Finished products, please.
As the more perceptive among you might already know, the week before last I wrote about unambitious boys. That post led to some interesting conversations, which I am going to synthesise for this one.
Training
Traditionally, men have married "finished products" while women have married for "potential". The theory goes that every woman picks her man based on her perception of "how she can improve him", and mould him, or "train" him to be the best husband for her.
Last weekend I had a great chat with my friend, Urvashi. I mentioned to her about how my husband had been a bit apprehensive when I moved to another country. He was worried that I’d fall in love with someone else, and leave him. I assured him that I wasn’t going to throw away 4 years of training him, as sunk cost.
Now, I'm not saying that the training has actually paid off (it’s been 10 years), or that he has lived up to the potential that I saw in him when we got married. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to “improve” him.
I constantly believe that all his quirks are a phase, and that I can train him to get rid of them and become the man that I still believe he can become.
As research for this piece, I asked him this morning…
P: Hey, why do you think I nag you or tell you what to do with your life?
K: I like you for who you are but you like me for who you can make me.
P: I am sorry I came with a pretty face.
K: which isn’t changing for the better either, you know.
P: So, I guess we’re even?
P: No, wait. I married you for potential. You weren’t even good to to begin with.K: Haha, that’s your f*ck up, not my problem.
P: Sigh.
And I'm not alone here.
I know many wives who think like this, even if they don’t vocalize their thoughts. This may also be one reason why it is rather common for women to nag their husbands, but seldom the other way round.
Men and women look for different things in their partners (OK I'm generalising here, but this applies to most people).
What we look for
A woman wants a man who is well-educated, well-settled, ambitious, but risk averse, takes initiative, but encourages women to have equal opportunities, is independent thinking, but consults the partner in all major decisions, is charming, but loyal, looks good, but doesn’t care about a woman’s looks yada yada yada.
A man on the other hand, wants a woman who looks pretty, and who cares to like him back (this latter constraint puts a limit on how pretty a woman he can get - remember we are in a matching market here).
Notice how long each list is. The length of the woman's wants means that it is next to impossible to find someone who satisfies each of those criteria, is single AND likes the woman back.
Hence, over generations, women have settled for evaluating men for their potential rather than current capabilities.
It's OK if the man is not well-settled if he shows the potential (based on his degrees or whatever) to be well-settled at a future point in time.
It is OK if a man is not risk-averse but can be made to be one (think about the dad in the movie, Paddington).
It is OK if the man doesn't yet encourage the woman to have equal opportunities but can be suitably incentivised (or "trained) to be so.
And so on.
So what's different today?
Witness the twitter reactions to Sima Aunty's exhortations to her clients to "compromise" - it was largely women who were triggered by these exhortations.
If women could break barriers to realize their potential, what stops a man from being good husband material? Independent women who are doing well in their careers today believe that they have earned the right to not want to compromise (they damn right have), and one way in which they will execute on that is to marry a man NOT for his potential but for who he is (if this were the 90s I could have cracked a bad joke about the man's Kinetic, but never mind).
While every woman has every right to want what she wants, what people in the market for relationships need to remember is that they operate in a matching market - it is no use liking someone if that person doesn't like you back. And no - liking you back isn't something that can be "trained".
What is potential?
While marrying based on potential is all good, some women (like myself) make the mistake of evaluating potential solely based on the man's education, and the "institutes of national importance" that he studied in.
What we fail to account for when we mistake education for potential is that some education is possible only at the cost of significant sacrifices in terms of social life.
Think about someone preparing for highly competitive undergrads - they spend the better part of standards XI and XII (prime age for starting the process of finding partners) buried in their books.
If their preparation for the highly competitive undergrads is successful, it means four more years in a largely male environment at the end of which they are pretty much incapable of marrying a woman.
In other words, by the time these men come to the arranged marriage market, they might show significant potential on professional grounds, but little on the emotional front.
Investing in these men, in some ways, is like making an early stage angel investment (except that you are the only person investing and you get a pretty large stake - at a high price).
If it pays off (or you are able to train him), the pay off is spectacular. In case it doesn't (their lack of social and emotional skills being a much higher barrier than you had imagined), it can lead to you questioning your decision-making every other day.
In other words, you should go for angel investment if and only if you have high self-esteem, an appetite for risk, confidence to influence and persistence to see through the pay-off.
Investing for potential
Based on people I've encountered in the last few months, I find this massive gap between what women want and what they eventually get, and this makes them unhappy.
One simple solution I'm proposing here is to go traditional - and trade based on potential rather than on how the person is now. Look for the basics (alignment on the type of relationship you both want to build), and the ability to get trained. Remember that the more you deliberate this decision, the worse the market.
And no, men are not going to be the ones marrying for potential - all they need is to be physically attracted to you (or at least to begin with), and it is only in the very rare case that this can "improve" over time.
Because you see, age is a bitch.
Sneak Peak into what I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: Now that Dinner Club’s getting over, I am back to reading again.
Confronting Race, Religion and Her Heart: I love both reading and listening to Modern love. The illustrations by Brian Rea are so comforting, and so are the voices of both the host at NPR, Meghna Chakraborty and her guests who read the letters.
How being heartbroken was the best thing to ever happened to me: Grief is a strange thing. It makes you weaker, yet stronger all at once.