AUDIO text>Religion and
Marriage
Arranged marriages are usually, what happens
is, within...within the community people know who has children
who are nearing the age they should be married, anything from
sixteen to say twenty-five, something like that, and what happens
is people would keep an eye, keep an eye open sort of thing. They
all look round and if they see somebody else who they think would
be a suitable match, because it's not an arranged...when people,
er... arrange marriages, it's not done in a haphazard way. A lot
of things are taken into consideration. Em...both, both sides,
their backgrounds, their social status, the education, to a large
extent the temperament of the children as well and the family's.
More so the family's I think than the children - not children,
the people who are going to get married. And I think all these
things are taken into consideration. They feel somebody may make
a suitable match, then the parents are approached, and then it's
taken from there. I thought...the idea of an arranged marriage
was absolutely appalling! It was sort of the done thing to say,
like everybody "Oh...", when people ask you, "Will
you have an arranged marriage?". And the done thing was to
say, "Oh no, I'd hate that", because that's, that's
what people accept, expect from you, and gradually I
accepted that I was going to have an arranged marriage, but it
was going to be an arranged marriage on my terms. So they said,
"Well, yes, but you must understand, em, you'll have to marry
somebody from the Sikh community", and they've got to be
acceptable to them, well, whoever I marry. And I wanted to get
to know the person I was going to get married, and my mum agreed.