All marriages are “arranged” by someone, so I don’t understand what you are saying. You wish your parents told you who to marry? As far as an eye towards financial and social stability, I don’t know anybody that doesn’t want financial and social stability, but they definitely should not be the grounds of receiving the sacrament of Holy Matrimony.
I would first note that “arranged marriage” doesn’t necessarily mean that the parents tell somebody who to marry, especially in this day and age. The people I know who entered such marriages had the ability to say “no”, especially given that they were in their late 20s or early 30s at the time this was happening. The “arrangement” was sort of like a matching service screening, only conducted by family members or matchmakers rather than an online service. They got to meet their future spouse beforehand, spend time and decide whether they were happy with the arrangement - in both cases I’ve seen, they were happy and unless you knew these people’s situation you would not see their marriages as any different from others, as by the time the wedding rolled around, they were in quite a romantic mood about each other.
As somebody else said, “arranged marriages” were the cultural norm, not only for Christians but for just about every culture, for thousands of years. It’s only in the last couple hundred years that marriage in Western culture shifted towards a “companionate” model where you went out and looked for your soulmate/ romantic love/ companion, rather than first looking to see whether the person would be a suitable match from a social, economic and child-rearing standpoint and only then maybe considering your romantic feelings. This at least made sure that people thought about things like whether their partner was stable, responsible, and could provide for or care for children.
It’s true the divorce rate used to be lower in the days of arranged marriages, but i think that was partly due to the difficulty of getting divorces, the social stigma associated with them, and the fact that a divorced woman, and possibly her children, might have great difficulty in supporting themselves financially unless she came from a wealthy family who could step in and help her. Still, it might have also been partly due to more emphasis on shared values and stability, and less emphasis on finding your “soulmate”, which can cause you to divorce just because you’ve decided your spouse isn’t your “soulmate” or somebody else makes a better “soulmate”. The bottom line is, if you’re in a long marriage, your spouse is probably not going to be 100 percent in tune with your emotions 100 percent of the time and vice versa, so you better have some shared commitment to a marriage beyond “soul mates” or you will not have any motivation to work through difficult times when you’re not quite on the same page.
This…I’m fully aware of. My question was also did you pray for your soulmate…or if you prefer not to use that word, your spouse beforehand and what was the outcome