Love Does Not Care How You Met: What Arranged and Free-Choice Marriages Reveal About Romance
Sunday, January 25, 2026.
There is a story Western culture tells itself about love.
It goes like this: love must be chosen freely, passionately, against resistance. Anything negotiated, inherited, introduced, or arranged is assumed to be thinner—functional, perhaps, but emotionally compromised.
This study politely ruins that story.
Researchers examining marriages across five non-Western societies—where both arranged and free-choice marriages coexist—found something deeply inconvenient to modern romantic ideology:
Arranged and free-choice marriages do not differ, on average, in love.
Not in intimacy.
Not in passion.
Not in commitment.
Same triangle. Different entrance.
What’s actually at stake here is not romance versus tradition, but a deeper question:
What does Western culture think love is for?
The Western Myth of Choice
In modern Western societies, romantic choice is treated as the moral foundation of love.
You choose your partner.
You fall in love.
You stay—because you want to.
Choice is assumed to generate authenticity. Authenticity is assumed to generate intimacy. Intimacy is assumed to justify permanence.
Arranged marriages violate this logic from the start. They foreground family continuity, reputation, social structure, religion, and economic compatibility—things Western romance prefers to pretend are incidental.
So the assumption has long been: even if arranged marriages work, surely they lack love.
The data do not support that assumption.
What the Study Actually Measured
The researchers studied life partners from five societies that practice both arranged and free-choice marriages:
Igbo (Nigeria).
Bhotiya (Himalayan region, related to Tibetan populations)
Meru (Tanzania).
Kimeru (Kenya).
Tsimane’ (Amazonian Bolivia).
Participants identified whether they chose their spouse themselves or whether family members arranged the match, then completed a culturally adapted version of the Triangular Love Scale, which measures:
Intimacy – emotional closeness and personal disclosure
Passion – desire, preoccupation, excitement
Commitment – permanence and long-term orientation
Across cultures, there were no overall differences between arranged and free-choice marriages on any of these dimensions.
This matters because the scale measures love as a relational structure, not a courtship narrative. It captures how love is organized and sustained—not how it began.
Western readers often miss this distinction.
Narrative Love vs. Structural Love
Western culture privileges narrative love.
How did you meet?
Was there chemistry?
Did it feel inevitable?
Did you choose each other against odds?
But the study points to something quieter and more durable: structural love.
Structural love is less concerned with origin stories and more concerned with continuity. It emerges from role clarity, shared obligation, temporal stamina, and embeddedness in something larger than the couple.
Put bluntly:
Western culture confuses narrative richness with relational quality.
The Cultural Differences That Refuse Moral Ranking
The study did find differences—but not ones that cooperate with ideological hierarchy:
Among Bhotiya and Tsimane’, free-choice marriages sometimes showed higher intimacy.
Among Meru women, arranged marriages showed higher intimacy and passion.
Among Bhotiya couples married over ten years, free-choice marriages showed higher intimacy.
Among Tsimane’, free-choice marriages showed higher commitment.
There is no clean moral arc here.
The data refuse to crown freedom or tradition as superior.
Instead, they suggest that love adapts to the cultural structures it inhabits—and expresses itself differently depending on how permanence, gender roles, and obligation are organized.
A Methodological Note That Cuts Both Ways
The authors note important limitations: self-report measures, translation issues, and the lack of measurement invariance testing.
But this caveat exposes something deeper.
If “intimacy” does not mean the same thing everywhere, then Western readers may be mistaking verbal disclosure and emotional intensity for love itself—rather than recognizing them as culturally specific expressions of it.
In other words, the measurement problem may not weaken the conclusion.
It may reveal Western romantic arrogance.
The Unsettling Takeaway
The authors conclude that their findings challenge the Western perception that arranged marriages lack love.
I would go further.
This study suggests that Western culture has confused choice with depth, and romantic narration with relational quality.
Love does not require a meet-cute.
It does not demand maximal freedom.
It does not wither simply because it was introduced rather than discovered.
Love appears remarkably indifferent to ideology.
It survives structure.
It adapts to constraint.
It grows wherever continuity is allowed to hold.
Which raises a more dangerous question—one Western culture has not wanted to ask.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Sorokowski, P., Groyecka-Bernard, A., Kowal, M., Butovskaya, M., Stefanczyk, M. M., Huanca, T., Kumar, A., Manral, U., Odo, O. M., Onyishi, I. E., & Jędryczka, W. (2023). Love components in free-choice and arranged marriages among five non-Western populations from Africa, Amazonia, and Himalayas. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52(6), 2529–2544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02608-3