Modern Marriage is no longer an Economic Proposition

Marriage, for women, traditionally at least, has been an economic proposition, as Amy explains in the 2019 version of Little Women. From the perspective of a marriage historian (as heard in a Hidden Brain episode): “the earliest marriages had nothing to do with the feelings of two people or their attraction to one another. As you probably know, marriage was much more about economics and acquiring powerful in-laws.”

Just look at how people used to talk about marriage a few hundred years ago. Pick up any novel from the Regency or the Victorian era, and you will see them often describing a proposal as a man “making an offer” to a woman. In modern society, when we say “make an offer” it is usually in the context of employment. But before the emancipation of women, marriage was the only offer of income they had (unless they were heiresses).

Even though the modern notion of marriage has shifted to be primarily about love and companionship, I argue that we haven’t completely gotten rid of this economic proposition mindset. To demonstrate, let’s look at South Asian culture; and I will focus more on Bengalis, that being my cultural background.

My culture is obsessed with marriage. In Western media, we see movies like Father of the Bride, where the father has a hard time accepting that his daughter is old enough to get married, whereas in my culture, parents start fantasizing about their daughter’s marriage from the moment they are born. There are nursery rhymes about baby girls in cradles who will soon become brides. There has been stigma against unmarried women in every culture of the world, but in my culture, it is viewed as a failure of the parents.

A key difference between my culture and some others is that marriage is viewed as the parent’s responsibility. In fact it seems the key duty of a parent is to find suitable partners for their children, which secures status for the parents. So many parents are barely involved in their children’s daily lives, but marriage is the one aspect about which they will be heavily involved from the earliest opportunity. Even a few decades ago, choosing your own partner was seen as an insult to your parents – you are depriving them of them of their parental duty. The wedding is paid for by the parents of the bride, because that is the biggest way for them to boost their status. Parents will start saving for their daughter’s wedding before they start saving for their daughter’s education. And desi weddings are huge deals. Everyone you know and their mothers are invited. A wedding with 500 guests is a small wedding. A typical wedding will have upwards of 2,000. The more people you invite to show off the alliance you have made, the bigger your status gains.

Of course, there has been a gradual shift in attitudes. In my grandmother’s time, there was no concept of the daughter having a choice in the timing of her marriage or the choice of partner. By my mother’s time, there was a larger element of choice, albeit with a large pressure. In modern times, as divorce is becoming more common, parents are in fact happy if you choose your own partner, because they don’t want to bear the responsibility of the marriage not working out. (However, the trend of big weddings has not changed: that has only grown bigger.)

Marriage in a huge deal in my society and so naturally it is a huge industry. Not only are weddings a huge industry, but the process of finding partners is an industry too. Traditionally, parents relied on word on mouth to find prospects (and in a culture full of busybodies this wasn’t that hard). Candidates for groom were screened typically on their wealth, income, and future earnings potential. (Candidates for bride were typically screened on how pretty and fair they are.)

As with most markets, there was a push for this system to get more efficient, and now, the marriage market has organized itself in the same way as a job market. Candidates have a CV known as a biodata which typically contains the education and employment history or the candidate as well as their parents, uncles and aunts, and grandparents. The signal people try to give is what kind of family (rich, cultured, educated, etc.) they come from. These biodata are circulated in the marriage market and used for screening purposes. After screening, the families and/or the candidates meet. Whether the candidates meet on their own depends on how conservative the family is. These days it’s becoming common to allow them to get to know each other, but even a decade back, all they would get were a few chaperoned meetings.

For those of us who have moved out West and adopted more Western practices can tend to be smug about having “escaped” this system. But have we really? From my perspective, the dating market operates in pretty much the same way as the Desi marriage market. You go on a platform to screen candidates based on some superficial criteria, try to discern what is genuine and what are embellishments, then you meet and make evaluations in person. The difference is that your parents are not involved and marriage is not the necessary outcome. But these two systems have seamlessly merged in the form of platforms like Shaadi.com and Muslimmatrimony.com where your parents are typically involved and marriage is definitely the end goal.

What I will say about the Desi marriage market is that at least it is completely transparent about its objectives. Dating apps are parading around as platforms on which to find love and companionship, as if they can find you love with their algorithms. Of course, people do find love on these platforms – but possibly that depends more on your luck rather than the power of the algorithm. Typically, people have to go through several options before finding one that works, and then you decide whether or not to commit. Much has been written about how the plethora of choice of making it difficult to commit, because what if you haven’t explored all the options?

In the Desi marriage market, when parents go into the market with specific criteria in mind, they tend to opt for a “satisficing” strategy as opposed to a “maximizing” one. If you are going into dating apps without strategically knowing what you’re looking for, you can easily get lost in the “maximizing” trap.

To be fair, I’m not speaking from experience. I have no wish to participate in the dating market, and I’ve written a whole other piece exploring that in depth. But I have participated in the Desi marriage market partly out of family pressure and partly because all I had was a gut feeling that I wouldn’t like the process and I needed evidence. Honestly, the process only works if you have the goal of getting married and you are just searching for a candidate who will satisfice your criteria. My experience has been that for someone like me, who views marriage as optional, I’m just wasting other people’s time. So I’ve tried to stop participating. The result is that my parents are being shamed by society for failing; and I am being viewed as selfish and a deviant.

Marriage is NOT an economic proposition for me. Employment is my economic proposition. I need an income, so I will show up and work hard to secure employment. I will create an attractive resume. I will try to impress potential employers; I will “fake it till I make it” if necessary. I will keep up a constant performance to be a good employee if necessary. I can do all of that with the comfort of knowing that this job isn’t permanent. If I don’t like it, I can quit and look for other options. If I do like it, then I will enjoy it while it lasts, and then enjoy my retirement. But I will not do the same for a marriage. People expect me to secure a marriage like it’s a job, but without the comfort of knowing it’s not permanent. I wouldn’t want a marriage unless I intend for it to be permanent anyway (and I’m sure most people don’t), so naturally, I do not wish to pursue marriage like I would a job.

In my personal life, I want comfort and security. And I will get that more from being alone rather than having to be with someone around whom I will always have to perform. Like it’s my job. I would have been forced to do this had I been born fifty years earlier. But I have been fortunate enough to grow up in a different world from the previous generation. Yet, I am constantly being urged by society of that generation to treat marriage like an economic proposition and to view it as a necessity. And I am in a constant battle pushing back against it.