Arranged Marriages

At work recently we were discussing arranged marriages. The Sicilian's take on this was that they were horrible...the concept that one did not get to choose their intended, to her, was totally inconceivable. Personally I don't think they are that bad. Apparently some huge percentage of arranged marriages are actually successful, which by far beats out the 50% rate of divorce we've currently got. Marriage these days just seems to easy to get into and get out of - I wonder if they sanctity of the concept is retained at all. It saddens me so much when I hear of children younger than my own whose parents are no longer together. Do I think people who are miserable should stay together just because they made a vow? Absolutely not - however I do think that if the marriage vow were less easy to 'get out of,' perhaps those people would have tried harder to resolve their issues. I am sure when relationships end (married, de facto or otherwise) it's emotionally a really, really difficult thing...honestly I can't even begin to imagine what it's like. However it just seems like everyone is getting married over and over, and divorcing over and over. Society these days is so much more accepting of the 'temporary' state of marriage. One look at the various celebrity magazines and one might think it's trendy to get married, and then trendy a few days later to get divorced. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm old fashioned about this, thinking that marriage should still be for life? To get back to the arranged marriage thing, is is possible that they 'work' more often because they are theoretically harder to get out of? Or is it just that in the cultures where these marriages happen, the women are less likely (less able) to speak or act out if they are miserable? Are there scores of women out there, suffering in arranged marriages because culturally they are trapped? Is that statistic of the marriages being successful really just because the women do not have the freedom to say otherwise? What about those women who, given the choice, would choose such a thing? Could you argue that mail-order brides and the like are choosing to be 'arranged' by making themselves available to men overseas? Are they, too, being somehow 'forced' by circumstance to choose that route? I suspect this topic is way larger than can be discussed in a blog....feel free to comment.