Arranged marriages happier, suggests judge

ARRANGED marriages could make people happier than marrying for love because they remove the pressure to find the “perfect” partner before settling down, a former High Court family judge said.

Sir Paul Coleridge, founder of the Marriage Foundation think tank, said he had come to the “truly startling” conclusion based on findings from a study suggesting that British Muslim women are more likely to be happily married than those from other backgrounds.

The research used data from the Millennium Cohort study, which contains details of 15,000 mothers who had children at the turn of the century. It found 45 per cent of mothers from a Pakistani or Bangladeshi background said they were “very happy” compared with 34 per cent of “white” mothers. Sir Paul said: “Muslims in arranged marriages enter marriage without artificial and unreal ‘celebrity’ expectations.”