England’s royal family finally announced this week what everyone in the world already knew: Prince William will marry Kate Middleton. What’s far more interesting is how much has changed in the uptight, conservative circle that is the English monarchy since nearly 30 years ago when an arranged marriage with a virgin was the only acceptable method for continuing the bloodline.
William’s generation has come a long way since his mother’s. Not only did he get to choose his wife (and she him), but he courted her for years – 8, to be exact. Further, Middleton is, unlike William’s mother, neither an aristocrat nor a royal.
These leaps and bounds of change in the official protocol of royal marriage are noteworthy to the world at large because they indicate significant change in an archaic institution: the English monarchy. But also because they reflect global trends of doing away with arranged marriages, especially in South Asia the world’s leading region for them. South Asians, including Pakistanis, still use arranged marriages to satisfy a social need for matrimony and procreation. Young Pakistanis continue to accept this method, but their numbers are dwindling, too. The day is arriving when the majority of marriages in Pakistan will be completely by choice, and not by curriculum vitae.
More and more arranged marriages are faltering because women in particular have the independence and self-respect to not hide themselves from their partners: there is less willingness and necessity to be the compliant partner and more impetus toward having an honest relationship between two equals.
This trend of choice in marriage is ironically best observed amongst those Pakistanis who still have arranged marriages, specifically the ones who, cognizant of contemporary trends, are reticent to admit the truth and instead characterise their marriage as “semi-arranged”. They explain that the parents arranged the original meeting, but they got to know each other before getting engaged. But the concept of a “semi-arranged” marriage is dubious since the definition of “arranged” is quite simply that others brought these two people together expressly for the purpose of marriage and therefore maintained the authority of guiding the arrangement through to completion.
The fact that the couple “got to know each other” at all involved a series of decisions in which neither the bride nor the groom were directly involved: the initial crucial decisions of identifying the potential spouse, analyzing his/her suitability based on superficial facts (which are sometimes even provided on a marriage curriculum vitae!), and deciding that a meeting should take place. There is also no explanation for how the familiarisation period was anything more than a reinforcement of the superficial credentials that allowed for such a period in the first place, primarily because the period is often very brief — either a few days or a few weeks before an engagement is finalised.
Why do some Pakistanis still accept arranged marriages? Sometimes, the answers are obvious: gains in social status, wealth, or both as a result of the marriage. Other times, inflexible traditions are involved and both parties know they have zero choice in the matter. In either case, arranged marriages, at least amongst the urban educated classes in Pakistan, are increasingly a source of embarrassment.
However, so is the growing rate of divorce amongst young people, though it shouldn’t be embarrassing: many of the divorces are from arranged marriages. Perhaps most are. And this is another sign of positive change toward respecting the individual. Further, what often happens is that divorcees are granted their marriage of love once they’ve proven the ultimate sacrifice to the family by agreeing to marry the one they did not want. This is painful and unnecessary but opens the door to choice where it was previously closed.
This brings up another relic that could do with change: the necessity to be married by the age of thirty. This is part of the reason for arranging marriages. It’s also part of the reason for allowing divorcees to take the spouses they had initially been refused. Prince Charles of England was allowed this when his divorce took place. That was the generation before William, though. Now, things have changed in England, as they inevitably will in Pakistan.
The writer is US-based political analyst and a fomer Producer for BBC and Al-Jazeera. Follow her on Twitter @ShirinSadeghi