Marry the person your parents choose for you.

-a pep talk for those sceptical of the arranged marriage

Marry the person your parents choose for you. Marry them because they are presenting you an adventure. Marry the boy with the beauty spot on his upper lip or the girl decked with five villages worth of jewelry, smiling up at you from the professional marriage bureau photograph. Marry them because they are offering to be your safety net while daring you to take a risk.

Marry the boy with the stellar resume or the girl with a great educational background. Don’t be afraid. Because behind all those six figure salaries and multi-alphabet degrees, there is a person who has feelings, emotions, dreams and aspirations just as you do. Marry that stranger who was born under the right stars. Maybe, they were born for you. Maybe they weren't. But it’s up to you to make them live for you. You will realize at some point that you want to live for them.

You will meet at a formal meeting arranged by your families. As they say, marriage is the union of not just two souls, but two families. His various aunts and sisters and other female relatives will grill you about your culinary skills and whether or not you fast during Navratri. Her father will try to make you look better than you really are and her brothers will flex their ill-developed muscles and scowl at you. You will probably not get to say anything to each other.

You will meet again on your big day. You will get to see her face properly for the first time ever, after the wedding rituals are done. They will expect you to share a bed that night. Don’t do it. Use the time to talk and get to know each other. Let the monotonicity of small talk lull you into slumber.

‘Love Happens’ is a phrase composed by lovesick writers of romantic comedies. Back here in real life, love doesn't just happen. You make love happen. Love is the notes in his lunch box and the flower on her dressing table. Love is wishing him ‘Good Morning’ with a mug of coffee. Love is a steaming cup of tea when she is reading her current issue of Electronics For You. Love is learning the swear words and then swearing along with him when stuck in traffic. Love is holding her when she wracking with sobs watching Jack make Rose promise to live her life to the fullest without him, even when you are dying to burst out laughing. Love is a smiley and a message on the bathroom mirror. Love is running together in the morning because she needs to lose another millimeter from her thigh and his cholesterol levels are shooting up and you have come to like each other’s company. Love is that tightening in your chest when you realize that each of you have clawed and coaxed and cajoled your way into the other’s life without either of you realizing it. Love is when you turn each other into a warm puddle of goo just by existing.

Accept that both of you had to make compromises to get together. Maybe she wanted to be an artist. Maybe he wanted to be a rock star. You both might have wanted to contribute to the society in a bigger way. Buy her an easel, some canvas and paints. Clean out his guitar and leave it sitting in his study. Paint while you listen to him strum. Sing for her as she goes mad with her colors. Become each other’s muse. Raise Awareness for Breast Cancer by auctioning her paintings while he provides the evening entertainment.

They say the foundation of any relationship is the truth. So, go ahead. Tell him the truth about the one time you were threatened with a hostel-out when you teetered back in your little black dress and fuck-me pumps, almost an hour after in-time and drunk out of your senses. Tell her the truth about that trip to Goa and those foreign chicks. Tell him about that Scooty trip from Pune to Bombay that you made with a bunch of dare devil friends without telling your parents. Tell her about the pot, the beer and the NH7 Weekender Concerts. Don’t judge. You both have pasts, Don’t let it muck up your present. Tell him he has the deepest eyes. Play with her hair. Ask him to open every jar/can/container you need opened and tell him he’s the strongest man you know. Walk beside her in the super market and growl at anyone who comes nearby. Even the acne infested teenage store assistant. Especially him.

You will kiss in the confines of your bedroom one night. She will smell of her night cream and he, of dinner. It will be awkward and unpleasant. By now, you would have become friends, at least. So, you owe it to your friendship to try again and again till you get it right. And, it really doesn't make sense to stop once you've got it right, does it? So, kiss at the door. Kiss on the stairs. Kiss in the morning, evening and noon time. Kiss whenever you miss her scent and kiss whenever you miss his touch. Don’t stop. Not that you could anyway.

Marry the person your parents choose for you. Don’t be afraid of what you are and certainly not of what you aren't. While she might find your Hot wheels collection amusing , she might plain detest your Vin Deisel fanboy tendencies. Teach her to build the tracks and introduce her to the Fast and Furious movies and Riddick. Watch ‘the Pacifier’ as a last resort. She will crack a smile, I promise. He might appreciate your Star Trek obsession; heck he might even approve of your Seven of Nine crush. Yeah. A lot of guys find the whole girl-liking-sci-fi-femme-thing kinky. He might find your neon colors phase endearing. She might hate your million-pocketed cargos. He might never get why mauve is dull and lavender is bright. She might secretly play CoD on your console and yet declare her abhorrence of the wretched thing to you . Don’t try to change the crazy in each other. Embrace it. Fun times guaranteed. Laundry might be as foreign a concept to him as “don’t-touch-my-vintage-vinyl-record-player” is to her. Slow dancing might be her stress buster while football might be his. You might both love rain. So the next time it rains, play a game of one-on-one football in your backyard. Tackle him like you saw on all those games you sat through with him. Get mud all over yourselves. Just when she’s sneaked a steal from you, grab her waist, bring her close and hum Etta James’ At Last and slow dance with her. Carry her inside and make sweet love. Or maybe just fuck each other senseless. Deal with the laundry later with The Foreigners blaring on the record player.

Marry the person your parents choose for you because, well, you know you are going to. Make an effort to fall in love with them because you deserve to love and be loved with unrequited passion. And wait and watch in wonder, when even Private Hudson (that annoyingly annoying man from Aliens) becomes that much less annoying when there’s a set of fingers filling the spaces between your own in a perfectly imperfect manner.

Edit dated 2.12.2013 :

One of the readers of this piece, Prateek, wrote to me and suggested that “How to love a person you don’t know” would be a much better title. I absolutely agree and I wish I had thought of that first. I have received a lot of feedback on this post, both positive and negative. Thanks for all of it. Honestly, I didn’t think so many people would read it all.

I am a 23 year old, single woman living with three similarly (read exactly same) aged roommates. I wrote this after a midnight chat session on arranged marriages, after one of us was harangued by her family on the same topic. There seems to be an intense cynicism related with this subject among the youth today. I am of the opinion that it can’t be that bad. This article is about what love is and what an arranged marriage could and should be.

I got an earful (or is it eyeful) on the social media about how this sort of attitude was why Indian women are still oppressed and can’t reach their full potential. I don’t know about you all, but I come from a pretty conservative background. As an army brat, I’ve had the most eventful and adventurous childhood possible. I consider it one of the greatest gifts of my life that I got to study in a great college in Pune, instead of some unknown private college in some unknown street of Tamil Nadu. I got the opportunity to break free, see the world (okay, fine. It’s just one new city, but whatever!)and gather new experiences. All that will happen if I decide to break tradition, is that I will become the village example. My younger cousins and other kids from my village, who probably have more potential than me will be denied such openings. This means that the so called change we are expecting to stir up will be streamlined into just me and my progeny. In fact, my being ‘the change I want to see’ would prove detrimental to the development of dozens of other people. Did you ever think of this, you, who propagate the giving up of seemingly pointless traditions for the sake of modernization? Or has the self centered chant of ‘It’s my life’ playing in your mind absolved you of civic responsibility? Break-out change has never stuck. It’s like a one-song wonder; everyone talks about it but the buzz fizzles out pretty soon. Only the scandalous parts remain, propagating from generation to generation. Attempting to change the mindset that has taken a gazillion years to be, well, set, is not an overnight job. It is gradual. You have to push a little, pull a little, give a little and take a little. Marrying a person of your parents choice isn’t all that bad, when you look at the big picture. It is not a compulsion, but a compromise. Food for thought for all you feisty feminists and change-makers out there.

Credits: “ …what love is and what an arranged marriage should be.” ~ stolen from the amazing Parina Magu, fellow midnight-chatter and BFF.