Disclaimer: If you are a commodity in the marriage market, you can give this edition a pass. Only if you believe you are remotely interesting and have particular partner preferences, read on…
I was supposed to send out this newsletter yesterday, butI’ve been down with “check-list” fever all week and I can barely move. Those of you whose hobbies include surfing matrimonial websites know exactly what I mean. But those of you who don’t, let me tell you more.
Check-list fever - It’s an epidemic - a deadly disease that’s taken over the way we view the process of finding a life partner.
It makes us build a laundry list of arbit things we want in our life partner like this:
A 22-26 year old Sindhi girl who is working, very fair, tall, upper middle class, having moderate values and living on the East coast in USA. GC preferred, but H1B is also okay. Genuine persons only please.
Does any of this tell you what kind of a relationship one might have with such a girl? No. Yet, we break down every human into these specific attributes that have very little correlation to the quality of our married lives. If these attributes live upto some even more arbit standards that are (mis)guided by our view of partnerships, then we’ll make the effort to meet someone. This has fed the way matrimonial platforms are built. Okay wait, I don’t know if it’s the other way around. Either ways, the way we think about finding ourselves a life partner is just fucked up.
Why do we think like this?
Simple answer - It’s easy. We are lazy. End of story.
Recently, I asked someone who she is. She started with her CV, then I prodded her a little bit to tell me more about herself outside of her CV. She paused. She told me two things that people tell her about her, and she relied on the city she grew up in to describe her as a third attribute. I am sure she could have done better. I am sure, I’d bulb too. You would too.
Firstly, We don’t think enough about ourselves. We’ve never had to. Even if we have to, we like to think of ourselves in terms of objective attributes - somehow makes it more honest, factual and doesn’t require defending. Sometimes, we brave relying on subjective external indicators to describe us. But the moment someone questions that, we might choose to drop it off our bio.
What’s the problem with that?
You could marry the most beautiful or the smartest person on Earth, yet you could have the most miserable relationship. So optimising for a certain type of partner doesn’t always result in an additive relationship.
A relationship is a piece of art created by two individuals at a specific time and place in their lives.
I have a story from high school. This story has meant different things to me at different points of time. Only recently, I realised how much it applies to relationships, or the way we have been conditioned to view it.
Do you guys remember, schools were usually divided into groups or houses? Maybe they still are, I don’t know. In my school, we had 4 houses, and I led one of them. It was 2004. Leaders of all four houses had been tasked with choosing a team for a poster making contest for our sports day. Two of us were artists ourselves, so this contest was right up our alley. The third house had our school’s best artist on their team, so the third leader was relieved too. The fourth leader, a very good friend, knew shit about art, and we all laughed our asses off about the miserable situation she’d been thrown into.
Over the course of the next one week, I assembled all the prize winning artists of each class in one room, we brainstormed a lot, never quite aligned on what we were going to make but we got started on the poster convinced that we would figure things out on the go. As a leader, I don’t think I assessed any skills beyond their creative abilities because I thought it was the only thing that mattered in a poster making contest.
Individually, each of us was perfectly capable of winning this, but as a group, we lacked the skills to work together on a piece of work. Four weeks later, we barely managed to finish our work in time. The story was not very different with the other two groups. Most surprisingly, the leader of the fourth group, who we had laughed at, was the one to have the last laugh as she had led her group to victory.
Back then, this story taught me about leadership. But today, when I think of how we choose our partners in the arranged marriage market, I am reminded of this story so much.
We’ve always viewed marriages as an association that is supposed to result in greater glory than what each of the individuals have ever experienced on their own. We think the recipe for assembling this greater glory is by bringing two individuals who are already fantastic on their own. We look for similar traits, complementary traits and what not to find the perfect match. We think that if we find the missing piece of our jigsaw puzzle, our life would be complete, as if this piece were an inanimate object with no ambitions of its own.
You don’t believe me?
Right, I’ll illustrate.
Just for fun, let’s imagine I had to find my current husband through the arranged marriage process, on one of these platforms. I’ll approach this in two ways-
Seek a suitable relationship: One in which there is always someone to talk about anything from bosons to bosoms, one in which we can be ourselves, one that has space for our respective families, one in which neither of us feel judged and one in which both of us feel like we can always talk and resolve things.
Now, there is no way in hell I could find this boy through any of the matrimonial sites around today unless I was willing to hunt aimlessly for years.
Seek a suitable boy: 36 year old Bangalore based Kannada Brahmin boy who studied at IIT and IIM. Today’s websites are very well equipped to throw up results with such filtering. In fact, it will throw five boys at me, but I couldn’t be certain that I’d get the type of relationship I described above from any of these five boys. Is there a chance I’d be trapped with a pyscho who’ll slowly kill me? Maybe.
Moral of the story: Follow the second approach, you have a higher probability of finding a partner sooner. But if you have any specific ideas about how you want your married life to be like, wait, even if it takes a billion years to meet someone who you might have a chance to build that life with. Seek a suitable relationship, and not a suitable boy or a girl.
So, what should we change?
We just need to evolve from thinking about the person we want to be with to the type of relationship we want to build. This forms the basis of who we’ll end up choosing.
But how can I able to?
May be stop fixating on the CV? Just maybe.
Ages ago, women were not financially independent and they were actively discouraged to be, so, their families usually sought out partners who could support the woman and her future offspring. In return, women brought good genes, household management skills and dowry. Today, this is mostly irrelevant, at least in my world. I can’t fathom why we are still obsessed with a man’s CV?
They: Girl has bachelors degree, so she wants someone with a masters degree.
Me: So what if he has one more degree than you? It’s like wanting to marry Diwakar Murthy because he has more degrees than would fit on the board.
They: Girl wants boy with min. one lakh salary per month.
Me: What if the guy makes all the money you want and is a wife beater? What are you going to do with his salary, huh?
They: Girl makes 40 lakhs, so her family wants a groom who makes more.
Me: So, would you be okay taking on more housework than him?
I can’t begin to tell you on how many levels none of this makes any sense.
There is little correlation between how much money your spouse makes and how happy you can be in your marriage.
Even if there was a significant correlation, it doesn’t imply causation.
Also, this is such a static view of someone’s life. It says nothing about one’s ambitions or potential. How in the world do we feel confident making a decision about who we want to spend the rest of our lives with based on someone’s salary at a point of time?
It feels so shortsighted to be selecting or eliminating people based on arbit and sometimes, static data points. No matter how fuckall our lives have been, we want marriage to fix everything in our lives and we all need nothing less than a happily ever after. If you are ugly, you want beautiful. If you are 5’3, you want 5’10 at least. If you are an entrepreneur, you want a VC. The list is just never-ending. Compromise and adjustment are words you won’t tolerate no? Then …
Just stop feeding the mammoth
I can’t figure out if these platforms are built to suit us or if we continue to think in filters so much that we are not open to a little bit of romance in life. Either way, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we must stop feeding the mammoth.
After 3+ months of being on some of the popular matrimonial sites, my verdict is they all suck. But wait, you already knew that. Ok no, I hate them all. Here’s primarily why:
They don’t help build trust. Trust is just fundamental to all relationships. These platforms do so little to help our already risk-averse selves.
They are outdated - Be it the irritating questions they ask you that most people from your generation would never ask or the pointless filters they have to help find the “right one”.
They haven’t simplified the process of meeting people any more than they did over 20 years ago. I still have to search, rally, tally and chat before I meet. Urrgh.
Anyway, I attempt to change things, and this is what happens…
I was trying to setup a client on a romantic cycling date in Europe. The boy, my client, was open to the idea. But the girl said, “I’d prefer to speak first before I decide to meet because we live an hour apart.” Ok, makes sense and a very practical decision I think. But whatever happened to romance, guys?
Imagine if Simran Singh rejected Raj Malhotra based on his CV or a WhatsApp conversation instead of hitching a ride with him across Switzerland, would DDLJ still be your all-time favourite movie?
Ok, I won’t judge. You don’t know if this dude is a creep. You have no trust in the platform. You don’t even know that I stand in between to vet the two parties.
I would probably do that too.