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From here:
After living in India for a year or so, I would often explain typical Indian views on "arranged marriages" by saying that they were sort of like Western views on careers. Many Indians assume that once they finish school, they and their parents will start a serious hunt for a marriage partner that will end in marriage to the most suitable candidate within the next year or two at most. The idea of just hanging around single until you happen to bump into somebody that you fall passionately in love with, if you ever do, seems rather absurd and wasteful to them. It would be like a recent American graduate saying "Oh, I'm in no hurry to tie myself down to a job just yet---I'm waiting till I find the perfect career that's really the right one for me. I don't care if I have to wait a few years till that happens."
But now it seems that a lot of young Americans are in fact saying exactly that about careers! We've already adapted our social expectations to the "love marriage", where young people are not expected to seek out matrimony for its own sake but instead wait until they find a spontaneous mutual romantic attraction to inspire it. Are we now going to have the "love career" as a social norm, where financial independence for its own sake isn't enough to motivate starting a career if you don't really love your work?
After living in India for a year or so, I would often explain typical Indian views on "arranged marriages" by saying that they were sort of like Western views on careers. Many Indians assume that once they finish school, they and their parents will start a serious hunt for a marriage partner that will end in marriage to the most suitable candidate within the next year or two at most. The idea of just hanging around single until you happen to bump into somebody that you fall passionately in love with, if you ever do, seems rather absurd and wasteful to them. It would be like a recent American graduate saying "Oh, I'm in no hurry to tie myself down to a job just yet---I'm waiting till I find the perfect career that's really the right one for me. I don't care if I have to wait a few years till that happens."
But now it seems that a lot of young Americans are in fact saying exactly that about careers! We've already adapted our social expectations to the "love marriage", where young people are not expected to seek out matrimony for its own sake but instead wait until they find a spontaneous mutual romantic attraction to inspire it. Are we now going to have the "love career" as a social norm, where financial independence for its own sake isn't enough to motivate starting a career if you don't really love your work?
