American’s Reaction to Indian Arranged Marriage

“Yesterday I bowled over my American teammates by revealing one thing- that I had an arranged marriage,” shared by Ms Sarah Philip on her Facebook post

“Yesterday I bowled over my American teammates by revealing one thing- that I had an arranged marriage. Before I get into that let me clear the air about the term ‘American’. I don’t know what else to call the people who have been in the US for many generations and have fairly low melanin levels. ‘American’ is not the right word, but I’m using this for the lack of a better term.

Coming back to the arranged marriage revelation, the first thing they asked me was, ‘What’s that?’. So I explained to them how parents find suitable boys and girls from the same religion, culture, state, and so on check the family background and extended family history, and then let the boy and girl meet. They were shell-shocked!!! They had no idea what I was talking about. Suspecting that they may pass out from major cultural shock I announced loudly, ‘Oh but we can say ‘no’ if we don’t like the person’. They seemed slightly relieved. I purposely didn’t tell them that a ‘no’ would mean the onset of the next iteration of the whole process – Find a family, find the boy/girl in the family, find their ancestors in the graves etc, etc.

They still have not digested the fact that people can marry after 2-3 meetings conducted in the strict jurisdiction of the parents. They gave me sympathetic and suspicious looks at the same time and I just sat there with a Monaisa smile pasted on my face. Huh, they don’t know about the resilience of Indians in such matters!

Disclaimer: I do not support one sort of marriage over another. This is just a true incident without any filters 😀”

-Sarah Philip