Arranged introductions
Contrary to popular perception, arranged marriages have a fraction of the divorce rate of conventional love matches. Reva Seth tries to make sense of the institution called marriage in Asian communities in her book First Comes Marriage. Over to Mathures Paul Finding Mr Right is easy if one is a believer in arranged marriages. Find a person and then fall in love! In India there has been a shift from arranged marriages to love at first sight, forcing most of us to believe that the trend in London or New York’s Indian community is similar. Not quite. Second generation Asians are tending towards “arranged introductions”, a compromise between the two. Trying to understand this philosophy is Reva Seth, author of First Comes Marriage. Seth was eight when she first became interested in the subject of arranged marriages; after realising that her parents, unlike those of her friends or the people she saw on TV, had never actually dated. Like most of our parents, they had met twice before tying t...