Arranged marriages are still marriages and come with the same issues. Couple of factors why they succeed often is:

* compatibility is established by design

* usually, its a union of families, which creates a wider social circle that helps out the newlywed couple through difficulties

Personally, I believe that _any_ two people living together and sharing so much will inevitably end up loving/hating each other. You simply can't be indifferent to people who are in such close social contact with you for so long.

Good that you mentioned the two families. And having 3-4 generations all right there is a big help.

Also helping are having kids if only because it creates and orders the TODO list when a baby cries or a child needs food, shoes, etc.

Also helping are well established ROLES. Both husband and wife already know in good terms what they are to do.

Also helped was the village church and the weekly services emphasizing family formation.

Also helped was village social pressure, at times really severe.

There's also specific pressure creating cultural conformity; if you need to go to your mother in law when your husband is an asshole, you and your mother in law had better agree on what being an asshole is and how he should change. This creates a bias towards cultural stability but also limits unions involving social outsiders or non-traditional marriage partners.

Another factor not to dismiss is that cultures with arranged marriages also generally allow husbands to beat their wives. Therefore the marriage "works out"...or else.

Or put another way, you can find a standard by which the marriage worked out. But is it a relationship that the people involved would want to freely choose?

That’s true. But arranged marriages (quasi-arranged marriages) are common even among folks who live in cultural subsets where wife beating is frowned upon (those who moved to the West or run in westernized circles). Those marriages seem just as happg as any others.

Part of the problem as I see it is that folks in the west often use their freedom to select for stupid things. (Omg she likes the same music!) My cousin just got matched up with someone where the criteria was: “she’s an engineer, her family is respectable and she’s not too religious.” I suspect it will be a good match.

Wives do beat their husbands, I'll grant you that. But I'm going to want to see one hell of an impressive citation before I believe that they are "just as likely to beat their husbands".

Not that I'm agreeing with the grandparent comment, but this is a pretty great paper discussing that.

They're not just as likely to beat their husbands, but violence against children appears to be 50-50; family violence vs. intimate partner violence, basically.

https://www.dvrcv.org.au/sites/default/files/Mens%20as%20vic...

That appears to be a study from Australia. Not exactly a country well known for arranged marriages.

In Bangladesh where I’m from (a “moderate” country) 80-90% of women are victims of domestic violence. The women do not hit back; that would get them killed.

Physical violence is more likely to be done by husband - by factor 10:1. Verbal abuse is less unequally distributed.

The rates of both depend on a lot of factors like culture, employment rates of males, employment rates of women, etc.

Do you know people with arranged marriages? They work and I don't judge, but it's based on a very different cultural paradigm than what we're (mostly) used to the west; I certainly wouldn't call them happier than modern western marriages I'm familiar with. There's a lot more extended family negotiation when there are problems, rather than direct communication.

The problem is that they are often prone to emotional abuse and occasionally physical abuse. The option to not leave means people (usually women) put up with a lot. E.g., here is an article https://www.thehindu.com/society/sum-of-her-parts-why-are-th... on why organ donors in India are mostly women. Arranged marriages allow this kind of coercion to happen. There is a lot of other stuf why it doesn't work very well, if you expect to be equal partners.