Strangers to Spouses: A Study of the Relationship Quality in Arranged Marriages in India

Approximately 90 percent of the marriages in India today are reported to be arranged marriages. Parents and families make partner choices and marital decisions for their children, sometimes needing the children only to consent to the decisions of the elders. Given this reality, most men and women who enter into such marriages have very limited pre-marital contact with each other. Several studies have been done on these arranged marriages in India to see how these relationships are formed and what their state of affairs is. The results have been varied and sometimes discrepant. This book is a revised version of a mixed methods study that the author conducted on the quality of relationship in such marriages in India. Specifically, the study explored the levels of marital satisfaction, quality of alternatives, investment of resources, intimacy, passion, and commitment, and examined their association with relationship quality.