Marriage is not a Fairytale

My viewpoint of arranged marriages has changed vastly over the years. When I was younger I loved the idea of finding your "prince" and falling in love and getting married, the whole cliche approach. As I began going to school I started hearing about divorce and not being able to pay bills due to lack of income because of poor choices in a life partner. This shattered my idealistic view of marriage. I then stumbled upon the the idea of arranged marriages. At first they seemed cruel and I was against them, but after digging a little deeper I found that I did not think it was such a horrible concept. You are paired with someone who will be able to support you financially, has a background relatively close to yours which will ward off conflicts of interest, and your parents will automatically approve. As I began to advance through the school system, I read countless books that addressed the idea of arranged marriages or contained examples of them. My perspective began to change. One of the most influential books that changed my opinion of this concept was A Thousand Splendid Suns. Mariam had become an inconvenience socially to Jalil when her mother committed suicide. His solution to this "problem" was to marry her off. This is when Rasheed comes into play. The two of them, Mariam and Rasheed, may have been married but they could not have been more discontented with their lives together. Mariam goes into the marriage with an open mind, she is not happy with her predicament but she is willing to make the best of it and convinces herself that she will learn to love Rasheed. Rasheed is not that bad in the beginning of their marriage, but after her first miscarriage its all downhill from there. She finds him to be abusive, cold, and only concerned with himself. This does not a happy healthy marriage make. This may be a work of fiction, but in other countries this happens all the time. We have the privilege of being able to marry for love and not for convenience or necessity. My feelings toward arranged marriages has gone downhill just as Mariam and Rasheed's marriage did. Although this may not be true of all arranged marriages, it is now and forever in my mind a staple example. I thank God to be blessed enough to be able to make this decision for myself.