You might need to sit down for this one. In Cambodia, people happily and routinely agree to arranged marriages.

We had a guide, a 33-year-old man, who was still living at home with his parents while he saved the dowry he needed to secure his 23-year-old bride that his parents had chosen for him.

It was going to take him three years or more to put the dowry together.

He was a well-educated, mature and experienced Buddhist adult male who described these circumstances to us calmly and with the awareness that we were shocked. Maybe it was when my jaw hit his shoe.

Apart from thinking arranged marriages were of centuries ago and of traditional religions only, I always assumed that they affected very young people — teenage brides and grooms.

Adults in a free world going along with mum and dad's choice seemed, er, foreign to me.

As I grilled the man with question after question, of course I wondered whether it was such a bad idea. Might be more successful than my marriage. Might work out better than the Australian divorce rate of more than one in three.

But what if it doesn't? What if he just doesn't fancy her? Or her him? I wondered how important that was as I believe successful marriages are based on shared values and aspirations. But mutual fancying has to at least be a small factor of success, surely.