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Yen Le
Ashley Argyle
ENGL-1010-037
11/28/2013
Issue Exploration Essay
There is no room for doubt that marriage plays an important role in our life. For most
people, it is a turning point in their love relationship which asks them to commit themselves to
their partners for their whole life. It is believed that people can marry to anyone regardless of
age, gender, religion and background. However, there are some requirements of marriage
existing in several specific tribes, groups and countries in which people have to follow.
Exogamy and endogamy are paradigms of the marital restrictions. According to Cultural
Anthropology, “exogamy is a rule specifying that a person must marry outside a particular
group”. In contrast, “endogamy is a rule prescribing that a person must marry within a particular
group” (Nanda and Warms 175). Based on different opinions of people, exogamy helps
strengthen their communities by the cooperation between them and other communities through
marriages. Besides this, it helps them to diversify their population and reinforce their
relationships with other groups, whereas there are many people who believe that endogamy will
prevent their groups from being intact and reinforce their privilege and wealth. This
circumstance usually happens among royal families in order to maintain their lineages. They
consider royalty as the most precious and most worthy descendants in their countries. In Recent
Data on Religious Identity of College Freshmen, Maller points out that “there is strong evidence
that exogamous marriages have a higher divorce rate and a lower fertility rate than endogamous
marriages.” (318). However, in Outsiders in the Land of Their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship, and
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Identity in War and Peace, it is said that “endogamy or marriage within the prescribed group,
thus loomed large, constraining women’s choices about marriage and sexual expression in often
painful and violent ways.” (Tabili 798-799). Through the two resources, I find that both
exogamy and endogamy have advantages and disadvantages that deeply affect people’s life,
especially women’s. In addition, it is obvious that both of them play an equally important role in
society although they are completely opposite to each other.
Arranged marriage is another issue of marital constraint. It is considered to be opposite to
love marriage, which means that the bride and groom are selected to marry each other by their
parents rather than themselves. In some cases, arranged marriage involves a matchmaker such as
a priest, a matrimonial site or mutual friends. For some cultures and religions, many people
marry to their partners when they have not even met each other yet. However, this circumstance
is no longer popular due to the desire of young generations to choose their partners themselves.
According to Xiaohe and Whyte, the authors of Love matches and arranged marriages: A
Chinese replication, “many people found themselves stuck in marriages with persons decidedly
not of their own choosing, mates selected on the basis of family status, wealth, or other criteria,
whom they might find personally repulsive” (709), which leads to the dissatisfaction in marriage
or even divorce. Besides this, they also point out “the high divorce rates in modern societies
characterized by freedom of mate choice as evidence of the problems inherent in love matches”
(709). Due to the drawback of the love marriages, some traditionalists suggest that "love matches
start out hot and grow cold, while arranged marriages start out cold and grow hot." (709). In
order to support this idea, Epstein, Pandit and Thakar, the authors of How Love Emerges in
Arranged Marriages: Two Cross-cultural Studies, conduct research in which they interviewed
arranged-married couples from various countries, cultures and religions to find out factors that
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make the love between individuals in arranged marriages increase over time. Based on the
results, there are eleven elements contributing to the growth of love in arranged marriages.
Among them, commitment is considered as the most important factor. Moreover, according to
research reported in the article “Why Would Such a Person Dream About Heaven?” Family,
Faith, and Happiness in Arranged Marriages in India, the involvement of family and religion
plays an important role in marital longevity and satisfaction, especially towards religious people
(Bowman and Dollahite 213-216). The culture of Hinduism is a paradigm of this point of view,
according to Angela, one of my Nepalese friends; almost all Hindu people stay faithful and loyal
to their partners for their whole lives and hardly divorce due to their belief in Hinduism.
Nevertheless, according to “India's Bharat Matrimony ushers in new era of arranged marriages”
today parents are not able to choose husbands for their daughters due to the desire of young
generations to decide their marriage themselves. Therefore, in order to accommodate both the
spouses and their families, Mr. Murugavel has created a matrimonial website in which Indians
can access and search for a potential spouse that can comfort both their parents and themselves
whereas they are still in the matchmaking process. Through this article, I learned that
modernization and revolution in education and human’s rights have changed people’s thinking
and awareness, especially young generations’, which requires them to find a way on the purpose
of harmonizing the relationships between generations.
Those resources truly give me an insightful thought about marriage’s issues, especially
marital restrictions within some specific groups. Before conducting the research, I strongly
disapproved the arranged marriages due to the belief that marriage should be based on love.
However, the article How Love Emerges in Arranged Marriages: Two Cross-Cultural Studies
really changed my mind. It shows me some factors that possibly contribute to the growth of love
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in arranged marriages. Indeed, I even find that arranged marriages have more potential to last a
lifetime than love marriages. Besides this, I also gained much knowledge of exogamy and
endogamy, which are topics that I have never considered before. Based on resources that I have
found out, they are one of the most important rituals of some particular tribes, which contribute
to the characteristics of their own culture. It is believed that what ethnicities expect reflects on
their own rituals and activities. This is a sensible explanation for the question why some tribes
follow endogamy but some others follow exogamy.
Besides the issues that I have mentioned above, I also gained more knowledge of the
marital co-residence with parents after marriage. In fact, the concept of living with husband’s
family after marriage is quite familiar to me because it is a critical tradition of my country. After
reading Marriage Form and Duration of Postmarital Co-Residence With Parents in Rural
China: Evidence from Songzi, I realized that most Asian countries have this tradition although it
seems to have a decrease in the popularity today. According to the article, a son has duties in
supporting and taking care of his parents, which is the reason why their son and his wife have to
live with them (121). However, this circumstance has led to many problems that seriously impact
the relationship between parents and children. There have been many Korean movies reflecting
those problems, especially the conflicts between a wife and her mother-in-law. Besides this, the
obligation of the son to take care of his parents has significantly increased people’s desire for
giving birth to a boy rather than a girl. This circumstance explains why there is a great disparity
between the number of males and females in China as well as other Asian countries.
All in all, this project really broadens my knowledge about marriage. It is one of the most
important topics that relate to my major, whose issues really interest me. Because of this, I
decided to select marriage as the focus for my final writing project. Through the studies reported
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in the resources as well as the interview with my Nepalese friend, I have completely eliminated
my prejudice toward arranged marriage. The research also gives me a comprehensive view of
exogamy and endogamy, which is a topic that I want to learn more. I find the knowledge that I
have gained from this project to be truly helpful for me in the present as well as in the future.
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Works cited
Bowman, Jennifer L, and David C. Dollahite. "‘Why Would Such a Person Dream About
Heaven?’ Family, Faith, and Happiness in Arranged Marriages in India.” Journal of
Comparative Family Studies 44.2 (2013): 207-225. Academic Search Premier. Web. 28
Oct. 2013.
Epstein, Robert, Mayuri Pandit, and Mansi Thakar. “How Love Emerges in Arranged Marriages:
Two Cross-Cultural Studies.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 44.3 (2013): 341360. Academic Search Premier. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.
“India's Bharat Matrimony Ushers in New Era of Arranged Marriages.” BBC News. BBC, 4 May
2011. Web. 09 Nov. 2013.
Li, Shuzhejo, Marcus W. Feldman, and Xiaoyi Jin. Marriage Form and Duration of Postmarital
Co-Residence With Parents in Rural China: Evidence from Songzi. Journal of
Comparative Family Studies 36.1 (2005): 121-138. Academic Search Premier. Web. 09
Nov. 2013.
Maller, Allen S. Recent Data on Religious Identity of College Freshmen: A Note. Jewish Social
Studies 49.3/4 (1987): 317-322. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Nanda, Serena, and Richard L. Warms. Cultural Anthropology. 11th ed. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth- Cengage, 2014. Print.
Tabili, Laura. Outsiders in the Land of Their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship, and Identity in War
and Peace. The Journal of British Studies 44.4 (2005): 796-815. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
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Xiaohe, Xu, and Martin King Whyte. “Love Matches and Arranged Marriages: a China
Replication.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 52.3 (1990): 709-722. Academic
Search Premier. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.