Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Question · Open

Our mothers arranged my marriage and the love came later. Which kind is the real one?

Dilnoza Karimova Contributor
· 5 replies
Love & friendshipIslamic#arranged-marriage#choice#family#love
Follow

Its coordinates: 6.19 Philosophy of Love and Friendship

I was twenty when I married. Our mothers knew each other from the market, and I met my husband two times before the wedding, both times with family in the room. Now we have fourteen years and three children, and I love him. I did not love him at the start. I did not know him.

My niece is studying in Tashkent. She told me, kindly, that this is not "real" love, because I never chose him. Real love, she says, is when you meet someone, you see who they are, and you choose.

I thought about today's question. If love is for qualities, then I could not love him at the start, because I did not know his qualities. Now I know them. Some I like, some not so much. But I don't think I love him for the list.

There is a well-known hadith that a woman is married for four things: her wealth, her family, her beauty and her religion, and the man should choose the religious one. So even our tradition talks about choosing by qualities. But what happened to me was different.

So my question: is love that starts from choosing qualities more real than love that grows from a life together? Or is my niece only describing the films she watches?

LikeAnswer
SaveFollow5 answers

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

5 answers

  1. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    Old Tamil poetry has names for both of your loves. Kaḷavu is the hidden love before marriage, the meeting in the millet field; karpu is wedded love, lived in the household. The poets wrote about both with equal care, and the second was never treated as the lesser one.

    So your niece is describing one genre, and a beautiful one. But a culture that wrote whole poems about a wife waiting for her husband to come home from a journey knew that love can be made as well as found.

  2. Nuwan Perera

    Contributor

    Mine was a proposal marriage too. My wife's uncle and my father arranged it. For the first year we were polite. I don't remember when it changed. Maybe the time she sat with my mother in hospital for a week.

    My daughter asked me the same thing as your niece. I told her: the films show the beginning, because the beginning is easy to film. Nobody makes a film about twenty years of cooking rice for someone.

  3. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    I'd push one point, gently, because I think it is the real question underneath your niece's. Love that grows inside an arrangement is real when the person could have left, or refused at the start, and didn't want to. In some marriages the love grows because there is no exit, and it's hard from the outside to tell love from making the best of things.

    Your fourteen years sound like the first kind. But the test isn't who chose at the start. It's whether choosing was possible all along.

  4. Dilnoza Karimova

    Contributor

    Femke, this is fair. I could have refused. My older sister did refuse the first man, and nobody forced her. And if I wanted to leave now, my family would be unhappy but they would not stop me.

    Maybe this is the answer for my niece: I did not choose at the start, but I have chosen every year since.

  5. Aigerim Nurlanova

    Reader

    Dilnoza, I am from Almaty, and my parents' marriage was arranged in a similar way, through two aunts who sold dried fruit at the Green Bazaar. My mother says she did not like my father for the first year, and now she cannot sleep when he is away.

    I am twenty-six and not married, and my friends would agree with your niece. But I think the films have taught us that love is a feeling you find, and your story says love is something you make, and the making takes years. Femke's point that you could have refused is important. My mother could have refused too.

    My grandmother used to say that a husband and wife are two wheels of one cart. Nobody asks whether the wheels chose each other. They ask whether the cart moves. Maybe that is too practical. But fourteen years and three children is a cart that moves.