How Arranged Marriages Lead to Family Values

I was thinking about something.

If you ever visit India, you find that families play a huge role in Indian society. People visit relatives all the time. Weddings are huge affairs, and people are offended if they are not invited. A typical wedding may be several times as large as the corresponding American wedding.

India (and the other countries in the subcontinent) are the last vestiges of arranged marriages. Countries like China used to have arranged marriages too.

I think the two are interrelated. In an arranged marriage, the parents are the ones to arrange their children's marriage. This means the kids are dependent on their parents to find them husbands or wives. With a society that values marriage and also feels shame, then it's shameful not to get married (obviously, people can get over this feeling of shame).

Furthermore, parents don't want boys and girls associating with each other in romantic ways, so boys/girls keep a polite distance, now associated with junior high school kids in the US just getting to know one another. It harkens to an era in the US when teens would go to get a burger and shake, and it would be (in theory) as innocent as that.

Given that most teenage guys and girls have a difficult time being brave enough to accost the opposite sex, and given that parents don't want them to go out dating on their own, and given that parents will find an appropriate spouse, then there is a strong incentive to get along with your parents. They control an important societal value, which is marriage.

Think about what happens when arranged marriages are no longer necessary. Then, boys and girls go seek the opposite sex and work at dating. They begin to distrust their parent's opinions on such matters. Because they see their friends doing it, they try it out too, and I suspect this leads to downward pressure of boys to go out with girls.

Once women gain sufficient independence so they can support themselves, marriage itself becomes unnecessary, and people can postpone it until much later.

So, the combination of the importance of marriage, the shame of not being married, the disapproval (generally) of kids looking for their own girlfriends or boyfriends, parents arranging marriages, and even all the celebration around weddings, and cultural shame when you choose to buck the tradition, leads to a society where family is valued highly.

Just a theory.