Why Indian Parents Are Done Taking the Blame for Failed Arranged Marriages

Blame is comforting - it gives heartbreak a neat address to mail its regrets to. For generations, when an arranged marriage broke apart, the blame always knocked first on the parents’ door. They forced it. They didn’t care about compatibility. They valued society over happiness. But under the surface of this old story is a quieter truth that many choose not to see: Indian parents didn’t design this system, they inherited it — and now they’re being asked to carry its failures alone.

Today’s parents are done shouldering that guilt in silence. They know what they did, what they didn’t, and how the world changed while they tried to keep the roof from collapsing. Maybe the real question now isn’t who ruined whose life - but what we’ve all been avoiding when we keep pointing fingers backward.
Before dating apps, romantic love, and relationship coaches, there was one manual: find a good family. Keep the bloodline clean, the horoscopes aligned, the family names untarnished. For our parents’ generation, a marriage wasn’t just two people — it was a pact between legacies. Divorce was an unthinkable shame. Emotional fulfillment? That was an indulgence people didn’t even have the language for. In that world, they did what worked for centuries — or so they thought. But the blueprint aged badly, because the world rewrote the rules of happiness faster than tradition could catch up.
It’s easy to say, “They should have known how miserable I was.” But did we tell them? Indian families have mastered the art of pretending. You learn to smile for the relatives, hide the fights, bury betrayal under compromise. Parents often only see the polished wedding photos and the occasional polite lie: “We’re fine.” Meanwhile, the rot grows in secret. Many parents find out too late - by then, the wounds are septic. They’re expected to fix what they were never shown. Maybe the real villain here isn’t who chose the partner - but the culture that taught everyone to keep quiet when it mattered most.
The rise of love marriages was supposed to end the arranged marriage blame game. If you choose your own partner, your life should be perfect, right? Yet, parents now watch love marriages fall apart for the same reasons: emotional neglect, fragile egos, mental health struggles, money wars. Some families even whisper: “At least when we arranged it, we took responsibility. Now they choose, but we’re blamed anyway for how they turned out.” Love or arranged — the real test has always been whether two people can sit in the fire of marriage when it stops feeling like a festival.
It’s not fair to paint all Indian parents as rigid gatekeepers of outdated rules. Many have bent so far they’ve broken ties with judgmental relatives just to let their children marry outside caste, religion, or nationality. They’ve sat with uncomfortable truths, letting their children divorce when necessary, supporting them through the social whispers. They’ve learned to say, “Your choice is yours, but make it carefully.” They still believe in family, but they’ve stopped pretending they can guarantee its future. If the old model was control, the new one is cautious permission — with the wisdom to know that permission isn’t protection from pain.
It’s comforting to say, “If my parents hadn’t arranged this marriage, my life would be perfect.” But would it? Or would the same patterns - poor communication, unhealed wounds, unrealistic expectations — play out with any partner? The truth is, the marriage that fails us is often the mirror that shows us who we really are. Blame is the wall that stops us from looking inward. Accountability is the bridge. A generation that wants freedom to choose must also accept the mess that freedom brings. Maybe it’s time to drop the pitchforks and ask better questions: “What did I miss about myself? What did I ignore in my partner? Why didn’t I speak up sooner?”
Indian parents are not blameless saints. Many did push, manipulate, or guilt-trip. But they also fed generations who never had to think about survival the way they did. They held families together when divorce meant social death. They played by rules they didn’t write, and now they’re rewriting them - awkwardly, imperfectly, but with more openness than they ever had before.

Maybe the real freedom for us is this: stop looking back to assign blame and start looking forward to build something better. If we want marriages that last, we have to grow the emotional vocabulary our parents never had. We have to speak up when it hurts. We have to leave when we must - without shame. And we have to stop asking the old generation to carry the weight of mistakes we’re still repeating, just in different clothes.

Blame is easy. Healing is harder. But one thing’s clear — the blame game ends when we choose to take responsibility for what we create, who we stay with, and when we finally decide to walk away.