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This is the basic philosophy underlying BBC television's new five-part
Arrange Me a Marriage, which is being presented by Aneela Rahman, a happily
married Asian woman of 39 with a husband of 15 years, Maqsood, that her
parents found for her in the traditional way.
Rahman has received generally good reviews for her first programme
which attracted a respectable audience of 1.8 million last week on BBC2, a
channel aimed at the more discerning British viewer.
Her central point seems to be that Westerners often rush into a
marriage on the basis of initial physical attraction only to find the
relationship does not last in the long run.
"Lots of people in Britain hook up in a bar or a club, but you wouldn'
t buy a house or car drunk, so why would you expect to find a life partner
that way?" asks Rahman, the mother of two children and a successful
businesswoman. "Then people wake up 20 years later and wonder why they haven
't found someone to settle down with."
She argues - as Indians have done for centuries and the British, too,
did in Victorian England - that education, class and family background are
important factors that help to ensure greater compatibility. Hence, family
and friends should assist in identifying partners for men and women who find
it hard to do so on their own.
Asian marriages in Britain have attracted unfavourable publicity in
recent years because underage or very young girls, mainly but not always
Muslim, have been dragged by ultra-orthodox parents usually to Pakistan to
be forced into marriage with much older male relatives.
"People react badly to the words 'arranged marriage', but there is a
huge difference between something being arranged and something being
forced," says Rahman, who was born in Glasgow of parents who came from
Pakistan.
The men and women brave or foolish enough to have consented to appear
on Arrange Me a Marriage all appear to have good careers but suffer
emptiness in their personal lives.
In last week's opening episode, viewers met Lexi Proud, 33, the
director of cabin crew for a private aviation firm.
Others who will appear in the weeks to come include Sally Cox, a
40-year-old senior civil servant from Croydon, South London; and Trevor
Stewart, 42, a management consultant from Reading.
Rahman will be pleased with some of the responses to her show.
Simon Hoggart wrote in The Spectator magazine: "You cannot trust a
single frame of any reality television show."
But he conceded: "Arrange Me a Marriage was more engaging than most in
the genre, mainly because nobody was strung out to dry. The notion is that
arranged marriages often work in the subcontinent, so it was worth getting a
marriage-fixer - a Scots-Indian woman called Aneela - to work her art on
Westerners. She seemed a sensible person. Her subject, a 33-year-old
unmarried executive called Lexi, insisted that she didn't mind what social
class her groom came from. Aneela quickly set her right on that - class
background was vital. Most unwed people have a fantasy about the exact
partner they want; she knew that nobody meets all our requirements, and if
they did we'd be disappointed anyway. As my friend the Texan gossip
columnist Betsy Parish said when a friend asked why she'd never married,
'Because all the men here are married, gay, or pond scum.' "
The word from the BBC is that Lexi, who been introduced by Rahman to a
man called Nick, is "that they are still together and thinking of moving in
together and that marriage may not be far off".
Indian-style. Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071128/asp/nation/story_8600496.asp
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