Rupa Gawle, NY
In this day and age we ABCDs (American Bred/Born Confident Desis) pride ourselves in our choices and the home runs we hit with the curveballs life throws us. We take pride in our flashy jobs, cars, MBAs, condos, stock portfolios, social lives, high flying lifestyles etc etc. Yet, many of us can't boast about making the choice of a life partner on our own. This incredible task is still left to Mommy and Daddy.
I don't get it. Lately it seems that many people are going back to either India or their "home-states" to marry someone their mom and dad have picked for them. While I must admit it's usually guys who'll go for that option I know a few loony bin female friends that have opted to go the "arranged marriage" route. I can't say I understand or relate to it but it scares the bejesus out of me. It scares me to think that one can commit oneself, overnight, to another person emotionally, mentally and physically without knowing much about that person.
I just don't understand how these seasoned players of life, who are so cut throat when it comes to their personal lives and professions, cannot make such a major life decision on their own. Is this the ultimate cry for the need to break the umbilical cord? After several friends started dropping like flies I decided to probe this a bit. It piqued my curiosity.
One friend, who I'll call Raj, is a successful ophthalmologist in his first year of private practice. He just bought his own house, lives alone, drives a loud Range Rover and has dated the crème de la crème of women. He's decent looking, smart, educated, successful and I'm unaware of any shortcomings he may have. After a recent visit to the west coast he came back engaged to someone he met for two days. I was floored. Was she gorgeous? Had he slept with her? What what? I couldn't figure it out. I knew him and it didn't add up at all. She was a very nice girl from what he said and her beauty didn't blow him away, but he thought it was "time". I didn't buy it because it sounded like hogwash.
I found out, after much prodding, that his parents had put an awful lot of pressure on him. He'd been feeling it for months and while I knew he was meeting people his parents were setting him up with, I had no clue that he was under such intense duress. He felt cornered and the numerous reasons used were….'We made you a doctor...now that you are settled it's time you bring a wife and make us happy', 'We are getting old, why are you putting us through so much stress and not allowing us the benefits of having a daughter-in-law', 'We want to see grandchildren before we die and our days are numbered'. I was a little tickled. He actually fell for this emotional blackmail? I saw through it so why couldn't he? He said he did, yet he felt guilty. He said he felt inadequate as a son and felt the need to make them happy. The whole concept of marrying someone to make a third party happy doesn't sit too well with me. What about the repercussions?
I have another friend; we'll call him Jay, who is freshly divorced. He married a girl to make his parents happy. Over the 7 months he was married they both learnt that they were incompatible. They were both pressured into it and while neither had a gun to his/her head, they married each other with the "end of the road" concept. Neither of them was happy and in the long run realized that it was a mistake to get married. The marriage turned sour and they ended up divorced. His parents were devastated. He resented them, didn't even want to talk to them or deal with them.
That annoyed me no end. "Why are you blaming your parents for the choices you made?" I asked him. He was so angry with me for not understanding. "Try living in my shoes over the past couple of years and know what it's like." He was apparently put through vehement coercion everyday and all sorts of emotional blackmail with mom crying and dad threatening a heart attack. So while he wasn't dating anyone nor had any prospect of his own in the background, he just gave in to his parent's wishes and got married to whomever they picked.
Another friend (we'll call her Neela) couldn't convince her parents to let her marry the man of her choice and after her mother had a stroke and her father tried to blame her for it, she agreed to marry someone they selected. The guy was nice and came from a nice family. She moved to Chicago after getting married and for a while we lost touch. One day, some four months later, I decided to give her a buzz to see how she was doing. I reached a very agitated mother-in-law who wanted to know if all the girls from NY were "like that"! I was puzzled and politely excused myself off the phone. I made a bunch of phone calls and finally tracked her down staying at her aunt's in NY. I was so confused. Why wasn't she at her parents? I met her over coffee where she explained to me in tears what a difficult time she had with her in-laws and her husband and how she felt stifled and couldn't work around it. She had come back home and her parents had refused to take her in, instructing her to go back home to her husband and make it work because it wasn't like he was "hitting her or abusing her". I didn't understand. Was getting hit the only criteria for a woman to walk away from a man? Why do parents behave this way? I felt so sad for her. She was even more sad…not on the breaking up of her marriage but on the lack of support she got from her parents who told her that she was being flaky and not working hard enough on her marriage.
I know of at least four divorces over the past year that came about as a result of "forced" marriages. I don't need a statistical analysis from the government or a study by some university to stand up and take notice of so many marriages breaking up among young Indians. Marriages that were "forced" in the name of "obligation". That word sounds harsh. I find it hard to believe that these professional and hard-core adult New Yorkers like me blame their problems on their parents. How can something like a "bad marriage" be blamed on parents? I find it shameful. I make all my decisions. Sometimes they are good decisions and sometimes they are wrong ones. I couldn't blame my parents for it. Yeah sure, they can be difficult but I make the ultimate decisions of life. Whatever choices I make I can only blame or congratulate myself. Isn't it rather cowardly to blame your parents for the seven "feres" we take? Why are then so many resentful children lately, blaming their parents for their failed marriages? So many 20-something divorcees to be seen lately. Not to say that marriages entered into on their own don't break up, but so many "arrangements" are falling apart and it makes me sad. Is the sad statistic of '50% of marriages end in divorce' now applicable to Indian marriages as well? Did we ever think such an old sacred institution that boasted of successful marriages would get so tainted?
For a lot of guys I've questioned, who've had failed marriages or who opted for marrying someone of their parents choice it came down to…'my parents have to live with this person day in and day out…if I don't marry someone that they like, the rest of their life would be very miserable not to mention the unfairness to the woman I'd marry. It's a mind game. There is almost an "upper hand" power position when it comes to parents and wife. If the parents pick the wife then they will always have the upper hand and if the wife and husband pick each other, without the parents consent, the wife will somehow have the upper hand and hence power. What happened to good old-fashioned love? Yeah I know it's not an Indian concept but for God's sake, we aren't exactly still in India! Why do these people who date and mate with everyone suddenly grow a conscience and go marry some unsuspecting person? Isn't that pretentious and deceptive?
Our parents who raise us with good values and lessons in culture and love, who drive us to soccer practice, send us to the best colleges and encourage us to take up the best professions are the same parents who can't let us decide on our own who our life partner should be? What happened to trust? What happened to wanting our happiness? What happened to treating their children like adults? I dream of getting married some day. Hopefully to a man I'd be in love with. It makes me sad when I hear such stories. No one should be forced into anything, especially something as sacred as marriage. I used to think these stories only happened in India. Now we hear about them here…hitting us right at home.