Allendorf and Pandian’s analysis of the India Human Development Survey — covering marriages from the 1970s through the 2000s — documents that purely parental-arranged marriages remain common (31% of recent marriages) but are no longer the dominant form. About 62.6% of modern Indian marriages are now “joint-arranged,” where parents and the adult child decide together. That paper measures only the structure of marriage formation, not how people feel about it: the authors note explicitly that they have no data on women’s emotions about their marriage. The closest direct evidence is Madathil and Benshoff’s three-group comparison, which found that arranged marriages in India and choice marriages in the United States “fell along equal levels of satisfaction and happiness” — arranged marriage shows no elevated dissatisfaction relative to choice marriage. The action-side 20% is therefore not a regret rate but a directional dissatisfaction-tail proxy, read as a ceiling: validated-scale surveys of married Indians (Chauhan and Sekher’s rural Uttar Pradesh sample) place the low-satisfaction band between roughly 8.5% and 50% depending on education, with no national regret figure available.
The inaction side reflects a different kind of cost — social rather than interpersonal. Pew Research Center’s 2021 nationally representative survey of India found that 64% of Indians say it is “very important” to stop women in their community from marrying outside their caste, with 62% saying the same for men. Even among college-educated Indians, roughly half hold this position. For the small share of couples who choose their own partners — particularly across caste or religious lines — this near-majority opposition translates into concrete social costs: family estrangement, community sanctions, and loss of kinship support networks. The inaction-side 26% proxy combines the near-certain opposition facing the intercaste love-marriage minority with a partial-opposition estimate for within-caste self-chosen marriages that deviate from family expectations.
This entry is flagged proxy_only because no bilateral “do you regret your marriage type?” survey exists for India at national scale. The 20% and 26% figures are directional triangulations, not measured regret prevalence. The near-parity between the two proxies is consistent with neither marriage form reliably avoiding its characteristic cost: arranged marriages carry dissatisfaction risk concentrated among low-agency pairings, while self-chosen marriages carry social-sanction risk concentrated among intercaste and interreligious couples. Allendorf and Pandian’s finding that joint-arranged marriages now dominate in India (62.6%) means the binary action/inaction framing applied here is a simplification — most Indian marriages sit between the two poles modeled.