Arranged Marriage to Open Marriage

Most Indians can relate to the first part of the post. If you are born in India or an Indian born and raised in the US, you will surely have atleast heard or had an arranged marriage. India is still one of those countries that has the record high of arranged marriages, no surprises there, though the divorce rate is also slowly, but steadily creeping up in present times. What with the advent of outsourcing, BPO's, women working night shifts and having higher education and more financial independence, along with which comes lesser tolerance to put up with crap from a male dominated society, divorce is also happening more commonly these days amongst Indians.

In my grandmother's generation, she got married as a child at 11 without even seeing my grandfather, the wedding was arranged by the families and they've been happily married for 50 plus years. In my mother's time, she went through the bride seeing process and ended up marrying my father whom she saw briefly for 10 minutes before a group of relatives and my parents have been happily married for 25 years or so. Growing up in India and having come to US for a masters education unmarried, I knew that I didn't have a choice to date (given that my folks had a lot of trust on me that I would go the arranged marriage way). Thanks to all the horrors of horoscope matching, the filtering process etc. I ended up marrying K, the first guy whom I met, though we definitely interacted a lot more than my mother and grandmother ): before making the decision.

I am sure that there may be others who have gotten married the arranged way, others who were lucky enough to marry the person they fell in love with etc.

Has anyone heard of the term "open marriage". The first time I heard it was yesterday morning when I was driving to to the train station to get to work, on the Don Blue show in FM 101.3 when they talked about how the actor Will Smith revealed that he and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith have an open marriage. Apparently, open marriage means when you tell your spouse that you want to sleep around with someone else. It seems that honesty is the basis of this relationship where in the couple are honest with one another in expressing their attractions to someone else and then ask the other partner if they are okay with them sleeping with someone else. Will was quoted saying that he wasn't sure of his reactions on how he would respond to Jada's question if she wanted to have an affair, but, he thought that she should okay his intention. Given that Jada is being given honesty about his actions first from him rather than hearing it from the tabloids or someone else.

Folks listening to the radio were asked to call in to voice their opinion on the open marriage concept. While, I personally feel that the open marriage fluff stuff will fly only for movie stars and those type of people where morals are defined differently. Even, the most liberal person who is open to gay and lesbian relationships would want to have their partner exclusive to themselves all the time. One of the callers was saying that it doesn't make a wrong doing right if you confess about doing the wrong thing.

Given the background from where I come from, this seemed like an interesting thing to blog about.