Make Me a Match (What Arranged Marriages Reveal About Love)

An intimate, revelatory exploration of marriage that challenges modern ideals of love, chemistry, and personal fulfillment—and asks what we can learn from partnerships built to last

“I have wondered, what is it like to fall in love, instead of grow in love? How does one know? Is love quantifiable? Is it as delicious a madness as Hollywood posits, or as quietly maternal as Saint Thomas Aquinas’s willing the good of the other?”

At seventeen, Frimet Goldberger became engaged to a man that she had met only once, in accordance with the traditions of her Hasidic Jewish community. More than twenty years later, she and her husband are still together. But over the course of their marriage, she has wrestled with questions: What would it have felt like to choose a husband for love? How does one choose a life partner entirely on their own? What actually generates compatibility and intimacy, what makes a marriage last—and does longevity matter?

Driven by both restless curiosity and a desire to better understand her own marriage, Frimet embarked on an intimate exploration of arranged unions across generations and communities. From the bustling streets of Delhi to the foothills of the Zion mountains in Utah, she traces the stories of five couples, and one hopeful romantic, whose partnerships complicate common ideas about love and autonomy.

Profound, provocative, and deeply personal, Make Me a Match brings us inside arranged marriages around the world to parse the tensions between choice and obligation, romance and pragmatism, individual desire and family expectation. The result is a nuanced, tender portrait of how people today are choosing partners, and how couples build commitment, endure disappointment, and cultivate intimacy over time. In an era of unprecedented choice, Frimet asks, can commitment itself spawn love?