Our view of ideal relationships in the West is skewed. It would be skewed to the right tail of distribution of human relationships if statistician tried to graph it. You have this idealized view of some amazing “passionate forever” relationship based on the two month exciting fling that once you had traveling around South America. And later in life you torture yourself by comparing every other emotion you feel to your next lover with the feelings that were exaggerated by the adrenalin of traveling in a foreign country and the heat of tropics. If that two-month relationship was the ideal one, why did you let it go? Did you think that the grass is greener on the other side? If it was so perfect why didn’t you compromise? And as time goes by, that two-month fling starts even look better that it was originally. Time often distorts our perception of what really happened. I wish time travel wasn’t just a science fiction...
So this is how I and many others see typical relationships in the world we live in. We meet that awesome someone, we fall in love, we decide this is it and settle. Honey moon phase goes away pretty quickly (basing this on my personal experience 4 months to 2 years), passion and infatuation fade, sex becomes not that exciting and if you are lucky, plain love, comfort and understanding stick around longer and hopefully forever. But being in India I learned some new things about love. I realized that love is an emotion that us, humans, can develop to anyone whom we are at least remotely attracted to as long as we have desire and may be some cultural conviction. Marrying someone and devoting your whole life to that person after seeing his/hers photo and may be meeting once seems insane in the West, but it's an absolutely normal way to meet your lifetime mate in India.
We always look for someone who is perfect, who completes us, who satisfies all our requirements… we date, have sex, learn everything about each other, get married…. And 50% of the times it ends up not working out, we drop it like a hot potato and start the vicious cycle of seeking “the one” all over again. In India more than often young people willingly leave it up to their parents to find them a life mate, accept what they get and actually learn to love them. I couldn’t believe it at first, but met various very happy educated couples that were paired up through arranged marriages. Impressive, isn’t it? Actually, I haven't spoken to anyone so far for whom this type of arrangement didn't work out.
Is this a coincidence? Of course, it’s a part of the culture, it’s being brainwashed… many different things, but truly, to me it seems that it is possible to really love someone and be happy with him/her even though you never even dated that person. Sadly, it's not possible for us with western mentality. But does it mean that us, westerners, are just wasting our time and opportunities when we look for “the one”, for the soul mate, for that one special person that is so hard to find? May be we should just lower our expectations and open up our hearts, and the first person who comes around will become that perfect “one” ? And may be we should learn how to stop thinking "what if there is someone out there better than the one we are with right now"? Do we set our expectations too high? Are we hoping to find something that doesn’t exist? May be we should just ask our parents to find us partners and as long as he/she is decent (a parent will pick someone good for sure) we will be happy? (being sarcastic here).... Who knows, but there is definitely something important to learn from these happy arranged marriage couples in India.
2 comments:
So wait... are you hinting that you'd like me to set you up with s/b? hehe. I liked your insights. And, by the way, I once had a boyfriend say, "If we were to plot out relationship on a graph..." Well, let's just say that model didn't accurately predict anything.
Wonderful post Mira! This very much intertwines with much thought and ideas and even life parallels I have been considering. You are the first person I’ve read or talked to that truly gets or expresses those thoughts.
Anyway...yes, there are many sides to love and marriage and I too share your discover and realisation that arranged marriages – and the cultural / community views on love and marriage that predicate them – highlight that the way we do it in the West is not perhaps perfect and even more importantly, is certainly not the only way. On one hand, my romantic side still fights for finding love – and I don’t figure on abandoning that – but on the other hand, the same romantic beliefs also allow that one can, as you say, find love and build love anywhere, even with someone you only married by picture.
You also touched on how the cultural beliefs and focus on adapting and compromising affects how one stays in marriages, no matter if you find love by your parents or in South America. And that more than anything is a broader understanding I am taking from India, a belief that there has evolved something wrong with our generation (or a certain demographic within it), the first where many or most of us are children of divorced parents, where we are too focused on taking such little steps before commitment, then dropping it whenever it doesn’t work. Not to say we should follow the Indian or historical West style of silently suffering in a marriage that isn’t working (my parent's divorce was a positive direction and I've got a wonderfully larger family now as a result). And definitely not to say that we should be afraid of divorce and starting again and being alone, but to say that we could believe more in compromise, in not needing it to some perfect union of 2 individuals who don’t need to change, but magically fit together like hand and glove; someone who “satisfies all our requirement” as you say, forgetting that what we think we want might be more arbitrary and false than we believe. There is so much more out there. I do recognize the value to community with marriage being focused on stability and an institution rather than the couple. It wars against my individualist, power balance and equality beliefs, but I can recognize that it does have interesting value, particularly when the majority of people remain within a small village geographic area.
I’ve my own story of a whirlwind romance in a distant country (although different continent and a month, not two), but might actually have taken the opposite lessons from it: of how broadly I could love and of discovering the understanding and resolve to compromise and focus on being a pair. But that surely requires a much deeper (and probably a little drunker) sharing of stories and insights to compare.
Just wanted to express my sharp interest in reading your account and considering between the lines. I particularly liked your expression of, “And later in life you torture yourself by comparing every other emotion you feel to your next lover with the feelings that were exaggerated by the adrenalin of travelling in a foreign country.” Yup. Holy, my world Batman. I’m even back in a foreign country and that didn’t stop that.
Thanks for posting. That was more honest than I’ve generally been online on my blog.
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