The Success of Arranged Marriages: Insights from MBA Lessons

Let me tell you why ‘Love marriages fail’ and ‘arrange marriages sail well’, the professor started elaborating a management concept.

MBA classes were full of real life experiences, especially because of the visiting faculties. Ours was not a premier institute as such, just another MBA college under Mumbai University.

But we students were thankful to our director, who helped us with such wonderful visiting faculty.

So, the one such visiting professor, I am talking about was an executive director of BPCL [Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited].

We never used to bunk his classes, whether it’s late Saturday or Sunday morning.

He was teaching us the stages of group development – Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.

Coming back to start of the story, he started talking, first about the love marriage.

In love marriage, everything starts with the compromises. That’s the reason, we see everything going so well.

Both the boy and the girl know what are the likes/dislikes of each other, they tend to accommodate themselves to get at it better initially. It’s like they already performing well.

During the norming process, they get married and then slowly they come to know the drawbacks of each other.

As they already accommodated themselves at the initial period for whatever may be the reasons, the same can’t hold true when they are actually together, which brings the differences even big way.

Which ultimately results in forming themselves separately in different groups.

On the other hand, in arrange marriage, the boy and the girl are forcefully formed in the group. It’s the social custom, the parents, and relatives’ compulsion, they won’t say anything as such. Thus the compulsory forming process done.

As totally new and don’t know each other well, they tend to fight, or at least struggle to get along.

Then during the norming phase, as they know there is no going back [or no option] they make themselves amenable with each other. Meanwhile kids, own home, savings etc are the things make them work together for the better future.

And then starts the real Performing stage of their life, tick marking things what a family generally expects for.

This was taught us almost 2 decades back [my God I am getting old], that time it was the general case and even now I see the situation is more or less same.

I must agree that I have seen love marriages doing well and arrange marriages falling apart.

Just tried to put it here, how the wonderful professor put together the analogy of an educational concept and real life.