While some societies prohibit marriage between certain categories of relations (Kinds), other societies permit or even require certain kind of relatives to get married to.
Thus marriage with particular cross: cousins (father’s sister’s or mother’s brother’s offspring’s) are approved or permitted in many societies Among Arabs and Muslims in India marriage between parallel cousin (child of father’s brother 01 mother’s sister) is common. Possible reasons for permitting or preferring cousin marriages are
(a) Family wealth is not dispersed as it remains within related family groups
(b) Relationships do not fade away as they are constantly renewed among offspring’s of relate families.
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(i) Marriage arrangements
In some societies, the decisions regarding mate selection are made by parents/relatives; in some other societies individuals are relatively free to choose their own mates. Marriage arrangements thus tend to follow two patterns, namely, parent arranged (arranged marriage) and self choice (love marriage).
Arranged marriage
Traditional societies like India, where extended family network has been crucial, arranging marriage has been the concern of parents and elders. In addition, gains in terms of family prestige, economic prosperity and power (especially in affluent families) have also been sought through ‘proper’ marriage to the fancies of the immature.
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As such, in traditional societies ‘arranged’ marriages has been the norm. Such marriages have also been unavoidable because in these societies there used to exist rigid sex-segregation, due to which marriageable young girls and boys could not come together and know one another.
Even today, hetero-sexual intermingling is not widely prevalent, and young people especially girls, themselves, seem to prefer arranged marriages, which saves them from many psychological tensions which modern youth undergo. However it should be remembered that arranged marriages are rarely forced marriages, the needs and preferences of the young people getting married are not entirely ignored.
(ii) Love Marriage
In the western urban-industrial method of mate selection, individuals go through the process of dating and courtship, they make selection based on the consideration of feeling for one another. This is termed as love marriage by Asians / Indians.
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For, in such marriages mate choice is done by the individuals concerned on grounds of mutual affection and love, rather than on pragmatic considerations of social status, wealth or other familial advantages. These ‘love marriages’ stress the individual’s supreme right to love and be loved in a romantic sense. Such love is considered as the essence of happiness in marriage.
There is an important difference between love marriage and arranged marriage. Whereas in the latter at the individual’s level one has vague expectations from marriage (in fact, individuals enter into it primarily for performing their social duty), in self choice marriage there are great expectations of happiness and companionship from one’s partner in marriage.
However these are not very easy to attain and retain in day-to-day life after marriage, where practical problems of existence confront the couple. Mature personalities are able to adjust to this gap between dream and reality.
The less mature find it difficult to adjust. At times the gap between fantasy of romantic love and exigencies of practical life is so wide that the strain becomes impossible to bear and marriage ends in a failure.
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Eventually such marriages involve a risk and since the partners entering such a union had not done so for familial or social reasons, the love marriage tends to be more fragile than the arranged marriage. Many of the love marriages become unstable not so much because of the mistaken selection but because of non-fulfilled expectations in marriage.