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mpendragon Donating Member (210 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-03-05 10:19 PM
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24. experience from other cultures
I work with a lot of people from India. Every few months some member of my team goes home for several weeks to get married. One guy I knew didn't know his wife to be until he got to the airport. Their families had given their in-laws-to-be a good check and thought they were good, decent people that seemed compatible. They had a few days for supervised courtship and then invited the whole town to their wedding.

I asked him how that's possible. How could you take off back home for a few weeks to marry a woman you'd only known for a few days? He told me that they had different expectations from marriage. These are successful (by western standards) people, not rural farmers who tend to be more traditional. It seems more like that culture is almost content to just be friends with a quality person.

In the west we have TV, movies, and books that tell us all we really need to be happy for the rest of our lives are the one person in the world that we can be madly in love with for the rest of our lives and expensive toys (cars, boats, beach houses). After a few years of being with a new romance (sometimes months or even weeks) the initial rush of love starts to wear off a little. If you are having sex, the sex begins to get routine and/or less frequent. Being addicted to the feeling of love is a hard high to maintain.

So, people become disappointed with the person they fell in love with and start looking again or find some other distraction to replace the feeling of love or lust that they are missing.

Don't get me wrong, I think that a lot of cultures oppress women in marriage arrangements. I'm just saying that maybe our culture has set our sites too high for marriage and almost everything else they depict.
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