
Today's New York Times Modern Love piece is swaying me to think us Westerners may need to not be so phobic of "arranged marriage."
Try it on for size. If only in our heads. (Briefly.) Before fucking and then breaking it off with whomever we've been sharing bodily fluids with for the past month.
The narrator is an Indian man, educated, software developer, who jumps through his family's arranged marriage hoops because, as he says, he is a "good boy."
His wife was the neighbor's daughter. He describes her as "cute" (cute enough, we presume). When she was presented to him he "nodded in approval" in what sounds like the same horribly unromantic vain as us Westerners when "approving" whomever we're seated next at our neighborhood bar.
So they married. Have two son. Are still together. Are they happy?
SAMEERA is emotional, quick to love and anger, while I am rational, almost nothing ever rousing my temper. She believes in instinct and gut feelings while I put my trust in statistics and probability. Would we have gotten married if we had met in the conventional Western manner and dated each other? Or would we have given up on each other and moved on, searching for the perfect “one”? I don’t know. What I am sure about is that our marriage, arranged with other considerations in mind, took us from acquaintance to love and kept us together until we realized that our differences are the yin and yang that make our relationship whole. Now we consider ourselves absolutely perfect for each other."
While, yes, this seems completely archaic at first glance--- you want me to live, marry, and procreate with that---but perhaps they're on to something. Do more options (not too unlike making one's way through a Starbucks menu) make one yearn for a day when your option was just a styrofoam cup of coffee handed to you by the man working at the deli?
We revel in our "enlightened" views of sex, dating and marriage. Not only do we condone it's sloppiness, but we relish in the using and disposing of naked bodies, errant lips and discarded phone numbers. It is a source of pride.
It's just sex, right? And we're all replaceable, no? So complicate matters?
There comes a time when you one grows tired of running through bedmates like you do $2.99 Target underwear. Not that it isn't fun to see how it all looks on (and in). A polka dot print for Monday, stripes on Thursday, maybe try something sort of lacy and avant-garde for the weekend. It's all great fun.
But when it comes to marriage, it may horrify us to learn that a small coffee and cotton panties does the trick.











