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?

It’s something I hate to do. Follow up things I have done, talked about. But then, when is there is no response to the 1st one, what’s the point in following it up??

Sups suggested to not be an attention-seeking blogger. I stopped identifying myself with the term ‘blogger’. No point any more. But then, I find it hard to write and compile stuff, when I know it’s pretty much going to be ignored.

I randomly come across blogs and posts through twitter or facebook. Today was the Cleartrip fiasco involving flyyoufools and thereby leading to Chori and from there to Twilight Fairy. Before that it was JRod and to another blog which had a post on Mohd.Azharuddin’s bid to become the president of BAI.

Twilight fairy’s post on matrimonial blues was something I could relate to having been in that situation for an agonizing 3 months before I think I settled up. I want to add something more to this discussion but let me warn you beforehand that some of it might sound clichéd or repetitive.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the ring of marriage. On one side we have the current-involved happily (??) married couples with children, theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee PARENTS. On the other side, the young challenger(s), with (maybe) an experience of winning one or two “love” battles, ready to take over from the reigning couple champions.

Ok, BS aside.

I was shocked to see my profile on the site. No kidding. First was the shock that I have finally come to this time and age where there is my profile on a matrimonial site and not on a dating site/so-net site. 2nd, yes there were glaring blunders both spelling-wise and grammatically, unrestricted use of CAPS sprinkled with phrases like “simple”, "down-to-earth”.

After getting over the stage1 of disbelief, I had two options: 1. delete the profile, 2. make changes and live with the profile. You’d think I would have gone for one of the two. Wrong. I did both. But the first step only emboldened my mom to create another profile AND keep it a secret from me (which I uncovered ‘cos I personally oversee both my parents’ email accounts, not for eavesdropping, but for maintenance purposes, but you wouldn’t believe me, would you?). Having failed with step1, I had to live with it and to do that I had to make that profile at least correct.

My first attempt at writing ‘about me’ never came through, for that section is blank at most places. I had to enlist my friend to help me with it and she brought along newer insights to this entire business.

1. Lower the search criteria of age from 23 to 21. Ugh!
2. Write a bigger, bloated ‘about me’ that involved literally giving the readers a piece of my mind. No, really. But it never made through either. After umpteen cuts and edits, we decided to give it a more even approach, warding off regular ‘parents’ type to attract the type of girls I was allegedly looking for: independent, working, upbeat non-biotechnology types.
3. Highlighting potential ‘candidates’ and short-listing them.
4. Send ‘like’ requests to the truly ‘seemingly’ interesting types (of which I never got a response)

Then there were the very types I wanted to wholly avoid who kept popping up every now and then in my inbox and my mom’s insistence on one particular girl who had only one thing going, the horoscope and yes, she did MSc Microbiology. Ughhhh!!!

In the end, I never met anyone from there. Never got a chance to take any “express interest” to the next level. All thanks to the fact that I more or less found ‘not-the-exact-ONE’.

Looking back, surely, it was a fun experience. But something I could avoid like the most of my past.