Super late to the party, but I'ma add my story because my wife and I are both (very) white Americans, born and raised, and from looking at some of the top comments here, that's not at all typical.
Super ridiculously short abridge version is I want to get married, but didn't know any one and to hell with dating because any women I was going to get along with was more than likely taken a long time ago and certainly didn't exist in the part of the world I was in at the time, so I took advantage of one of the weekly times my mother asked me if I had "met anyone" to tell her to find me a women to marry. She's crazy enough that she didn't even need any convincing (to my slight surprise--I had a whole thesis prepared to convince her with) and began asking people she trusted if they knew anyone. Couple weeks later a long time friend of our family is telling me about this girl my age she knows and thinks that honestly, we're probably about perfect for each other as two people can reasonably expect to get. So I agree to her informing the girl (the friend of our family was also a long time friend of the girl's) who is quite taken aback at the idea of getting the message of basically "hey here's this random guy who's looking for a wife, I think you two would make a good couple, what do you think?", but she decides to cautiously "be friends" and see where this goes. 4 weeks later we had exchanged over 10,000 Facebook messages, and two weeks after that we knew we were going to get married. wedding happened 11 months after we were made aware of each other's existence.
As for the being married part, it's fantastic! She's an amazing women and we get along really well to the point I'm pretty sure we were made for each other. We have some disagreements every so often like every couple, but we thoroughly enjoy having each other.
We had only been around each other for a week and a half before our wedding (long distance relationship), but our love for each other has only grown in the three years we've been married, and that's a major point for why I'm an advocate for arranged marriages like this: we decided to get married because we got along and made good friends, not because "we were in love", and because of that our marriage is based off of our friendship and not off of the emotional type of love which is prone to grow and wane depending on the day/mood/recent events/stars aligning/whatever, so our relationship is extremely stable. That's not to say we don't have the emotional kind of love for each other (we do, and it's only grown more the longer we've been married), just that that is not the *foundation* for our marriage.
Super ridiculously short abridge version is I want to get married, but didn't know any one and to hell with dating because any women I was going to get along with was more than likely taken a long time ago and certainly didn't exist in the part of the world I was in at the time, so I took advantage of one of the weekly times my mother asked me if I had "met anyone" to tell her to find me a women to marry. She's crazy enough that she didn't even need any convincing (to my slight surprise--I had a whole thesis prepared to convince her with) and began asking people she trusted if they knew anyone. Couple weeks later a long time friend of our family is telling me about this girl my age she knows and thinks that honestly, we're probably about perfect for each other as two people can reasonably expect to get. So I agree to her informing the girl (the friend of our family was also a long time friend of the girl's) who is quite taken aback at the idea of getting the message of basically "hey here's this random guy who's looking for a wife, I think you two would make a good couple, what do you think?", but she decides to cautiously "be friends" and see where this goes. 4 weeks later we had exchanged over 10,000 Facebook messages, and two weeks after that we knew we were going to get married. wedding happened 11 months after we were made aware of each other's existence.
As for the being married part, it's fantastic! She's an amazing women and we get along really well to the point I'm pretty sure we were made for each other. We have some disagreements every so often like every couple, but we thoroughly enjoy having each other.
We had only been around each other for a week and a half before our wedding (long distance relationship), but our love for each other has only grown in the three years we've been married, and that's a major point for why I'm an advocate for arranged marriages like this: we decided to get married because we got along and made good friends, not because "we were in love", and because of that our marriage is based off of our friendship and not off of the emotional type of love which is prone to grow and wane depending on the day/mood/recent events/stars aligning/whatever, so our relationship is extremely stable. That's not to say we don't have the emotional kind of love for each other (we do, and it's only grown more the longer we've been married), just that that is not the *foundation* for our marriage.