Totally agree with Dachlostar...

I think one important thing to remember about the concept of "Arranged Marriage" is that a lot of the process if fuelled by cultural customs. My in laws are Pakistani, and were surprised that my Husband did not want to have an arranged marriage. Despite many meetings with potential brides to be, he felt that he wanted to meet a girl on his own accord. At the same time, neither of us ever wanted to spend years dating until we met The One. We both found eachother through a Muslim marriage website. The empowering thing for me, like Chloe mentioned, was that I met my husband and knew that it was his intention to find someone for marriage. We spoke on the phone for a few weeks getting to know what either of us wanted from marriage, and then we met up on our own (in Public) and knew that from the months of conversations we had that we wanted to marry. We kind of like to think that we arranged our own marriage. Although the process of getting to know eachother was almost business meeting like, we both made the effort to be thorough and open with eachother about our beliefs, morals and expectations before we both agreed to marry. Our meetings were always in Cafes and it was a very friendly manner, but once we got engaged and got prepared for the wedding, we started letting ourselves to have feelings for one another, within Islamic boundaries. Now we are happily married and very much in love - and I think our process of getting to know eachother and being completely honest and upfront about our intentions really helped us get where we are now.

We are proud to say we are not the product of "conventional" arranged marriage, nor are we the product of "conventional" western dating... we made sure we were within the religious boundaries of Islam (ie. No physical touching / sexual overtones before marriage, got our families involved etc) and then did it our own way!