Attachment Styles › Attachment in Arranged Marriages
Attachment in Arranged Marriages: When the Bond Forms After the Wedding
Western attachment writing assumes a couple bonds first and commits later. An arranged marriage reverses that order: commitment comes first, and the attachment bond is built afterwards, in real time, between two people who are still largely strangers. That is not a defective way to form a bond — it is a different sequence, and research suggests arranged marriages often deepen over time rather than fade. What determines the outcome is not how the marriage began but whether the couple becomes each other's secure base: responsive, reliable, and emotionally available to one another. That can be built deliberately.
Almost everything written about attachment in relationships was written for a culture where you fall in love, then decide. In my practice that describes a minority of the marriages I see. For most couples who come to me, the question is not "did we bond before we committed?" but "how do we build a bond now that we have?" It is a genuinely different psychological task, and the international literature is almost silent on it — which is why so much of the advice available to Indian couples quietly misses the point.
Sources: research on love in arranged marriages by Robert Epstein and colleagues; dissolution rate from India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The low dissolution figure should not be read as a measure of happiness — staying is not the same as thriving.
In a love marriage you bond and then commit. In an arranged marriage you commit and then bond. Neither sequence guarantees closeness — but only one of them lets you build the bond deliberately, from the very first day. — Dr. Prerna Kohli, PhD & M.Phil, Clinical Psychologist
The Reversed Sequence
In attachment terms, becoming attached to a partner means they gradually become your secure base — the person you turn to under stress, whose availability makes the world feel manageable. In a love marriage this process typically happens over months or years of courtship, and the wedding formalises a bond that already exists.
In an arranged marriage, the wedding comes first. Two people who may have met a handful of times are suddenly sharing a bed, a home, an extended family, and a future — while their attachment systems are still, quite reasonably, treating each other as strangers. The intimacy is instant; the bond is not. Many couples experience this gap as a private failure ("why don't I feel what I'm supposed to feel?"), when it is in fact the entirely expected starting condition.
The reassuring part is that attachment bonds form through repeated experience, not through origin story. Bonds are built by responsiveness: reaching out and being met, again and again, until the nervous system concludes this person is reliably there for me. That mechanism does not care whether you met on a dating app or across a drawing room with both sets of parents watching.
What Builds the Bond
- Responsiveness to bids. The small moments — a comment, a worry mentioned in passing, a hand reached out — matter more than grand gestures. Being consistently met is precisely what builds a secure base.
- Turning toward under stress. Attachment is forged in difficulty. The first illness, job crisis or family conflict is where the bond is genuinely made or missed.
- Protected couple time. In a joint household, a couple can go months without meaningful private conversation. Bonds don't form in the presence of an audience.
- Emotional disclosure, gradually. Not interrogation, but the steady mutual revealing that makes two people knowable to each other.
- Physical intimacy at a pace both can hold. Sexual intimacy that outpaces emotional safety can slow the bond rather than build it, especially where the couple were near-strangers at the wedding.
- Repair after conflict. Every couple ruptures. Attachment security comes from reliable repair, not from an absence of fights.
What Quietly Blocks It
In my experience, these are the most common blockers, and few of them are anyone's fault:
- No private space. A couple living in a joint family with no protected time together simply cannot do the work of bonding. This is structural, not attitudinal.
- Third parties inside the marriage. When parents or in-laws are the first point of emotional contact for either spouse, the couple never becomes each other's secure base — someone else is already occupying that position.
- Unspoken expectations. Two people arrive with entirely different assumptions about roles, money, sex, children and independence, and often no forum in which to discuss them.
- Pre-existing insecure patterns. An anxiously attached spouse may read a new partner's reserve as rejection; an avoidant spouse may quietly withdraw from a closeness that arrived faster than they could tolerate.
- Pressure to perform happiness. Families want reassurance that the match was right, so difficulty gets hidden — and hidden difficulty does not get worked on.
- Waiting for feelings instead of building them. Perhaps the most common of all: assuming closeness will simply arrive on its own.
A short composite, drawn from patterns I see often — not a real client, and not a record of any one person.
A couple might come to me two years into an arranged marriage, both quietly convinced it had been a mistake, and both far too polite to say so directly. Nothing dramatic had happened: no cruelty, no betrayal, no fights worth naming. They were simply strangers who shared an address. Living in a joint household, they had never had an uninterrupted conversation; each of them still took every real problem to a parent rather than to each other. What struck me was that neither had done anything wrong — they had just never been given the conditions in which a bond could form. Much of the work was practical: protected time, taking troubles to each other first, learning to notice and answer small bids. The feeling they had been waiting to arrive turned out to be something they had to build.
A Note on What the Research Does and Doesn't Say
Findings that love in arranged marriages tends to grow over time — overtaking love marriages at around five years and roughly doubling by ten — are genuinely encouraging, and I share them often. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let them stand alone. India's very low marriage dissolution rate reflects social stigma, economic dependence and limited options for women as much as it reflects marital happiness. Staying married is not the same as being securely attached. The honest reading is: arranged marriages have real potential to deepen into secure bonds — and that outcome is built, not guaranteed.
- An arranged marriage reverses the usual sequence: commitment first, attachment bond afterwards.
- Not feeling bonded early isn't failure — it's the expected starting condition.
- Bonds form through responsiveness and repair, regardless of how a couple met.
- The commonest blockers are structural: no private time, third parties inside the marriage, unspoken expectations.
- Research suggests arranged marriages often deepen over time — but low divorce rates reflect constraint as well as contentment. Secure attachment is built, not guaranteed.
Building a marriage with someone you're still getting to know? This is some of the most rewarding couples work I do — and it works best early. In-clinic in Gurugram and online across India and worldwide.
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