Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Will there be a time when the terms “marriage” and “love marriage” will be synonymous in India?  Can I rely on meeting someone, spending time with her, falling in love, and getting married?  I sure hope that is a possibility.  I hope I am not deluding myself.  I prefer meeting a girl outside of an arranged marriage scenario.  This is mostly due to a desire to get to know someone before rather than after marriage although I could do the latter if I had to.  The other very practial issue, though of fluctuating importance, is that I am realizing with the extended family I interact with, it may not be possible to meet the kind of girl I would like to meet.  They simply may not be able to introduce me to her.

Most of my extended family has a circle that is different than who I am and who I am looking for.  This circle would follow a strict definition of arranged marriages.  The decision would be based on horoscopes matching and what not.  This is not a desirable route!  Not being able to count on appropriate introductions through family or the horoscope matching process being the preferred route, I am now shifting my focus to meeting someone on my own, while being open to the occassional introduction.  As I am finding out, meeting people in a new city and that city being New Delhi is easier said than done.

As I was talking to Rita (see my post “Marriages in the New India”), I started to wonder if I my approach to finding someone on my own is the right way to find a girl.  If love marriages are not working, then why should I be seeking one out?  Rita said “you don’t know someone until you live with them”.  I know this all too well (which is another post at another time).  She also said while dating “everyone puts their best foot forward”.  I found this notion interesting.  So let me talk about that.

Why would you want to put your best foot forward when you are dating?  I can imagine doing that early on in the relationship.  However, if the dating lasts for any extended period of time, say over 9 months, and you are seeing each other a few times a week, why (or how) would you not be yourself and let the good and the bad be shown?  Why would you not show your thinking, your feelings, your attitude, your perceptions, your quirks, your pet peeves, your strengths and your weaknesses?  Isn’t this what getting to know someone means?  Isn’t this the purpose of dating?  That, of course, is still not the same as living with a person day in and day out but I think the question is still valid at least to some level.

This discussion raised the question in my mind – is there something substantially different about dating relationships in the US and in India?  Do people approach it the same?  Are the behaviors and expectations the same?  Are their day-to-day interactions the same?  Or, at a different level altogether, is there something fundamentally separate at work – are people raised in the US equipped with a different mindset than people in India that makes the practice of dating incomparable?

So am I setting myself up for a gigantic fall by wanting to date someone here?  I am different than the people who Rita is talking about.  They were born and raised here.  I was born in India and raised in the US.  As Indian as I am, this has undoubtedly affected my thinking, my outlook, and my expectations of what should happen and will happen in a relationship.  I behave differently.  I see relationships differently (if not completely, at least partially).  I may even see the whole approach to dating differently, I don’t know.  I may expect the cues to be different.

Or does none of this matter?  Is the person more important?  Is the compatibility between her and me more important than any of these cultural differences?  I believe it is more important but by no means will it be true across the board in my interactions with a girl I may date in India.  There will surely be times when the cultural differences appear in different assumed understanding of behaviors, expectations, and attitudes.  And that’s the problem I fear.  Her and my expectations may be assumedly different and neither of us may know when and how they are different.

To go back to the original issue I was discussing, if love marriages are not functioning as well as arranged marriages, then what the heck am I thinking?  Or does it not matter because I am different and so any relationship I get into won’t be the same as a relationship between two people who were raised in India.

Now, at a level not directly relevant to me, but something that does affect me because one cannot discount one’s environment, why are love marriages not working?  How many people are similar to Rita’s friends?  How many have different experiences?  How are those experiences different?

I am barely at the tip of these issues so I cannot claim to know the reason(s) why love marriages may be less successful (anecdotely and thus far in time) in India than arranged ones.  I can take educated guesses, though, combining my estimation and understanding of things along with Rita’s comments.  Discussion to be continued in my next post.