I had one of those big-tech team dinners. The conversation turned to how people met their partners. A few of my Indian coworkers talked about arranged marriage, family involvement, and how much more normal it is in India for marriage to be treated as a family matter and not just a private romantic choice. That part is fine, different cultures and all. It was interesting to see their perspective, even though I wouldn't share it. The problem started when one of them stopped describing the custom and started saying that it's better than "what they do here". He said arranged marriage was better than what we do in the West because Western relationships fail all the time and people divorce all the time. By the end the message was obvious: your system is not good, while our works. The team is majority Indian, and although only 3 were mentioning that the rest were nodding silently.
So I pushed back. I said Europe also had long periods where marriage was shaped heavily by family, property, class, and communal pressure, and it moved away from that partly because consent and individual choice came to matter more morally. I also said that low divorce proves very little by itself if divorce is socially radioactive, especially for women. If leaving a bad marriage means family cutoff, humiliation, or economic free fall, of course fewer of them leave.
The mood changed immediately. Suddenly I was the one being disrespectful. Suddenly I was judging another culture. The same people who had no problem using divorce rates to criticize Western relationships treated returned criticism as if it violated a different rule. That is what stayed with me afterward. I do not think the real issue was that I criticized arranged marriage. The issue was that I did it back.
There is a basic distinction here that people blur when it helps them. Describing a custom is one thing. Claiming moral superiority on the basis of that custom is another. Once you say your system is better because our system produces more divorce, you get into actual facts and you have to be open to other people get to ask what your cleaner numbers are actually measuring.
That is why low divorce is such a bad moral shortcut. A low divorce rate can reflect good things. Stronger family support. More seriousness about commitment. More pressure to work through ordinary conflict instead of treating every problem as a reason to leave. Fine. It can also reflect shame, dependence, fear, and a much narrower idea of what counts as intolerable. I'm sure Sharia countries have the lowest divorce rates in the planet.
If you want to compare marriage cultures honestly, you cannot just ask how many people stay married. You have to ask how free they were to enter the marriage, how free they were to refuse it, and how free they are to leave it.
Maybe I'm just being over-sensitive lately because I'm realizing that in the past 3 years most of my team has turned Indian. I used to love the culture and be curious about it, but little by little all the other nationalities in my workplace have dissapeared (including Americans) and moved to India or Indian H1B engineers. I wrote on that some days ago.
It revealed a one-way permission structure inside elite pluralist spaces. Criticizing Western norms is treated ok, it's expected. American culture in particular is highly critical of itself (and that makes us great). Criticizing non-Western norms, even in direct reply, suddenly looks like racism, xenophobia or whatever. That is not fair. That is just one side getting to judge while the other one is expected to smile and take it.
I may have been too blunt at the table. Fine. Work settings punish bluntness. I can concede that. What I do not concede is the underlying rule. If someone wants to use divorce rates to tell me his marriage culture is better than mine, I get to ask what women pay for that number, what dissent costs inside that system, and how much of its stability comes from health rather than constrained exit. Cultural criticism only works if it goes both ways.