Shock as Woman Reveals Sad Truth Behind Marriage to Her Male Best Friend – Newsweek

A post about a woman planning to marry a gay man because he’s her “best friend” has gone viral on Reddit.

In a post shared under the username Lost-Ad6537, the 20-year-old woman said her parents have had “these family friends since immigrating to America ages ago,” and they have a 22-year-old son. “Both families had decided to marry us off to each other pretty much since my birth.”

The Redditor said: “He’s my best friend, my soulmate, and my ride or die…we’re honestly both so excited to do this.”

An August 2020 small study of 116 Bangladeshi women, published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Psychology, found that regardless of marriage type (be it arranged or “couple-initiated”), women with “greater influence over their partner selection reported higher levels of intimacy, passion, commitment and positive marital quality.”

The study said: “Results suggest that influence over partner selection is a better predictor of these outcomes than marriage type, with marriage type offering little if any information beyond that provided by perceived influence.”

A 2012 small study of arranged and love-based marriages among 58 Indian Americans in the U.S. was published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Reports.

“Love, satisfaction, and commitment appear to be common outcomes in both arranged and free choice, love-based marriages,” said Pamela Regan, one of the co-authors of the study, in a 2012 article for Psychology Today.

Regan, who is a psychology professor at Cal State Los Angeles, said it’s important to bear in mind that the marriages in this study “were contracted in the U.S. by men and women living in an urban, industrialized environment.

“The dynamics of marriage (arranged or otherwise) in other countries, in other environments, involving other people, might be very different.”

The user in the viral Reddit post said she and her fiancee (known as “M”) grew up together. He’s known he was gay since he was 11 and told her about it when he was 16 and she was 14.

She wrote that she comes “from a culture where it’s very normal for your parents to set you up with a marriage partner” and “because of our culture, M is guaranteed to be cut off, bashed and even physically hurt if he ever comes out.”

The original poster said they “always knew” they’d end up married, so they began “compr[om]ising.” They will “be the perfect couple” for their families, but she said: “We’ll lie and say I’m infertile, suffer through one wedding kiss, pursue our own relationships, and no one’s going to know.”

The Redditor wrote: “We’re not moving in together until after the wedding, but we’re honestly both so excited to do this. It sucks that it has to be this way, but at least we’re stuck together.”

Several Redditors praised the original poster’s decision, saying the marriage “sounds perfect.”

In a comment that got 4,400 upvotes, desertrat0302 said her cooking teacher from high school “married her best friend (a gay man, in the military) just so she could travel the world with her best friend. she said it was the greatest time of her life…”

PowermanFriendship wrote: “The platonic love that you guys share is better than like, a large double-digit percentage of toxic marriages out there. I wish you guys all the best, and it’s a shame to have to stay in the shadows but hopefully some day it won’t have to be that way.”

OnlyDuckkkk commented: “Yes, it really sounds perfect cause the both parties are happy with this and happiness and understanding matters the most in the relation.”

TheCowzgomooz wrote: “I think there’s nothing wrong with people getting into ‘platonic marriages’ the deep bond between the two people is usually still there, they just don’t have sex and do romantic things together, and you give each other benefits you otherwise wouldn’t have if you were ‘single.'”

Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment.

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