My mother made me talk to an arranged marriage match. Oh, the joys of being an Indian daughter.



Here's a snapshot of our Whatsapp conversation. Guess how badly it went 😆

( Screenshot )
Alt text for the screenshot:

Audacious Guy: you consider yourself a humorous person?
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: my jokes are not everyone’s cup of tea
Audacious Guy: high iq jokes ah?
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: you could say that
Audacious Guy: cool
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: 😎
Audacious Guy: how do you feel normally everyday?
Audacious Guy: like privileged, entitled… ala
Audacious Guy: or better than everyone else..
Long-suffering Indian Daughter: i feel emotionally self-sufficient
Audacious Guy: why do you need a partner then

Some context: 'ala' is a filler word in Telugu. It means something like 'and so on', 'like that', 'or some such'.

Some more context: this is our first (and last! lol) conversation, so it wasn't a case of familiarity breeding rudeness. I asked him what's important to him in life, and in marriage, and then since I was the one asking these questions and he was just asking them back to me, I asked him if he had any questions for me. The 'are you humorous' question was the first one he asked, and the 'are you entitled' question was the second.

Yet more context: many Indian men in the arranged marriage 'market' *shudder* today think that women are entitled. Before Audacious Guy, there was another guy my mother wanted me to talk to, who we'll call Hypocritical Guy. Hypocritical Guy told her that he was having a hard time with women because they were entitled. In what way were they entitled, you may ask? Turns out he is working in the U.S. (as so many Telugu boys who studied tech do), and the Indian women he talked to there were not willing to drop their entire careers to move to another state to shack up with him.

It never occurred to him that he could move in with his wife. Or that his expectation that a woman move for him, when he is not willing to do so for her, makes him entitled. I explained this to my mother and told her I wasn't going to talk to that guy.
( It gets worse )
Didn't think I'd come across a grown adult with no moral compass and such appalling, apathetic, smug cynicism.

I sat my mother down and showed her the conversation. It took a while for it to sink in for her. She has no idea what to ask men or what to listen for, no eye for red flags, thanks to only interacting with her husband and men in her family for decades. I told her to stop searching for men for me. She never listened before, but she listened now because she'd gotten a reality check. Even when I would tell her what menaces men could be, I think she believed educated middle-class men wouldn't be misogynists.

My Mom cried and said men didn't behave like this in her day. And when she said she couldn't understand why they were behaving like this now, I explained that as women became more empowered there's been a corresponding rise in resentful men. I said I'd made my peace with never getting married and she'd better accept it too.

I'm allosexual, I have romantic and sexual yearning. But men aren't socialised to do the emotional labour to meet my romantic yearning, or to prioritise my pleasure and not just theirs. I don't think going through any of this is worth the supposed prize. If there's a lovely guy out there, these experiences in the process of getting to him will bring down my morale and mental health until I'm in no fit state for a healthy relationship by the time I get to him.

I'm allosexual, and I recently found out I have vaginismus. I don't trust men to be empathetic towards this because whenever I've not given them what they wanted, they've turned nasty. My friend has vaginismus too, and her boyfriend, who is enlightened, told her that desire is male-coded and penetration's significance is just a social construct anyway. And they always had amazing sex, with never any pesky penetration. I've known enlightened men too, left-leaning intellectual liberal artsy types that I never encountered after finishing college. I had my chance in college and now it's gone. It's some comfort to me that I asked my college crush out and was turned down, because at least I tried. (My friend met her enlightened boyfriend when they were both teaching assistants). I know I'm young, but current world trends don't exactly inspire hope in me for enlightened men hovering in my horizon.

I used to feel like something was wrong with me because I'd never had a romantic relationship. But now I know it's mostly other people making me feel like I've got to be fixed, with their shock, bafflement, concern, barrage of unsolicited dating advice etc. I've got my romance novels to write, in which I can pen beautiful men who didn't grow up under patriarchy (the perks of writing fantasy).