Should love come before marriage, or the other way around? After five years in India, Miranda Kennedy was forced to rethink her western approach to relationships
In the months after I first moved to Delhi, I spent more time than I'd like to admit trawling through the marriage classifieds in the Sunday newspapers with horrified fascination. I couldn't help but feel a westerner's resistance to arranged marriage. The ads seemed unabashed, brazen; boiling marriage down to its core: a tying-together of families based on convenience, caste, religion and status.
Reading them ? "Brahmin girl, 23, from well-educated, traditional family. Pure-veg household. Girl is homely, slim and fair-skinned" ? I tried to imagine the partnership that would result. After one or two chaperoned meetings, the young couple would find themselves seated beside one another on ceremonial cushions, eyes lowered, knees carefully not touching, while their fathers negotiated the terms of the alliance, and a Hindu priest, or pujari, offered a prayer to the gods. It seemed to me to be leaving an awful lot to the gods. I tried to imagine the kind of man my mother would pick for me. It didn't seem fair not to be able to make my own mistakes.
I'd shown up in India at 27 without a job or much of a plan, other than to become a foreign correspondent. It was a goal that each day seemed to present new, unconsidered challenges ? not to mention the loneliness of living in a strange culture, the bureaucracy and the chaos of Delhi's morning smells: burning incense, the street dogs' panting sickness, the sharp tang of paan spit landing in a red stream on the cement.
I was the third generation of women in my family to set up shop on the Indian subcontinent. My mother had spent a year in Karachi with my father, soon after they married, but the first and most significant had been my great-aunt Edith, a British missionary with the Bible Churchmen's Missionary Society, who in 1930 moved to what was then called Benares and is now Varanasi. Her lack of success in preaching the Gospel to what she called "the natives" only made her more stubborn; she stayed for 36 years. To my idealistic twentysomething self, Edith seemed a symbol of everything the west had done wrong, insisting there was only one way to live. Unconsciously, I think I considered my own move an effort to compensate.
As if it wasn't enough to take responsibility for the history of colonialism in India, I had a lot personally riding on the place. I'd abandoned a full life in New York ? a job as a producer on a radio show, a boyfriend I was crazy about ? for a one-way ticket. I told myself I was propelled by an urge for adventure, but it was more than that: at some level, I thought India would help me "become" myself. For that to happen, I believed I needed to immerse myself in the culture, without being judgmental about anything: not the squat toilets, not the fact that women were advised not to leave the house alone at night in Delhi, and certainly not a centuries-old tradition like arranged marriage.
It was easier said than done and, loth as I was to admit it, I found myself to be just as opinionated as my evangelical great-aunt had been. I thought there was only one way to get to marriage, and that was through love; not the other way around, as happens so often in India. In my first few years living there, I was gripped by the desire to convert the natives: not to my religion, but to my idea of a healthy relationship ? even though it hadn't exactly worked out for me so far.
I continued to believe that Benjamin, my boyfriend at the time, was my one true love, yet I'd chosen to leave him for a different kind of romance ? that of escaping to India. We'd been together for only six months when I went away, partly out of an irrational desire to prove that I needed him less than he needed me. Benjamin was a journalist, too, but even more footloose than I was, and although our so-called relationship stretched into three of my five years in India, for most of that time we had what we euphemistically referred to as a "flexible arrangement". This allowed us to have affairs while still staying together in name. To the extent that I'd thought about our future, I suppose I believed that one day Benjamin would realise that India was, indeed, the most magical place on earth, as I kept telling him in my letters. He'd show up at my little apartment in Delhi, and that would be that. Just like in Bollywood films.
After a while, I found myself doing what I'd hoped professionally, reporting on the war in Afghanistan and the separatist movement in Sri Lanka; but even then my deepest attentions were always focused inward. I wandered around Delhi in a daze of sensation, just soaking it in: the swoony film music blasting out of chai stands; the vivid saffron and crimson of women's clothes; the sun saturating everything. I watched Bollywood films by the dozen, and it was from their choked expressions of love that I learned to speak a version of Hindi: simplistic and peppered with clich�s.
In spite of the hours I devoted to it, I didn't really get Bollywood. Song-filled and sentimental, the films almost always passed the three-hour mark, by which time I was usually bored and frustrated. They were nothing like the relentlessly self-aware Hollywood romcoms I was accustomed to. Expressions of love in Bollywood are always earnest, outsize and delivered from a swaying yellow field of mustard seed. How could it be, I'd wonder, that the heroes could swing their arms open wide and sing out their love for a girl their parents had chosen for them? How can Indians be obsessed with passionate declarations of love and yet, in real life, expect to feel it only if it follows marriage, and only then if they're lucky?
It was meeting Geeta that helped me understand. She was my neighbour ? a small, dimpled, effervescent woman my age who looked much younger. She liked to call herself "a modern girl": she worked in public relations, lived separately from her parents, drove her own car around the city and occasionally wore "westerns", as she called jeans and blouses ? all of which was unusual for a small-town girl from a traditional family. Because Geeta didn't quite fit into Delhi's cosmopolitan lifestyle, or to her parents' traditional expectations, she felt an affinity with me, the ultimate outsider. Her effort to befriend me mostly involved educating me in all things Indian.
Geeta was a Bollywood fan, but she was also willing to acknowledge that the movies tended to be "a little backwards toward women". Similarly, she considered arranged marriage "a little anti-modern" ? but it was still an Indian institution with a high success rate. The solution, according to her, was not to scrap it altogether, but to come up with a compromise ? just as contemporary Bollywood directors had. The plots of today's Hindi films may follow the same time-worn formulas, but now it is possible for heroes to kiss their heroines and for career girls not to end up spinsters every time.
For almost a decade, Geeta's parents had been afraid of just that, so they'd been setting her up with "arranged-marriage meetings". These escorted, parentally-approved blind dates are as formulaic as Bollywood romances, with the conversation pointed toward the goal: the alignment of two families. Geeta had gone on dozens of such meetings, but she always managed to find something wrong with her date. For years, she'd been saying she wanted to find a sensitive and progressive-minded guy. But, with her 30th year fast approaching, she was coming to terms with the fact that there weren't that many men around who would fit the bill, and those who did clearly weren't advertising in the Sunday papers.
Geeta needed an alternative, and she found it in a matrimonial website called shaadi.com. Named after the Hindi word for "marriage", Shaadi has become the portal for the new generation of arranged alliances. The online matrimonial industry in India now has tens of millions of registrants, most of whom are looking to strike a bargain between a pure arranged marriage and a love match. The rather ungraceful Indian English term for these alliances is a "love-cum-arranged marriage": an Indian marriage with western influences. In theory, the couple can have as much input into the process as their parents do.
Geeta's parents had created her online profile and her father went through the invitations, sending notes to potential suitors himself. But Geeta was involved in the process in a way that has never before been possible in India: she could click through photos and instant-message men she liked. Online courtship allowed Geeta to maintain her identity as a modern woman who sometimes wore miniskirts, even while defending herself as a traditional girl who believed her parents should take the lead in the biggest decision of her life. She devoted hours to defending arranged marriage and trying to convince me of its relative merits.
"Back in my grandparents' day," she'd say, "everyone still believed that love follows marriage. Now we've all been influenced by the Hollywood idea that love comes first. I'm not sure this is a good thing.
"My mother always said that getting into a relationship is like heating water: first simmer, then boil. The only way to be sure is to marry first and wait for love to come later. Westerners have it backwards ? you expect the water to come to a boil first. When the relationship cools down, you're disappointed and you break it off."
This bit of metaphorical wisdom gave me pause. For one thing, parentally-approved marriages have a better track record than love matches, at least on paper. Although the divorce rate is rising in India, couples there still rarely separate, whereas 30% of American relationships collapse within 10 years of marriage. And it's hardly as though India is the only place in the world where people align themselves based on their backgrounds. When I thought about it, most of my own boyfriends had mirrored my race and socioeconomic status. Statistics about marriage in the west show the vast majority of people choose a mate whose income group, race and education match their own.
I'd focused my efforts on searching for someone whose beliefs lined up with my own, and I'd chosen men who were, in fact, too much like me. If Benjamin was emotionally distant and independent, he was no more so than I. We were also a perfect example of the "boil first, simmer later" model; we insisted issues such as timing, life goals and even monogamy were pedestrian, when it was obvious to everyone else that there was no sensible reason for us to stay together. In fact, we had probably undermined our relationship with our very idealism ? our hope and expectation that we'd be able to outlast affairs and a separation of thousands of miles over a period of years.
Towards the end of my time in India ? in my early 30s now, and aware that I didn't want to end up alone any more than Geeta did ? I began to wonder whether I might not have something to learn from Indian marriage after all. My conversations with Geeta couldn't have been more different from those with my friends back in New York, who were skidding between dates and boyfriends so fast I couldn't keep up. It started to seem a very inefficient method, this whole love and free will approach.
Geeta had grown up believing that it wouldn't matter if she and her husband had different likes and dislikes; it was, in any case, a wife's duty to adjust to her husband's preferences and fit in with his family. Although that sounded a bit much, I had to acknowledge that there was something to be said for compromise. If a boyfriend was open-hearted and caring, it might not matter whether his political views or taste in clothing perfectly matched my own. If this sounds obvious, it wasn't to me.
When I met someone new in Delhi after four years there, I tried not to let my romantic side take over. I asked lots of questions, and talked about those things I'd always considered so pedestrian, such as life goals and plans ? albeit mostly over the phone, since we had only two weeks together before he went home to Washington, DC. By the time I made the decision to leave India and move in with him after eight months, I felt like I knew him and where we were headed. It didn't feel nearly as rash as many of my relationship choices had in the past. Our marriage, when it happened two years ago, wasn't exactly arranged by our parents, but perhaps it's correct to say it was arranged by us. Maybe a little simmering wasn't such a bad idea after all.
? Some names have been changed. Miranda Kennedy's first book, a personal account of women's lives in India, is out this spring in the US and Australia. More at mirandakennedy.com.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/arranged-marriage-husband-miranda-kennedy
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