Since my second TEDx talk was picked up by TED.com in New York and put on their website last week, it’s received a lot of comments specifically around my research into the “modern arranged marriage”. These are studies of marriages, typically amongst Indians, in California, where each partner has the opportunity to veto the marriage if they are not happy with the partner selected for them.

I went on to explore what it might be about an arranged marriage that leads to higher levels of marital satisfaction by 10 years into the marriage compared to romantic love marriages. Against each of the commonly used parameters, the modern arranged marriages outperformed, sometimes by a big margin, love marriages. I was particularly fascinated by the finding that greater involvement by each partner in partner selection did not improve marital satisfaction scores some years down the track.

To be very clear, I am not suggesting that we should return to arranged marriages – despite some of the comments, but there is no doubt they have much to teach us about the way we manage expectations going into a marriage. As I discuss in the talk, there are aspects of a love marriage, and romantic love, that I believe actually contribute to divorce down the track.

For only 5% of recorded history has romantic love been the basis of marriage. This is an experiment that we are in the very early stages of, and given the falling rates of both marriage and having children – and the increasing number of single-parent and blended families – we still have a lot to learn.