Ok, the last post was.. incomplete.
That was only the experience. No opinions and gleanings from that episode, which is what follows here.
1. Establish a scale, an overall scale that factors looks, education, money, family etc. Rate yourself on that scale. Say, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai’s hybrid kids, say I am a 6
2. Rate every potential girl on the same scale. At most, you can go to your score + 1 but you can always go till your score – 3 (up to you)
3. Keep a track of the requests sent and received
4. Making sure your profile states what your likes and dislikes, your tastes and expectations is, in my view, useless; because there will be requests from profiles that’s gonna be exactly opposite to them, and the ones who match will never read your profile
5. Every effort invested in this ritual can be better used up at your work, school, home, game, sport etc.
My disappointing run-in with the whole matrimonial sites stems from my own personal dissatisfaction with it. I can’t say it will be applicable to everybody, ‘cos am not everybody.
My parents were quite liberal, but there was a certain understanding amongst us that we knew had to abide to. My sister was married when she was 23 and pursuing an MBA degree. It was more or less a traditional one, the match coming in from a well-wisher of the family, families meeting and the victims liking each other and so on. Rest is history.
I have always told them I not a conformist to the tradition and stuck to it. There were cool too. But when the season of marriage dawned upon me, things weren’t so easy. My mom’s insistence on horoscopes and stuff threw me off a bit. Horoscopes matching between total strangers, and not matching between otherwise compatible people is something I couldn’t live with.
In our society, when the value placed on marriage as an institution is steadily eroding, it is quite obvious that most try to cling on to their ideals in the face of adversity. But at what cost? I have known marriages which were disasters from day one, hastily arranged in the face of an imminent death of a prominent family member, that marriage of my friend to a complete psycho is one example why you cannot predict arranged marriages. Add to the fact that the girl’s parents were, lets say the brainiest of the lot, no not scientists, but advocates somewhere high up.
And few more. Yet people insist these are the proverbial ‘few bad apples’. Agreed. Hence the recent increase in hiring private detectives to do family background checks. Digging up dirt is different from digging up the past. I, for once, stand by this practice. The price involved (not monetary) in marrying off your kids after 20+years of love and attention, to a complete jerk, is too high to not do such things. But then, as a receiver of such privy information, would you consider that a uncle of the brother of the groom/bride’s father/mother once defaulted on a loan and was hence .. blah blah let you affect your decision?
Where will you draw the line?
This is only the family that deals with the marriage. The boy/girl come with their own baggage. Tastes, preferences, education, job, confidence, trust etc determine who, how whom one marries. Do they really?
I now know that having similar likes and dislikes is not necessary for a healthy relationship. Nor does it form the basis of a relationship. All I can say is to each his own. Some guys want their wifey to stay at home, and not work. If you think this is absurd, avoid those guys. They might be hypocrites but not wrong in wanting their spouse to stay back and look after the family.
Guy doesn’t want his wife to earn more than him. And he mentions it. Well, he has clearly mentioned that his ego is big enough to not settle up for such an arrangement. Any woman getting married to him knowing this shouldn’t be cribbing about it. “If she had a choice, and chose him, it’s her headache”. But yes, its difficult to know this beforehand sometimes. I was shocked to know that guys educated in the best of best universities, studying in co-ed colleges, living sometimes with girls in the same house or around, turn around and say they want a girl who has studied only till 12th, better if she was brought up traditionally, strictly no US-educated girls. I can understand why they would have such a preference but whatever happened while living such a life??
Everyone has their preference, there are girls preferring someone who can “afford” their lifestyles while they sit at home and gossip about movies, neighbors and families. Guys who had girl-friends, sometimes one a year, but want a lesser educated girl for wife, who wouldn’t even step out of the house?
Hypocrites all right, but are they wrong in their preferences?
Avoid them if you don’t like them. Isn’t it the same as to changing a channel which feeds you BS? Don’t you already avoid people whom you don’t like?
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