On Marriage

Because a lot of work is due this weekend, and because I blog only when I have piles of other work to be done… I thought it would be a good time to post……

I’ve made a conscious attempt not to post on marriage, I have to look back ;but I’m quite sure I haven’t posted, I post on love often ,yea, but not marriage( or rather the state of possible impending marriage ), the reasons being :
1) It’s the single most depressing topic I think I can blog about.
2) So many other folks I know have written much better about it than I possibly could…

Anyway ever since I graduated from under grad , the topic of marriage was always ominously looming , but I think I fully got into all this matrimonial ickyness only recently , maybe I’m in the race too late, but that’s totally my fault because I wasn’t open to getting married till about six months ago, and I think my parents were chill because I was , but when seven of my friends got hitched in the same week ,it was a bit too much to take ( you know all that peer pressure stuff).

Anyway so I was thinking, there’s so much pressure to get married , not so much from my parents , but we get it on all sides from family and friends .

Let me clear at the outset that a vast majority of the marriages I know off are very happy ones ,that's precisely the problem for me as a girl , because , in the pool of eligible matches ,all the good guys are taken or Gay, but in India , even the Gay guys are taken !

I’m the first admit it’s not as if I have a long line of guys waiting outside my door waiting to get married to me!!! But all this marketing stuff really gets to me , I mean who was that who said the ratio of women to men in India was low ,sure doesn’t seem like that!!!

So what are the marketing strategies I’ve personally had to deal with in search of that “one proposal that works!!”,( as an aside isn’t it the scariest thing in the world getting married to a stranger…I mean parents do background check and all , but I’ve seen some real loons get married , poor girl!!):

1) Being able to pay heaploads of dowry, if you can do that the rest of the stuff below doesn’t matter .

2) I don’t know what happened to chivalry, it certainly is dead amongst some Indian men , I mean when my parents ask if a certain guy who they’ve passed on my number to, who I’m not extremely interested in but my parents are fixated on, has called and I tell them he hasn’t ,they suggest that maybe I should email him, suggesting that the guys mum says that “He’s shy and cant really call up girls” ..well first of all I certainly don’t buy that , and second of all, “OK Aunty ,your son is shy, even I am shy”, I don’t know who the onus goes to in our supposed “male dominated society”, to make that call ..ofcourse it is another thing if he doesn’t want to call…


3) I don’t have much of a past, but it seems having one certainly brings down your chances of getting married , I don’t know when India will reach a point where you marry a person for who they are and not for what you think is their lack of life experiences, of course if you satisfy the dowry criteria all this really doesn’t matter, (seriously dowry, the fact that parents have to save their entire lives to marry of their daughters , I really don’t wonder why the status of women is what it is .)

4) See I’m a traditionalist , I don’t use the internet to date guys , I prefer to meet them or use traditional sources, so when people who personally haven’t used the internet to marry off their kids suggest that I should use the internet, I get more than a little irritated , why didn’t they start the revolution and marry off their kids that way?


5) I don’t know how guys can scope out so many girls , like they are buying a car or something ..this is what makes me sad , I mean really sad , like literally my heart is weeping, because in essence the same thing is going to happen to me ….so I hear of this guy , that after rejecting a dozen or so girls because she was (insert suitable adjective) too ( short, tall, dark ,fair , fat , thin , uneducated, educated , fast, slow, astrologically incompatible…..), the guy sees me fit for consideration, at the end of this ploy to promote a guys “popularity” , should I be happy for being bestowed such an honor , feel bad for the girls who have a total strangers sympathy for not getting married to some one, or feel like punching the said guy in the face!!!


And in the end what is all this for ???

Even after people get married they’re happy 95% of the time but for 5% of the time the keep groaning for the rest off their lives over there “fate” , all this lamenting seriously puts me off marriage all together…..who told them to get married in the first place , no way I want to end up like that, people should hold some responsibility for how their lives are!!!

I guess the problem lies because we Indians are conditioned to believe that marriage is the end of all your problems , the way I see it , I have my own set of problems , a guy has his, if we get married that just doubles the number of problems in life , unless you have something strong to pull you through all this , it’s a bad situation to get into..

Well that’s my analysis so far, more as I get further into the process .I’m 'for' marriage no one wants to be alone….. but i'm also for being happily single forever if the other option was to get married to a totally wrong person.Gosh these problems are so uniquely indian , my Kiwi friends would probably think i'm mad for even considering these things, i'm not saying Alabama, because they are more tradional and "Indianlike" to some extent in the South.


To quote something my nineteen year old girl cousin posted in an Orkut forum:
" in desperate need of "decent,intellectually stimulating, non conservative!!! "enter community/caste name "!.. d only ---- guys i know hwo can keep up a good interesting ,, stimulatin n witty conversation in normal ENGLISH(no corny one liners pls) besides being decently good lookin( yes ,, ill admit .. i am a lilllll superficial..hehe) are my own cusin brothers!!!! anyone here or anywhere! who cud prove me worng???"

Not entirely true..but not entirely false either.....


I know lots of people who have it good , God bless them!!Their arranged marriage was the best thing that happened to them , but I’m sure many people have to go through this irritating stuff as well …

I’ve read that chick based blogs are the least frequently read, and I guess I do a lot of male bashing , hopefully should post more positive stuff later!!!

Recommended reading :These posts by Meghna:
Horoscopes
Holy Matrimony