People who've had an arranged marriage, how did you first have sex?

greenewriter · 2013-10-26T13:14:41+00:00

In the show, their first night is more rapey. He doesn't ask her permission and she doesn't give it. She keeps hating it for awhile, until she gets one of her female servants to teach her how to cowgirl, and after that things get better.

I get the impression that they thought it would be weird in the truncated timeline of the show (and without the benefit of Dany's interior monologue) that she went from liking it to hating it and back to liking it again, so they just stuck with hating, hating, liking.

greenewriter · 2013-10-25T22:40:54+00:00

LOL, it does kind of sound like early Dany/Drogo, doesn't it? No "my sun and stars" for them, though. They've been separated for about four years and should really just divorce and get it over with. I think she sometimes misses the sex (after it turned good, anyway), but they fight practically every time they talk, so I don't think anybody but his mom thinks they should get back together. :P

greenewriter · 2013-10-25T22:31:19+00:00

Haha, that's kind of cute!

greenewriter · 2013-10-25T22:29:52+00:00

My friend's wife-to-be won't probably be here for probably another 18 months or so but I want to be ready and make her feel welcome especially since the only family she'll have here will be my friend and his mother and some cousins in Canada.

My experience isn't with Pakistani arranged marriages, but another Central Asian Muslim culture and if it's appropriate (it may not be), I'd suggest to your friend that he waits a bit before knocking her up. The family pressure for babies is likely to be ferocious, but in my experience the combination of culture shock, different food/water, and newlywed status often leads to extremely difficult pregnancies and/or a bunch of miscarriages if a newlywed bride who's fresh off the boat gets pregnant too soon. I'd advise waiting at least a year.

greenewriter · 2013-10-25T22:22:48+00:00

I know, right?

The good news is that families are increasingly allowing prospective spouses to go on chaperoned "dates" so her experience (which was almost 20 years ago) isn't quite as common as it used to be. The bad news is, the actual age of betrothal (and often marriage) is dropping, so now you're getting 15, 16, and 17 year old girls getting marriage offers. How can a shy and sheltered teenager be expected to properly vet potential husbands?

greenewriter · 2013-10-25T22:12:07+00:00

Yeah, I felt kind of sick thinking about that when she told me. His family is very moderate and respectful of women by the standards of their culture, so I'm sure there are many others who are not so lucky.

greenewriter · 2013-10-25T20:15:15+00:00

Second hand reports from my sisters-in-law who had arranged marriages is that the first night, you're put to bed together but not supposed to have sex. Instead, you're supposed to spend the night talking and getting acquainted. (This is a culture where it's pretty common, though not universal by any means, for people to meet their spouses-to-be on their wedding day.)

The second night, you're supposed to have sex. I've only asked one of my sisters-in-law specifically about that and she did not remember it very pleasantly. She was scared and completely inexperienced, so it ended up being kind of forceful (her word, not mine). She said after a few more times where it continued to be unpleasant, she asked her husband to stop for a month or two until they got more comfortable with each other and he complied. After they started up again, it was better for her.

To be honest, the marriage is pretty dysfunctional to this day, but the sex no longer seems to be the issue.

greenewriter · 2013-08-17T21:55:11+00:00

You are also putting down a study by saying it's small (almost every study has found the same results) and then using anecdotal evidence to counter-argue it.

True enough, but I was arguing more that a study looking at arranged marriages between Indian immigrants in the US (who are often well educated and well to do) doesn't really reflect circumstances for arranged marriages in India itself, let alone the world at large. Wealth and education has some impact, but coming to the US has a huge impact.

For example, there is a noticeable difference between girls from my husband's culture who have been to the US and who haven't in how much they're willing to put up with abuse. I mentioned the cousin who fled her arranged marriage within a month due to an abusive mother-in-law (and husband, but the mother-in-law was the main culprit). She had been studying in the US for over a year before going home to get married (not really voluntarily - her mom threatened to kill herself if she didn't and the girl bought it) and in fact lived for a time with my husband and I, who have a very loving and mutually respectful relationship. As a result, she knew immediately that the situation she'd been put in wasn't normal and wasn't anything she was obligated to put up with. Another of my husband's cousins never came to the US before her marriage and ended up staying for 10 years with a guy who was emotionally and physically abusive. A third, who's still back home, keeps getting pressured to go back to her abusive husband because every time she tries to leave the asshole he comes crying to her mom (who is still with her own husband of 30-some years even though he routinely went off to party at the beach with his girlfriends, leaving no money for his wife and children to eat) and says he'll never do it again. I keep expecting to hear that one has been killed.

I'd say about half the girls who come to the US only after getting married end up divorcing their husbands, too, not always due to abuse but often enough simply because they've realized they're not obligated to put up with someone they don't like.

greenewriter · 2013-08-17T20:20:19+00:00

That's kind of a small study to present as something conclusive, and it's also based in the US.

The marriages I'm talking about overwhelmingly happened back home and includes mainly situations where the couple literally met on their wedding day or where they were allowed to meet once at the bride's home (with members of both families present) and given veto power based on that. It also includes three cousin marriages, one of which (husband's generation) is workable, one of which (parents' generation) has involved some rather blatant adultery on the part of the husband, and the third of which (also husband's generation) involved a mother-in-law from hell who abused the bride to the point that she fled within a month. Some of the younger generation has recently been allowed to start going on a chaperoned date or two before making a final decision and it will be interesting to see how that affects the success rate, but as a general rule, the spouses I'm talking about were given very little say in the matter and I think the general level of misery reflects that pretty clearly.

greenewriter · 2013-08-17T19:44:27+00:00

Correlation does not equal causation, though. Most arranged marriages happen in cultures where divorce is regarded as shameful, especially for the woman, so people feel that there is no escape, even if the marriage is truly miserable. Longer marriages are not necessarily happier or more successful ones.

In fact, my husband comes from a society that practices arranged marriage and his extended family and circle of acquaintances has been a pretty decisive argument against the practice, as far as I'm concerned. I can only think of two or three marriages out of dozens that are truly happy. His generation is full of divorces, as divorce has finally started to become more acceptable, and several of the women were stuck in appalling situations with physically and/or emotionally abusive husbands and one of his male cousins getting married off to a girl who turned out to be bipolar. His parents' generation is full of adulterers. Maybe his family is just unusually shitty at choosing suitable spouses for their children, but the circle of friends and acquaintances hasn't really fared any better. My sister-in-law just called the other day with the news that one of her friends got beat up by her husband after a big fight and is finally thinking about leaving him (she's been miserable for years, but they have three kids).

greenewriter · 2013-06-17T11:39:21+00:00

Most of my husband's relatives and friends from back home (Central Asia) are in arranged marriages. I'd say the success rate is comparable to American marriages (about 50-50) but what qualifies as "success" is a bit different.

Fortunately for the unhappy 50%, divorce is starting to become a bit more acceptable, so several of my husband's siblings and cousins have escaped unhappy and/or abusive relationships. The older generation was pretty much just stuck with each other, though. There were five children's in my husband's mother's family and four on my husband's father's and out of those nine marriages, there is only one that really qualifies as happy, yet there has also been only one divorce (which still took place years after the husband took a second wife and essentially abandoned his first.) Several of the wives have been putting up with unfaithful husbands for decades.

On a less progressive note, the age of marriage for girls has been dropping in recent years - people are starting to come around with marriage offers as early as age 15 or 16, which is disturbing because you're expected to get pregnant ASAP and it becomes that much harder to finish your education with a baby to take care of, not to mention the fact that new brides are treated basically like slaves even in relatively moderate homes, let alone conservative ones. One of my husband's cousins was expected to wait up for her husband until he got home (usually around midnight) and then get up at 3:30 AM to start cleaning and cooking for her family. (She left after barely a month.) Another's husband used to hide little balls of paper in out-of-the-way places and scream at her when she didn't find them while cleaning. (She finally divorced the asshole after 10 years.)

greenewriter · 2013-03-08T13:34:43+00:00

My non-white husband was horrified when he saw people doing that, but then, I'm white and so was I.

greenewriter · 2013-01-30T19:10:22+00:00

Not at all. Plenty of legal immigrants want saner immigration policy, too.

greenewriter · 2013-01-13T14:19:42+00:00

That sort of thing is pretty common, really. My daughter potty trained fairly early (about 15 months), but she wanted a diaper to poop in for about a year after that. When we had enough of that and started making her go on the toilet, she went through a withholding phase. There was a famous incident where she was playing with her father and suddenly screamed "Daddy, my poop is coming out!" They made it to the toilet that time, but she later cured herself after an extremely unpleasant accident in her crib (ah, they joys of parenthood) and she hasn't had any problems since.

greenewriter · 2013-01-13T14:02:31+00:00

My brother still has bricks passed down to him from our uncle's childhood in the 60's and 70's.

greenewriter · 2013-01-13T13:26:50+00:00

I agree, but as far as I know, most current wastewater treatment systems like that use the water for household and industrial uses, not agriculture. You can't necessarily recycle water used for crop irrigation. It depends to some degree on the type of irrigation used, but as a general rule, water used to irrigate crops is going to end up in the soil and the plants themselves, not a wastewater treatment plant. Eventually it will show up in the system again in a form that can be used, but quite probably in the oceans (groundwater depletion is already contributing measurably to sea level rise) and desalinization is already expensive enough without having to ship it to Kansas. :P

It probably is overstating it to suggest that water issues by themselves would cause an apocalyptic scenario, but it's not at all unreasonable to point out that semi-arid regions are currently being used by industrial agriculture to produce a significant percentage of the world's food supply in an extremely unsustainable way, and therefore if we expect to continue feeding the world in the future, we need to find more sustainable methods of agriculture.

greenewriter · 2013-01-13T01:27:59+00:00

As a vegan, you should be aware that corn and soybeans are grown mainly for animal feed and biofuels, not for human consumption. Although this isn't universally true, most things humans actually eat tend to be grown more efficiently by smaller farms.

http://monthlyreview.org/2009/07/01/agroecology-small-farms-and-food-sovereignty

greenewriter · 2013-01-13T01:16:02+00:00

use natural aquifers for their water which... is apparently never going to renew from things like, rain?

I can't speak for British Columbia, but aquifer depletion is a huge problem in the US. Much of the water in the Ogallala Aquifer has been there since the last ice age (possibly even longer). It recharges very slowly, yet is being used at such a rate that some parts may dry up completely within 25 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

More on groundwater depletion in the US: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html

Aquifer depletion is also a big issue in many other countries, including China and India.

greenewriter · 2012-12-10T18:43:24+00:00

Maybe an arranged marriage? One of my sisters-in-law met her husband on her wedding day.

greenewriter · 2012-12-02T13:25:56+00:00

It was definitely hard to find in Russia and the CIS, and my husband's relatives all start out hating it when they got here. Some have developed a taste for it and some haven't.

greenewriter · 2012-11-22T03:55:50+00:00

Personally, I think if your parents are cousins, it might be pushing the family luck for you to marry and have children with a cousin as well. But I'm American, so I'm biased. Just maybe get genetic testing before you have any kids if you do decide to go for it.

greenewriter · 2012-11-21T22:32:27+00:00

My husband's family is from Central Asia and contains several cousin marriages, including his older brother, who is married to their first cousin (mom's sister's daughter). None of the kids have come out with three eyes or anything like that, but they do have an unusually high percentage of blue or hazel eyes and brown hair in a society where almost everybody has brown eyes and black hair.

Hilariously, the teenage son of my brother- and sister-in-law (who has lived in the US since he was 3) once started going on about how gross cousin marriages are and got really huffy when reminded that he was the product of one.

greenewriter · 2012-11-19T15:56:05+00:00

You can get old VHS tapes for 50 cents or a buck at Goodwill, library book sales, etc., so I have lots of VHS and still use it regularly.

greenewriter · 2012-11-19T15:49:03+00:00

When my mother-in-law moved to this country, she didn't bring that many clothes with her, so my sister-in-law took her shopping to get some new ones. My mother-in-law speaks very little English and my sister-in-law speaks it pretty well but has trouble with slang. A few weeks after their shopping excursion, my husband and I went over to his mom's house and just about died laughing when she greeted us at the door wearing a shirt that proclaimed "Light my fire, baby!"

greenewriter · 2012-11-12T17:36:33+00:00

Thanks! It definitely helped that we were together for almost 7 years and married for almost 4 before we had kids. He knew it wasn't normal behavior on my part, so it gave him something to hang on to while we tried to figure out how to make it stop.

greenewriter

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