There is a very good reason why one ought to be emotionally happy alone before committing to a relationship or marriage. A lot of people get involved because they're unhappy and they are convinced that the cure to their malaise lies in another person. That's not a recipe for happiness; it's a recipe for codependency.

I know a few people like this; they generally seem more in love with the concept of the relationship itself, rather than the person they are with. What happens once you're married and you're still not fulfilled? Then you're miserable AND restricted.

I haven't read the book this is excerpted from but it sounds like a fairly interesting angle on a cultural comparison between two countries.

At the same time, the result of the romantic quest is fairly easy to predict. The clues are in this article near the start, with New Yorkers sitting around bemoaning how there are "no men" out there, a dialog which even by the author's own description contains lots of lines like this:

"What about him?"

"Eww!".

Just a perusal of the online dating world will show that there are people from each gender (all of them) out there looking. What the author describes is a certain kind of over-developed choosiness meeting itself in the mirror, and blaming the mirror. I'm almost tempted to read the book to find out how someone in this mindset fares when plunged into a world that doesn't pander to that kind of hyperselectivity-masquerading-as-victim attitude, moreover one that by all accounts simply removes the choice. Or at least that was one of the writer's stated hopes, that it would.

By the author's own description of her and her friends, there was really no shortage of choices floating by for each of them, compared to other cultures these women are meeting men left and right.

The issue here is one of a heightened sense of entitlement, to be able to sift through and find a certain and predefined ideal mate, and going to a place where that kind of choice is neither as admired or even allowed was probably mostly an extremely rude awakening.

Those can be good.

if all you want it to be married!

I think it's perfectly valid to be marriage oriented. But I do think there are other, perfectly valid forms of relationships. I, for one, have a long term friend/lover who I don't live with, who I don't want to have kids with (I'm 43, by the way), and who enriches my life on a daily basis and fulfills all my needs for friendship, affection and sex. He is simply not my domestic partner.

I realize I have a rare kind of relationship, and it certainly took a bit of work to define our relationship in the face of society's expectations and the expectations projected upon both of us. He, for example, did not believe I didn't want to have children, and finally, when I turned 41 began to understand that I was not planning on pushing the limits of science some day in order to have one. I, on my part, suspected him of being the kind of man who eventually dumps a woman he can't have children with in favor of a younger, more fertile model.

No, we don't all want to be married and bearing babies. We are not "hard-wired" to want that, we are taught those values by parents and society. I was quite put off marriage and unprepared for motherhood by a malfunctioning family. (I used that word on purpose - both parents mentally ill, not just dysfunctional). For those who do want marriage, I think arranged marriage is a good idea and no less random that meeting someone on the subway. I'm sure an arranged marriage can lead to disasters just as easily as falling in love with your colleague can. At least, though, there is the presupposition of marriage as the goal.

I have something rare, and am feel extremely lucky when I look around at my sexually frustrated friends -- sexually frustrated because they can barely get laid in NYC, men are so spoiled and picky. Men are even quite a turn-off with their attitude here: you can go out hoping to end up getting laid, and be ready to be sworn to celibacy by the end of a conversation with one. Here, you are either a whore or a bride. A man will treat you badly unless he wants to marry and impregnate you. It's shocking. I was prepared for loverhood by my experience in Europe. There, it's your birthday every day when you have a compatible lover. And a lover can be yours for a week, a year, twenty years... it depends on your compatibility and the kind of people you are. It is NOT the same as marriage, and god it is much better than being someone's "fuckbuddy", a disgusting term I only learned after moving here.

and its seemingly liberated women so desperate. Thanks, Ms Jain, for impressing on me how meaningless my heretofore fulfilling life in Brooklyn is. I think you were hanging out with the wrong people here... either that, or you got the wrong idea.

I had a lot of the same feelings the writer did, as a male in the Detroit area a few years ago. I fantasized about arranged marriages because a) I figured I could get along with anyone I was married to, b) I noticed that people in a relationship are often the worst judges of the quality of that relationship, and c) it was just easier.

Now I'm married, and through my own struggles in my marriage (struggles which, I'm sure, are similar to the struggles of many others), I've come to realize that there was another subconscious issue in play - my not wanting to change my bad habits and faults to make a relationship with another person work. I wasn't willing to admit that I was not a particularly driven individual, that I wasn't the neatest or most domestically responsible person in the world, that due to my ADD I would have to work harder to become a more ideal social partner for whoever I was interested in. Frankly, it was easier to just wish that my parents would set me up with someone who would love me for me (or more accurately, tolerate my shortcomings because I didn't want to fix them)

I think this is the issue with a lot of young people seeking marriage, and especially with the author as I see it; she's interested in being married, but there is almost no introspection as to why it's happening (granted, this is just an excerpt, but still...). She moves the blame outside herself and onto the Western Culture, and in doing so excuses herself from looking at her own inadequacies. Anyone that says "eww" about a guy interested in her is saying a lot about herself; if she had parents in India, one would imagine that that guy would be the one she had the arranged marriage with. (I know my parents would have poo-pooed my objections on a girl I wasn't all that interested in: "Oh, but she really likes you and she's a nice girl with good parents and you're only looking at her from the outside.")

The fact is that arranged marriages are just that - arranged. You don't have a choice, you don't get a chance to know whether or not you're compatible with the person. You just... marry, and that's it. Deal with it.

I know the Western Culture's dating scene has its flaws, but so does everything else in the world. Personally, I prefer a system that forces me to grow and learn more about myself in order to become a better life partner, rather than one that backs me into a corner I can't get out of. But that's silly old Western me, bogged down with my idolization of freedom of choice.