An arranged marriage is one in which two or more parties arrange for a marriage between two people. Marriage parties may choose suitors based on financial security, religion, upbringing, health, and a variety of other factors.
Arranged marriages still shape millions of lives worldwide, often praised for family compatibility and low divorce rates. Everyone loves a good arranged-marriage success story: “Our parents chose perfectly, 30 years, zero fights, happily ever after.”
But behind the Instagram reels and family WhatsApp forwards, thousands of people quietly live very different realities. In arranged marriages, typically compatibility is measured in caste, income, and horoscopes—not chemistry, values, or attraction. What looks perfect on paper can feel like a life sentence when the spark never arrives.
Let’s take a look at the top 12 downsides of arranged marriages. Keep in mind that we are just discussing planned marriages, not forced marriages.
1. Loss of Personal Autonomy
With arranged marriages, adults often cede one of life’s most personal decisions to parents, relatives, or matchmakers. Meetings are brief, choreographed, and chaperoned; genuine veto power is nonexistent. Many feel they are marrying the family’s choice instead of their own.
This erosion of personal agency fosters hidden anger from the outset. With time, they come to doubt their sense of identity and decision-making capabilities. The message instilled comes through loud and clear: your happiness is less important than the collective honour, status, or tradition. For many, especially younger people in modernising societies, this foundational denial of autonomy poisons the entire marital experience.
2. Lack of Initial Emotional Connection
Couples see each other for just a few times—at times only once—before the marriage. They do not have courtship, shared experiences, or the buildup of falling in love over time. Emotional intimacy is then manufactured post-vows. When there is no buildup of feelings like attraction or affection between the partners, they feel like roommates rather than spouses.
Marriage without pre-marital bonding makes others emotionally depleted and bewildered as to why they don’t “feel” anything for their spouse. So-called adjustment feels like forced emotional labour without recompense.
3. Family Pressure and Expectations
Parents and the extended family have tremendous power, treating the relationship as a collective responsibility. Saying no to the relationship often means experiencing guilt trips, blackmail, silence, or even threats of disowning the child. Even after securing the relationship, the in-laws keep snooping and critiquing every action, from food preparation to career choice and childbearing age.
The personal life of the couple becomes a public display of performance, largely dictated by unwritten rules set by the family. Many people are stuck in an incompatible marriage just to maintain family links. This relentless external pressure makes the marriage an obligation to keep everyone else happy, but perhaps not those involved.
4. Incompatibility Risks
The traditional factors—same caste, similar income, similar horoscopes—can easily take precedence over personality, life goals, mode of communication, or even sexual compatibility. When the couple realises, after the wedding, that they have different short- and long-term plans with respect to having children, or that they are high or low achievers, or that one is an outgoing person and the other a shy one, it can become a daily source of friction between them.
The “perfect match” is seen as the source of all future disillusionments when differences in values and habits repeatedly surface in daily life and cannot be easily compromised on.
5. Mental Health Strain
Research and personal accounts have repeatedly associated coercion or low-choice arranged marriages with high levels of depression, anxiety, and burnout, particularly among women. The feelings of being trapped in a relationship without emotional safety or options of exit wear away at self-worth. Constant suppression of personal desires and societal judgment leads to chronic stress.
Many complain of sleep problems, loss of appetite, panic attacks, or emotional numbness. The most important issue is quiet suffering, rarely recognised, because adjustment is expected. This strain, unaddressed over time, can build into serious mental-health crises that families often dismiss as personal weakness.
6. Potential for Abuse
In such cases of limited choices, the involvement of families can lead to marriage situations of control, emotional exploitation, and, in some cases, physical exploitation. If the individual tries to get out of the marriage, they face the fear of shame, financial dependence, legal hassles of child custody, and social boycotting by the community and relatives. The abuser takes advantage of the fact that it’s difficult to get divorced, which leads to exploitation of the spouse through financial control, social boycotting, and physical exploitation, all in the guise of saving the marriage!
7. Delayed or Absent Intimacy
Physical and emotional closeness takes its own time to develop—if it develops at all—since partners may not have been physically attracted to each other. In many instances, there is a sense of being pressured to get intimate too soon. This creates dislike or anger. In some marriages, there is years-long celibacy since neither partner is attracted to the other. But does the promise of one day growing that intimacy due to nearness ring true when intrinsic chemistry is missing?
8. Trust Issues
There are always suspicions about the spouse’s motivations. Was he or she chosen because of compatibility, dowry, status, immigration necessities, or family pressure? Early suspicions undermine the very foundation on which trust will eventually be built.
Differences and minor arguments come about because people are unable to believe that the other’s affection is genuine, not obligatory. “Without a pre-marriage track record of vulnerability and reliability, building trusting relationships can truly be an uphill climb.” One is always suspecting that love existed only as a function of external pressures.
9. Gender Inequality Reinforcement
In such arranged marriages, more responsibilities are also imposed upon the woman, including the pressure to conform to conventional roles, to forgo individual aspirations, to move in with the in-laws’ home, and to be more stringently judged in terms of appearance and fecundity. The man is more empowered in decision-making and other aspects of freedom.
Such an inherent framework of conventional match-making is already biased against the woman. Women who refuse to conform to the conventional setup are deemed to be ‘difficult’ and ‘self-centered’ individuals. The men are subject to almost negligible pressure. The system reinforces patriarchal ideals, undermining the woman’s power long after the marriage ceremony is complete.
10. Social Stigma Around Divorce
Even extremely unhappy couples choose to stay in their marriages because the idea of divorce brings great shame, especially if they’re women. “What will people say?” is what families warn against if couples choose an unwelcome divorce. Low rates of divorce in an arranged marriage system belie the fact that many are forced by their communities rather than by happiness in their marriages.
Couples suffer silently through years of loveless marriage in the name of appearances. When they finally do choose divorce, they’re shunning marriage options and suffering financially because of social judgment.
11. Regret and Resentment Buildup
Eventually, the question of “what if I had chosen differently” becomes a background thought that one can’t shake. Milestone events such as an anniversary, a child’s marriage, or success in one’s career are continually compared with friends in loving marriages. Unmet emotional needs fester into a quiet bitterness with one’s parents, society, or sometimes the spouse themselves.
Resentment builds when one comes to see that the marriage was not suited to who one really was in the first place. Trapped, individuals see no escape due to children, financial circumstances, or age, and they live with a quiet regret of a “what if” that continues to seep into interactions with others.
12. Impact on Children
Children brought up in complicated, loveless, or high-conflict arranged marriages pick up undesirable patterns of relating. They learn from what they experience and absorb into their normal reality: emotional alienation, bottled-up anger, or superficial agreement.
Adult unhappiness translates into inconsistent parenting and parental mood swings, or an excessive preoccupation with the child’s life as compensation. They develop into adults who dread commitment, mistrust marriage, or replicate the patterns they saw. This is the generational ripple effect: the child of an unhappy marriage often battles with intimacy, self-worth, and secure attachment in his or her own relationships.
Conclusion
Arranged marriages carry cultural weight and work for some. But these downsides reveal real costs to freedom, mental health, and long-term happiness that deserve open discussion.
Love should be the driving force behind a marriage, not family pressures. Kick-starting a new life with someone needs to be a happy, mutually consented decision so that life is enjoyed in all its glory.
