Now I don't just mean the
Barry Schwartz definition of choice or the
Journal of Consumer Research and how our selection of steak sauce at the supermarket makes us unhappy. There's a lot of studies that have refuted the gut-check belief that having more choices necessarily equates to more happiness -- as counterintuitive as that sounds.
To put a corollary in Sheik terms: are arranged marriages necessarily worse than Western ones?
Depends on what you're optimizing. While I feel almost a kind of patronizing pity and rescue instinct for the zombified woman who talks about her glorious subservience to God and "her man", I think it's a bit simplistic to assume that I necessarily have the secrets to her happiness and she does not. Often, that isn't the case.