lend support, said Robert Epstein, a research psychologist. "Love" marriages often start steamy but quickly cool off, leading to fraught families and unhappy hearts, said Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. He believes that American couples can learn from Unificationist conjugal practices. "Whatever anyone wants to say about the Unification Church, the marital aspect is not crazy," said Epstein. "It really seems to work." But Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, says Epstein draws broad conclusions from narrow studies. "Many arranged marriages in many countries are associated with a lack of choice for young people and are particularly repressive to women," she said. "The fact that arranged marriages tend to be more stable is not a measure of success because we know that people are sometimes held in them without any options," said Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.
A man in Thailand married a dead girlfriend to fulfill his promise of love.
29-year old Sarinya Kamsook and her 28- year-old boyfriend, Chadil Deffy, were to be married this year.
Sarinya Kamsook unfortunately died in a car crash, just day before the big event; Chadil Deffy decided to go on with their wedding as planned and married her.
Sarinya was involved in a car crash, leaving her severely injured. She still could have been saved with timely medical attention. However, the doctors made her wait for 6 hours due to an overcrowded ICU instead of transferring her to another hospital.
During this time, she succumbed to her injuries and passed away. During her funeral in Surin, Thailand, Chadil Duffy placed a ring on his deceased bride’s finger. It thus turned out a wedding/funeral ceremony, one of the rare events in the world.
The rich are different from you and me: they’re more likely to get married. A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income.
The trend is especially pronounced among men.
Forty years ago, about nine of 10 American men between the ages of 30 and 50 were married, and the most highly paid men were just slightly more likely to wed than those paid least. Since then, earnings for men in the top tenth of the income distribution have risen and their marriage rates have fallen slightly, from 95 percent in 1970 to 83 percent today.
For men further down the income ladder, however, both earnings and their chances of connubial bliss have plummeted. Rich men are marrying rich women, creating doubly rich households for them and their children. And the poor are staying poor and alone.
Liu shuwei: the New York Times brings this lonely news: 51% OF WOMEN ARE NOW LIVING WITHOUT SPOUSE. The story has been thoroughly blogged, and readers have been dutifully reminded of all the usual statistics suggesting that marriage is threatened in the U.S., an abiding worry of some social commentators at least since the '70s. But many of those statistics are commonly misread. If you look at the raw data, it's clear that while Americans aren't marrying at the Ozzie and Harriet rates of the 1950s, marriage faces no dire threat today. In fact, we may have come to value marriage too much: there's good evidence that it isn't as beneficial for individuals as pro-marriage conservatives would have you believe. Let's start with the basic health of the institution: Americans still love matrimony. We spend more than $50 billion a year on weddings. As the National Marriage Project at Rutgers in New Jersey has pointed out, "More than 90% of women have married eventually in every generation for which records exist, going back to the mid-1800s." Even the most extreme predictions for the current generation of women say that at least 4 in 5 will marry. What about all those women not living with a spouse? The Times got to 51% only by including 2.4 million American females over 15 (of the 117 million total) who are married but aren't living with their husbands--but not because the marriage is troubled, according to Robert Bernstein, a press officer with the Census Bureau. Instead, they live in different places because of, say, a temporary work assignment such as military deployment. The paper also counts widows as women living without their husbands. Right. They're dead. Except for the infinitesimal number who killed their spouses, these women didn't give up on matrimony. What about the oft repeated recent finding that most U.S. households are no longer home to a married couple? That's true, but just barely, and it also has something to do with widowhood. Married-couple households now make up only 49.7% of the total. But roughly 52% of all households are headed by either a married couple or someone who has been widowed. The death of spouses should not be confused with the death of marriage. Finally, it's true that Americans wait longer than ever to wed. But the rise in marrying age almost exactly mirrors the rise in life expectancy. In 1970 the average American woman could expect to live 74.7 years; by 2003 she could expect to make it to 80.1--a 5 1/2-year difference. Similarly, in 1970 the median age at which women first wed was 20.8; in 2003 it was 25.3--a 4 1/2-year difference. Women are waiting to get married longer at least in part because they are living longer.
Should they feel pressure to wed at all? As Bella DePaulo demonstrates in her (ponderously titled) 2006 book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, the evidence that marriage makes us happy and healthy is quite weak. It's true that currently married people report slightly higher levels of happiness than single people. (In one big study that DePaulo cites, being married was associated with a 0.115-point increase in life satisfaction on a 0 to 10 scale.) But researchers can't reliably determine which causes which, the marriage or the happiness. Perhaps happy people are simply more prone to take a spouse because they are more sociable; perhaps unhappy people are more prone to stay home and listen to XM rather than date.
Of course, some people end up happier after marrying, but just as many end up sadder. And that's not even accounting for divorce: DePaulo shows that people who marry and then divorce are not as happy as those who stay single. Again, divorce may not cause unhappiness (rather, unhappy people may be more likely to split). But as another study that DePaulo cites concludes, "It is better to have no relationship than to be in a bad relationship." DePaulo dismantles a few other claims of the pro-marriage lobby. For instance, it's true that currently married people report a better sex life than single people, but men who are divorced and living with a new girlfriend report even better sex. Also, according to a 2004 paper from the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, those marrying for the first time tend to report better health--but surprisingly, the period around divorce is also associated with improved health for those breaking up. In short, we feel better when we can pair off and then dissolve those pairings when they go awry. We feel worse, mentally and physically, when we can't find a mate or when we are trapped by a bad one. There's good evidence that it is freedom that makes us healthy and happy, not the bonds of marriage.
"When you go for an arranged marriage," Kamna Mittal, whose marriage is arranged, said, "it's a total gamble." Now a mother of two, Mittal counts herself lucky that it worked out, but 12 years later, she wants to help Indian-American singles in the Bay Area meet directly. Turns out even love can use a little help every now and then, and the age-old practice of arranged Hindu marriages is getting a 21st-century makeover. Hinduism orders families into four major castes and thousands of sub-castes, each with their own particular ritual role or profession. Ideally, a couple must be in the same sub-caste, region and religion. Priests also compare their horoscopes to ensure compatibility. Thakur's parents encouraged her to go the singles party, even though they had wanted to arrange a marriage for her when she was younger. Now that she's older, her father is more open-minded about who his daughter marries -- "but it has to be an Indian," she added, and preferably from one of the higher castes. Thakur's desire to marry reflects Indians' traditional values at a time when only 51 percent of American adults are wed, according to 2010 Census data. Indian immigrants tend to look for the same religion, caste and region, Mittal said. American-born Indians might want somebody who is Indian, preferably raised in America, too. Ninety percent of Hindus in America marry within the faith, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
From: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2012-05-23/does-arranged-marriage-last-longer/55174520/1
ReplyDeleteDoes love last longer in arranged marriages?
NEW YORK – Elke Thompson and Sam Quinn got engaged the old-fashioned way: their parents arranged it.
Quinn, 23, a quiet engineering student from Springfield, Mo., wanted to settle down, and asked his parents to play matchmaker. Through church friends, they found Thompson, an apple-cheeked 17-year-old from Manhattan, Kan.
"We spent one day together, and then his dad said, 'Yes or no? We're leaving tonight with an answer,'" Thompson recalled with a giggle.
Most of the courtship occurred among the parents.
"I was very sure that I was going to take whoever they thought was right for me," Thompson said. "I didn't want to worry about what I want in a guy."
The Unification Church via Religion News Service
Elke Thompson and Sam Quinn trusted their parents to find them a mate. They were married through the Unification Church.
Fifteen months later, Thompson wore a wedding dress and Quinn donned a dark suit as they sat in a hotel ballroom in New York City, quietly fidgeting around a table adorned with white flowers, waiting with 42 other couples for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon to bless their union via a satellite video beamed from Korea.
Thompson's high-school friends think she's nuts, she said. But in the Unification Church, arranged marriages are the norm. Moon teaches that romantic love leads to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies.
Several religions practice arranged marriages. Hindu and Jewish matchmakers abound, for instance. But rarely does it rise to the level of dogma. Unificationists believe that marriages arranged through the church and blessed by Moon are "sinless" and foster the kingdom of God on earth, one happy family at a time.
"This is the way to restore world peace," said Quinn.
Arranged marriages — or lessons imparted by them — could also help lower the American divorce rate, according to research recently highlighted by the Unification Church.
...
In countries such as India and Pakistan, marriages are often brokered by families or professional matchmakers for religious and cultural reasons. In many of these marriages, expectations start low, love grows slowly and extended families lend support, said Robert Epstein, a research psychologist.
"Love" marriages often start steamy but quickly cool off, leading to fraught families and unhappy hearts, said Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. He believes that American couples can learn from Unificationist conjugal practices.
"Whatever anyone wants to say about the Unification Church, the marital aspect is not crazy," said Epstein. "It really seems to work."
But Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, says Epstein draws broad conclusions from narrow studies.
"Many arranged marriages in many countries are associated with a lack of choice for young people and are particularly repressive to women," she said.
"The fact that arranged marriages tend to be more stable is not a measure of success because we know that people are sometimes held in them without any options," said Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.
A man in Thailand married a dead girlfriend to fulfill his promise of love.
ReplyDelete29-year old Sarinya Kamsook and her 28- year-old boyfriend, Chadil Deffy, were to be married this year.
Sarinya Kamsook unfortunately died in a car crash, just day before the big event; Chadil Deffy decided to go on with their wedding as planned and married her.
Sarinya was involved in a car crash, leaving her severely injured. She still could have been saved with timely medical attention. However, the doctors made her wait for 6 hours due to an overcrowded ICU instead of transferring her to another hospital.
During this time, she succumbed to her injuries and passed away. During her funeral in Surin, Thailand, Chadil Duffy placed a ring on his deceased bride’s finger. It thus turned out a wedding/funeral ceremony, one of the rare events in the world.
Marriage Is for Rich People
ReplyDeleteThe rich are different from you and me: they’re more likely to get married.
A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income.
The trend is especially pronounced among men.
Forty years ago, about nine of 10 American men between the ages of 30 and 50 were married, and the most highly paid men were just slightly more likely to wed than those paid least. Since then, earnings for men in the top tenth of the income distribution have risen and their marriage rates have fallen slightly, from 95 percent in 1970 to 83 percent today.
For men further down the income ladder, however, both earnings and their chances of connubial bliss have plummeted.
Rich men are marrying rich women, creating doubly rich households for them and their children. And the poor are staying poor and alone.
Liu shuwei:
ReplyDeletethe New York Times brings this lonely news: 51% OF WOMEN ARE NOW LIVING WITHOUT SPOUSE. The story has been thoroughly blogged, and readers have been dutifully reminded of all the usual statistics suggesting that marriage is threatened in the U.S., an abiding worry of some social commentators at least since the '70s.
But many of those statistics are commonly misread. If you look at the raw data, it's clear that while Americans aren't marrying at the Ozzie and Harriet rates of the 1950s, marriage faces no dire threat today. In fact, we may have come to value marriage too much: there's good evidence that it isn't as beneficial for individuals as pro-marriage conservatives would have you believe.
Let's start with the basic health of the institution: Americans still love matrimony. We spend more than $50 billion a year on weddings. As the National Marriage Project at Rutgers in New Jersey has pointed out, "More than 90% of women have married eventually in every generation for which records exist, going back to the mid-1800s." Even the most extreme predictions for the current generation of women say that at least 4 in 5 will marry. What about all those women not living with a spouse? The Times got to 51% only by including 2.4 million American females over 15 (of the 117 million total) who are married but aren't living with their husbands--but not because the marriage is troubled, according to Robert Bernstein, a press officer with the Census Bureau. Instead, they live in different places because of, say, a temporary work assignment such as military deployment. The paper also counts widows as women living without their husbands. Right. They're dead. Except for the infinitesimal number who killed their spouses, these women didn't give up on matrimony.
What about the oft repeated recent finding that most U.S. households are no longer home to a married couple? That's true, but just barely, and it also has something to do with widowhood. Married-couple households now make up only 49.7% of the total. But roughly 52% of all households are headed by either a married couple or someone who has been widowed. The death of spouses should not be confused with the death of marriage.
Finally, it's true that Americans wait longer than ever to wed. But the rise in marrying age almost exactly mirrors the rise in life expectancy. In 1970 the average American woman could expect to live 74.7 years; by 2003 she could expect to make it to 80.1--a 5 1/2-year difference. Similarly, in 1970 the median age at which women first wed was 20.8; in 2003 it was 25.3--a 4 1/2-year difference. Women are waiting to get married longer at least in part because they are living longer.
Should they feel pressure to wed at all? As Bella DePaulo demonstrates in her (ponderously titled) 2006 book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, the evidence that marriage makes us happy and healthy is quite weak. It's true that currently married people report slightly higher levels of happiness than single people. (In one big study that DePaulo cites, being married was associated with a 0.115-point increase in life satisfaction on a 0 to 10 scale.) But researchers can't reliably determine which causes which, the marriage or the happiness. Perhaps happy people are simply more prone to take a spouse because they are more sociable; perhaps unhappy people are more prone to stay home and listen to XM rather than date.
Of course, some people end up happier after marrying, but just as many end up sadder. And that's not even accounting for divorce: DePaulo shows that people who marry and then divorce are not as happy as those who stay single. Again, divorce may not cause unhappiness (rather, unhappy people may be more likely to split). But as another study that DePaulo cites concludes, "It is better to have no relationship than to be in a bad relationship."
ReplyDeleteDePaulo dismantles a few other claims of the pro-marriage lobby. For instance, it's true that currently married people report a better sex life than single people, but men who are divorced and living with a new girlfriend report even better sex. Also, according to a 2004 paper from the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, those marrying for the first time tend to report better health--but surprisingly, the period around divorce is also associated with improved health for those breaking up. In short, we feel better when we can pair off and then dissolve those pairings when they go awry. We feel worse, mentally and physically, when we can't find a mate or when we are trapped by a bad one. There's good evidence that it is freedom that makes us healthy and happy, not the bonds of marriage.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1587273,00.html#ixzz22IMSoTqf
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1994768_1994786_1994822,00.html
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/hindu-weddings-america_n_1442996.html
ReplyDelete"When you go for an arranged marriage," Kamna Mittal, whose marriage is arranged, said, "it's a total gamble."
Now a mother of two, Mittal counts herself lucky that it worked out, but 12 years later, she wants to help Indian-American singles in the Bay Area meet directly.
Turns out even love can use a little help every now and then, and the age-old practice of arranged Hindu marriages is getting a 21st-century makeover.
Hinduism orders families into four major castes and thousands of sub-castes, each with their own particular ritual role or profession. Ideally, a couple must be in the same sub-caste, region and religion. Priests also compare their horoscopes to ensure compatibility.
Thakur's parents encouraged her to go the singles party, even though they had wanted to arrange a marriage for her when she was younger. Now that she's older, her father is more open-minded about who his daughter marries -- "but it has to be an Indian," she added, and preferably from one of the higher castes.
Thakur's desire to marry reflects Indians' traditional values at a time when only 51 percent of American adults are wed, according to 2010 Census data.
Indian immigrants tend to look for the same religion, caste and region, Mittal said. American-born Indians might want somebody who is Indian, preferably raised in America, too. Ninety percent of Hindus in America marry within the faith, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.