A comment (with editing; required when one attempts coherence under painkillers) I made over at SM, in response to this one:

'Most arranged marriages do not end in divorce because there is no exit option in Indian society. There is no such "safety net" in "love marriages" and that's why you see a lot more people from your town divorced. You should be celebrating their right to get out of unhappy and often abusive relationships not berating "love marriage" as being on par with arranged marriage.

M&A deals have a "due diligence" phase. Car dealers have a "test drive" and yet desis even today enter into the most important thing in their life blindfolded. Don't do your due diligence or test drive well you have a lemon on your hands!"

No amount of "due diligence" or "test drives" are good enough guarantors that it will all work out. In other words. while these may be "necessary" conditions for some one to "jump da broom" but are not "sufficient" conditions to ensure that the eventual marriage is a not lemon. Besides, if you consider the kind of hard nosed scrutiny and data collection (which is too business or CIA like even) folks are subjected to (at least in India; once my parents were out of town, and I had to field a telephone call from a distant uncle of a potential groom who wanted to talk to my father about the general behaviour and demeanor of a girl who lived down the street) under arranged marriages, you would not be able to say there is no "due diligence" in arranged marriages settings.

All this, discounting the issue of how initial conditions ("due diligence" and "test drives") are not all that accurate in predicting what the final state of the complex system (marriage) will be. Finally, I remembered that there was a 2002 study put out by the National Marriage Project @ Rutgers, which indicated (I haven't re-read it since then) that "a careful review of the available social science evidence suggests that living together is not a good way to prepare for marriage or to avoid divorce". Here is a well written (recent) blog post on this subject of cohabition before marriage or "test driving".

Just some more food for thought.

Interesting article at the Po Bronson blog.