Parents invariably play a role in who their offspring marry. In many societies, parents or other family members determine who their sons and daughters will marry, with the respective families or go-betweens handling the negotiations. Sometimes betrothals are completed while the future partners are still children, as was formerly the custom in much of Hindu India, China, Japan, and eastern and southern Europe. Implicit in the arranged marriage is the conviction that the joining together of two different kin groups to form new social and economic ties is too important to be left to free choice and romantic love.

In some societies, arranged marriages were more likely to take place among the elite or royal families; commoners or poorer people could make their own choices. King Solomon, according to biblical texts, married the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh, his old enemy. In order to protect his growing empire, Alexander the Great married the daughter of the Persian king Darius III. Beginning with the 12th-century rule of the first English king, Henry I, until the late-20th-century marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, the British monarchy arranged the unions of heirs to the throne.

Even in modern Western societies, where people assume that they choose their mates freely, parents’ choices were shown to influence who their sons and daughters married well into the mid-20th century.⁷⁰ Given the freedom to choose, do people today pick someone very different from the spouse their parents might have selected for them? Perhaps not. One experiment showed that, whether selecting a husband or wife for their offspring or for themselves, people placed three key traits at the top of a list of 18: emotional stability, a dependable character, and a pleasing disposition. It seems that secondary traits, such as good looks, mattered more if someone were choosing a mate for him or herself.⁷¹

Good looks appear to matter less when an arranged marriage is also a class alliance, as among the Kwakiutl of British Columbia.

When I was old enough to get a wife—I was about 25—my brothers looked for a girl in the same position that I and my brothers had. Without my consent, they picked a wife for me—Lagius’[s] daughter. The one I wanted was prettier than the one they chose for me, but she was in a lower position than me, so they wouldn’t let me marry her.⁷²

Arranged marriages are becoming less common in many places, and couples are beginning to have more a voice in selecting their marriage partners. Marriages were still arranged, for example, on the Pacific island of Rotuma in 1960, and the bride and groom would sometimes not meet until the wedding day. A Rotuma wedding ceremony may be much the same today as it was then, but couples are now allowed to “go out” and have a say about whom they wish to marry.⁷³ In a small Moroccan town, arranged marriages are still the norm, although a young man may ask his mother to make a marriage offer to a particular girl’s parents, who may then ask her whether she wants to accept the marriage offer. But dating is still not acceptable, so getting acquainted is hard to arrange.⁷⁴