I really despise the arranged marriage culture/system. Literally everything is wrong with it.What do you think?

Well, I have always thought about this because this is the reason my personal life and so have many other people's lives have been ruined. I'm an 18 year old boy and I had a terrible home environment, especially when I was really young. My mom and dad always had issues, from the very beginning I was never really that close with my dad, although he would be affectionate towards me, I avoided him, i didn't feel comfortable, even though till that point of time he hadn't done anything wrong (in front of me), but heated, verbal arguments still happened between my mom and dad, and they both were quite cold/distant/pragmatic is how I would describe their relationship on ordinary days. In 2014 we moved to the US, and in 2016 (10 years ago), when I was 8 years old my dad brutally beat my mom in front of me and my elder sister (she was 15 at the time), he threw whatever object came at his hand (thankfully those weren't lethal) and threw at her, and even hit her repeatedly with a bat, obviously me and my sister got quite scared and screamed and cried. My mom got very impulsive and she went to the kitchen and brought a knife and gave it to him to end her life right there. He didn't do anything with the knife but I tried to intervene and I begged him to stop, he told me to move or else he would do something to me as well, but i didn't, I continued intervening. I was crying and crying, my mom saw this and dropped the knife, and she was going to call the police, and she did call, and while she was speaking on the phone he tried to grab it from her but i intervened between the both again, physically and yelled at my father to not do anything to my mother which made him push back a little and because of this she was able to complete the phone call and the police arrived within 2-3 minutes and arrested my father and took him to lock up for a night. My sister froze during this entire incident. I still remember that day vividly. It was the single biggest day in my entire life, even now. And I can never forget it.

After this incident i really started hating my father, and men in general. I still do. I am not comfortable around men at all. I'm scared by them, when i returned to India I was also bullied by my male peers, in the US I was never bullied, I felt safer and better there, so this is another reason why I don't like men, especially the Indian ones. And after this incident my mother started opening up to me about her marital problems. She vented her problems to me, this wasn't the first time he had hit her. It had happened multiple times before, even in India, and my mother didn't do anything because she was financially dependent. These things happened before I was born, so the 2016 one was the first and only time I saw this happen in front of me. He came back next morning from the police station, did nothing, went to his room, locked himself up and after a few hours he left for work, that evening he called his friends home and they spoke about this matter, i was friends with his friends' kids so I played with them and wasn't there in that conversation, so I don't know what happened but things eventually got "normal" but the verbal arguments never stopped. Eventually my mother, my sister and I came back to India in 2017 due to some reasons, though he stayed, and we lived where we used to live before moving there. But by 2021 things got so bad between them over the phone that they separated. We then lived/live with my maternal grandparents. He still lives in the US.

So the point is, my mother had an arranged marriage, obviously, she was 26 at the time of her marriage, her father pressurized her to marry, and she succumbed to it and married. When I got to know this it filled me with rage. I would never forgive my maternal grandfather for what he did and for my father for what he did. If it wasn't for my grandfather none of this would've happened. I wouldn't have been born to suffer. Arranged marriage isn't love. And no love develops after the marriage. It's all fake. Putting my own experience aside, I can still speak for the general population. The idea that love develops after marriage is deeply flawed:

This is how arranged marriages ruin lives. Especially for women and her kids.

So I would never enter an arranged marriage at all. I already have deep self esteem issues and if my partner was pressured into being with me, and didn't actually freely/truly chose me means she wouldn't have chosen me if those external pressures were not there. I won't be able to live with it. It would've been better for me and her to just not have been married. I don't want someone who didn't freely choose me. I want someone who independently, freely chose me, someone who had the full freedom to reject me without any consequences yet chose me. Arranged marriages shouldn't involve any kind of pressure, not even subtle ones. No pressure at all, literal 0%. But this doesn't happen even in marriages today, at least some subtle pressure is still there, which makes the choice pressurized rather than free, so it doesn't matter to me whether affection and love grows later or not, and like I said, i don't even consider this love or affection in the first place. It's just compromise. Love isn't compromise. I'm a very egalitarian person, I would love my partner deeply and do anything and everything for her, simply because I'm supposed to. I will fight anyone in the world for her, and I would make sure that she feels satisfied and feels that it's an equal partnership, which means I provide for her and also split domestic work evenly. I have no issues with it. I literally do most of the domestic work in my home right now like doing the dishes, cleaning, etc. All I ask for is someone who genuinely chooses me and isn't pressured into it, not even subtly. Otherwise it would break whatever's left of me, regardless of whether or not affection grows.