What are the benefits of an arranged marriage?

Many provided empowered assistants are at work, helping two conditioned souls regulating their life’s so spiritual progress becomes possible.

Recently, once again, one devotee expressed to me his disbelieve in arranged marriages pointing to the shockingly high divorce rate in ISKCON. As he was a sincere soul, I pointed out to him in return that karmis are certainly not less affected by Kali as devotees are. The argument that "unless both, the boy and the girl don’t like each other, how can the marriage work" is irrelevant from all points of view. It assumes that arranged marriage is conducted by artificial force, which is in itself a wrong assumption. And it advocates sensual platform of perception which likely may result in unwanted progeny.

First of all liking or not liking is entirely product of sensual and mental platform and as such can change instantly along the moves of modes of material nature.

Secondly, the original vedic process of growing up together, boy and girl learning to know each other even before the sex urge becomes prominent, all this leads to a very mature and "natural" union thereafter. After all, it’s the varna which is the basic consideration in the marriage, along of course strong spiritual guarding system represented by guru sastra and sadhu. Any serious grhasta will approach his ashrama with great caution, knowing the possible risks as even on royal road deathly accidents may occur. Even after all the precautions are carefully met, still securing the blessings of the vaisnavas is most important ingredient. By blessings of superior devotees there is at least a hope for a somewhat stable relationship. The spiritual disasters are often followed by material ones; a divorce is both, spiritual and material calamity.

Assistance and blessings are absolutely needed, the "dating, tasting and leaving again" internet life style of today is below the level of pigeons and few other animal species which are known for their chastity.

And so an arranged and spiritually blessed marriage is a proper "strategic step" for those who cannot fight maya from the "simply blissful" position of a brahmacary and insist to experience the far more complicated life pattern. As grhasta ashrama is meant to taste the impact of material energy in regulated way with minimal spiritual damages, it needs spiritual guardians, assistants and examples of those who did survived it and can share their realizations with others. Fortunately such rare devotees are available and ready to help those who are endangered by sentimentality.

Consequently the first step towards an arranged marriage should be absolute loyalty to a spiritual authority demonstrated in form of an initiation and surrender to a bona fide spiritual master. If both parties have that kind of spiritual determination and feel deeply obliged to their guru, then the impact of sensuality awaiting them will be tolerable. When such a strong base is established then one day even polygamy might be possible as everybody involved is deeply committed to the principles given by his and hers superiors. For women polygamy is acceptable as to be protected is the main need. As one of the practicing polygamy ladies frankly expressed: “Better to share one real husband with five others as to have one fool for yourself.” :-)

If the partners don’t follow such procedure, depending only on their "like or not like" perception, they might maintain such relationship only to the degree their karma allows and so they may also despite all the initial "love" be separated by its powerful currents and thrown into entirely unregulated circumstances. A risky enterprise indeed.