Rena_CH1_DQ1,2,&3

This is going to be my response for Discussion Questions 1, 2, and 3 since I neglected to make my post last week.

DQ1: I think the divorce rate in India is lower than in the United States for many reasons. First, in the US, it is socially acceptable to get a divorce whereas in other countries such as India, divorcing your spouse would have all kind of consequences, such as dishonoring your family or being disowned by them. Also, in India, it is part of their culture to have arranged marriages. It's not necessarily about love. People don't get married with the same mindset as in the US.  Women also have greater rights in the US versus India and many other countries where women's rights are all but nonexistent. In the United States, marriage just isn't taken as seriously as it is in other countries. People just flit in and out of them because they can. The mindset is, "Oh well I can get married right now, spur of the moment, on a whim, and if it doesn't work out, well there's always the option of divorce."

DQ2: I don't think marriages should be arranged by parents. I definitely think you should marry for love, not because your parents have matched you with a wealthy suitor that will be able to take care of you. I wouldn't care about the security if there wasn't any love. I definitely think marriage is a very personal, intimate decision. I do, however, think that it's very sweet and very respectful for a man to ask a woman's father for her hand in marriage. While it's not necessary, and sometimes you have to go against your family's wishes to make yourself happy, I just think that it's a very polite and very romantic gesture, that shows the woman's family that you respect them enough to see what they think about it before you whisk their daughter off into a new life with you. Although I don't currently have a partner, the guys I have dated have not necessarily been very similar to me. I have been in relationships with guys that are different from me religiously, a different ethnicity than me, and just lots of different things. While relationships can sometimes be complicated by these differences (hypothetically, imagine an atheist dating a person of faith), they are not necessarily important to me.

DQ3: I think that using college-age students in research for romantic relationships can have a couple of flaws. I don't think college students would be a very good control group to get results concerning romance, necessarily. College is about exploring the world and getting to know yourself and how you relate to others, so romance may not necessarily be present in a relationship. The cliche idea of college is that everybody experiments with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Maybe not all three, and maybe not extensively, but it is generally understood that college-age people and people in college are mostly all about having fun and being young before they have to get their life together and be a put-together adult with major responsibilities. So I think that researching romance using college-age people could yield poor results, depending on the type of research being done, simply because it's not as much of a priority among that age range as it is with people older than that.