The Arranged Marriage and the Hook-up

“So, did you have an arranged marriage?”

This was the question one of my colleagues at school asked me the other day, completely out of the blue. The notion seemed so absurd that I didn’t even take the time to formulate an articulate response. I just laughed and said, “no!”

“Oh,” she said, “so then you met in college?”

Yes. Yes we did, as if those are the only two possible ways to meet your spouse. It was an amusing exchange, but not til later did I stop and realize that while I regarded arranged marriage as an archaic construct, for her, it was reality. And she is not the only person I have met here for whom arranged marriage is as natural as meeting someone as an undergraduate, dating for a few years, and then getting married. Arabs, Indians, and Asians. Muslims and Christians. For many people in this part of the world, marriage and relationships are defined quite differently than what we see in the West.

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum, the hook-up culture, which I dearly hope was not what my friend had in mind when she asked if I met my husband in college. Maligned by some and exalted by others, the hook-up culture is basically the phenomenon of casual sex replacing more traditional dating. I recently read an article that touched on many interesting points about the hook-up culture, but ultimately lauded it as vehicle for female empowerment.

Wait, what?

To be honest, I vehemently disagree with the majority of opinions expressed by this article, but I’m not going to give you a point-by-point analysis. I think we can attribute those differing opinions to the fact that my worldview is entirely different than those of the article’s author and most of the people she quotes.

But.

The article, juxtaposed with the ideas of femininity, relationships, and marriage I see every day in the Middle East really got me thinking. Not to sound like a Negative Nancy (a term which inevitably reminds me of my mother) but I deeply believe that both extremes, the arranged marriage and the casual hookup, miss the mark.

Arranged marriage takes a lot of different forms, and I honestly haven’t researched it enough to speak with any authority. I do think the concept has some merit, and probably shouldn’t be laughed away as thoughtlessly as I did when my coworker brought it up. I like the idea that women are considered valuable, and I like that a family has a right to care about and contribute to who their daughter ends up with. However, it also seems inevitable that women are somewhat objectified in this process, like a product being advertized and sold. One wife=x number of camels. One other Indian friend of mine also had an arranged marriage, in which the families contacted each other and proposed the idea. They were family friends, so the man and woman at least knew of each other beforehand. Then they had a dinner together with both families, to feel it out. The next day, the man’s father called my friend’s father, who in turn asked his daughter, “So, do you want to marry him or not?” She said yes.

It’s not the way I would want to go about it, but my Indian friend didn’t seem to have any complaints, 20 years later. My issue with the idea stems from the personal autonomy of the woman, though. Even though she did have the final say, how much pressure was on her to say yes? If she had loved someone else, but the families didn’t get along, would she be forced to miss out on true love? There’s no getting around these problems. There may be many great marriages that began with these awkward arrangements, but I fear for the women who aren’t so lucky. I am afraid I see them every day, clad in black and following their husbands dutifully down the street, entirely powerless.

You see, female empowerment and I go way back. This idea, this catchphrase, was a central cog in the ideological machine of my college experience. But to me, to us, the naughty princesses, female empowerment, or FEM, as we called it, was about friendship, supporting each other, celebrating what made us amazing, strong women. We pursued female empowerment through girl-power music, sleepovers, cathartic art projects, and yes, the occasional bra burning. But never did we achieve it through meaningless sex.

The article I read describes a primary tenet of the hook-up culture as the idea that casual sex lets you get what you want in smaller, less intimate, and less committed doses, so that a real relationship doesn’t distract you from your professional goals: “For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.”

While I am all in favor of women achieving their dreams, climbing corporate ladders, and not letting anything get in the way of their success, I still find this comparison unnecessary and sad. A meaningful relationship = career ender? One young woman quoted in the article admits that her current dating philosophy is “100% selfish.” She doesn’t want to devote time to a guy with long-term potential—that would just make things messy. Instead she, and many others, would rather just hook-up until, one magical day when they believe themselves to have reached consummate success and empowerment, they will stop, settle down, and continue to live fabulous lives none the worse for wear.

I just don’t think this scenario should be anyone’s goal. If a loving guy you are genuinely crazy about (unlike the fake, place-holder boyfriends mentioned in the article) wants to be with you, why shouldn’t he help you achieve your dreams, rather than holding you back? It’s true that relationships take work and require investment, but I don’t think we as women are doing ourselves any favors if we perpetuate the idea that a career and a marriage are mutually exclusive. Limiting ourselves by believing that we can’t have both isn’t empowerment, it is bondage and self-worship, and it is destructive.

In the last few years I’ve gone from being a celibate college student to, now, a happily married young professional. And at no point during that time do I believe my life would have been better or any of my goals accomplished through the subtraction of a real relationship and the addition of casual sex. On the spectrum from arranged marriage to ubiquitous hookups, I’m really glad I fell somewhere in the middle, making my own choice and finding power in my brain and my heart, not my body.