Today I convinced somebody not to get married.
One of my friends caught me off-guard today. She's in the midst of some torrid love affair - in India, love affairs are never anything but torrid, it seems - and their parents disapprove, and he's headed to the UK next year for school. She's decided the best way out of this morass is for the two of them to get married in secret in August. She's 22.
"But marriage is a legal commitment!" I blurted, when she dropped this bomb. I had a bite of lunch halfway to my mouth, but decided to drop it in favor of the much spicier tidbit that this conversation was turning out to be.
"I never thought of that," she sighed.
"Your parents will be really hurt when they find out," I said.
"I never really thought of that either," she admitted.
"What if you have to assume his school debts? He has no income!" I wailed, in the midst of a full-on panic attack.
"I never thought of any of that!" she cried. People in the cafeteria were turning to stare.
What did you think of? I wanted to shout. Did you think at all, you feckless child??
Anyway, she eventually saw the wisdom in some of my points and decided to pressure her fiancee into a public engagement rather than a secret marriage. In the auto home, of course, I began to suffer from an attack of conscience.
Let her be young and stupid, this conscience said. These are the joys of being her age. And: Haven't you done stupid things, ever? No? Maybe you should have. And so on.
There are two factors working against my accepting her marriage: 1) In India, people regularly fall in love with people they have never seen. Meanwhile, in America, people still aren't sure whether someone they're living with and have children with is "the One." Americans are, by nature, a profoundly commitment-phobic culture. 2) I am by nature the most risk-averse person on the planet. I say "on the planet" only because so far we have to discover intelligent life anywhere else. When I was being born, the doctors eventually had to extract me by Caesarean section. Some might say this is because I was just too large a baby, but I strongly suspect it was because even in utero I already knew that the outside world was a bad, bad place. The womb was so comfortable, why risk it?
The other day, in a car back from Amritsar, we were telling "Delhi Love Stories." Someone talked about a co-worker, who had met his girlfriend when he'd called her father's warehouse to place an order. He liked her voice so much he asked if he could call her back. She said yes. They talked for hours every day, for three years. They planned their wedding. He'd never even seen her picture. Now, of course, he's met her once, decided she's his soulmate, and their parents refuse to agree to a wedding.
"It's dangerous to love someone that much," said one of the people in the car, when this story ended.
Indian society, by its strictures, seems to breed this kind of passionate recklessness. And not just India, according to the NYTimes: Afghanistan is worse. Consider this key line from a story about two teenagers in an illicit relationship: "The teenagers, embarrassed to talk about love, said plainly that they were ready for death." Why death? Because their parents found out and are so ashamed they're petitioning the state to put both teenagers to death.
Everyone in India knows at least one pair of star-crossed lovers who were forced to elope in order to ditch angry parents. The Indian courts contain legal agents whose sole income comes from young couples looking to get married on the sly. In the United States, I know nobody like this.
What makes Americans more cautious? Is it that our society is that much more permissive? It's hard to find any context in which marriage is a revolutionary act. (With one notable exception.) Scrolling through photos of gay couples recently married in New York City, one fact jumped out at me: it was still very, very rare to come across couples who came from different ethnic backgrounds. In India, these inter-caste marriages tend to be the most contentious. Maybe the mere difficulty of finding love in the Indian context - rigidly segregated society, etc - means that people are more willing to take a chance on something crazy, if it works out at all.
One of my friends caught me off-guard today. She's in the midst of some torrid love affair - in India, love affairs are never anything but torrid, it seems - and their parents disapprove, and he's headed to the UK next year for school. She's decided the best way out of this morass is for the two of them to get married in secret in August. She's 22.
"But marriage is a legal commitment!" I blurted, when she dropped this bomb. I had a bite of lunch halfway to my mouth, but decided to drop it in favor of the much spicier tidbit that this conversation was turning out to be.
"I never thought of that," she sighed.
"Your parents will be really hurt when they find out," I said.
"I never really thought of that either," she admitted.
"What if you have to assume his school debts? He has no income!" I wailed, in the midst of a full-on panic attack.
"I never thought of any of that!" she cried. People in the cafeteria were turning to stare.
What did you think of? I wanted to shout. Did you think at all, you feckless child??
Anyway, she eventually saw the wisdom in some of my points and decided to pressure her fiancee into a public engagement rather than a secret marriage. In the auto home, of course, I began to suffer from an attack of conscience.
Let her be young and stupid, this conscience said. These are the joys of being her age. And: Haven't you done stupid things, ever? No? Maybe you should have. And so on.
There are two factors working against my accepting her marriage: 1) In India, people regularly fall in love with people they have never seen. Meanwhile, in America, people still aren't sure whether someone they're living with and have children with is "the One." Americans are, by nature, a profoundly commitment-phobic culture. 2) I am by nature the most risk-averse person on the planet. I say "on the planet" only because so far we have to discover intelligent life anywhere else. When I was being born, the doctors eventually had to extract me by Caesarean section. Some might say this is because I was just too large a baby, but I strongly suspect it was because even in utero I already knew that the outside world was a bad, bad place. The womb was so comfortable, why risk it?
The other day, in a car back from Amritsar, we were telling "Delhi Love Stories." Someone talked about a co-worker, who had met his girlfriend when he'd called her father's warehouse to place an order. He liked her voice so much he asked if he could call her back. She said yes. They talked for hours every day, for three years. They planned their wedding. He'd never even seen her picture. Now, of course, he's met her once, decided she's his soulmate, and their parents refuse to agree to a wedding.
"It's dangerous to love someone that much," said one of the people in the car, when this story ended.
Indian society, by its strictures, seems to breed this kind of passionate recklessness. And not just India, according to the NYTimes: Afghanistan is worse. Consider this key line from a story about two teenagers in an illicit relationship: "The teenagers, embarrassed to talk about love, said plainly that they were ready for death." Why death? Because their parents found out and are so ashamed they're petitioning the state to put both teenagers to death.
Everyone in India knows at least one pair of star-crossed lovers who were forced to elope in order to ditch angry parents. The Indian courts contain legal agents whose sole income comes from young couples looking to get married on the sly. In the United States, I know nobody like this.
What makes Americans more cautious? Is it that our society is that much more permissive? It's hard to find any context in which marriage is a revolutionary act. (With one notable exception.) Scrolling through photos of gay couples recently married in New York City, one fact jumped out at me: it was still very, very rare to come across couples who came from different ethnic backgrounds. In India, these inter-caste marriages tend to be the most contentious. Maybe the mere difficulty of finding love in the Indian context - rigidly segregated society, etc - means that people are more willing to take a chance on something crazy, if it works out at all.
Anika! I'm so glad I stumbled upon your blog. It's been too long. I loved this post and the voice you write with-- looking forward to catching up on your previous posts. I'm leaving for Tanzania next week, but would love to catch up with you before then. I don't have a personal blog yet, but you can always follow my project blog, in case we don't get a chance to chat before I leave: http://thebunguproject.wordpress.com.
ReplyDeleteCheers!
Pei