Thursday, March 01, 2012

Love, Matrimony, etc..

Being 29 and single seemed pretty normal in my head. That's what I thought before I turned 28 :).  My entire family along with their acquaintances whom I had never even met before came up with only two questions:
1. Why are you not married yet?
2. What are your expectations from a girl?

As the year 29 dawned closer, even friends joined the band-wagon. So here comes this post as a possible answer to the first question. 

A poet has written: " And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.". Well, my initial plan was pretty much the same. Perhaps it was the effect of  taking movies way too seriously. Somehow the hero finds his heroine, manages to woo her and they live happily ever after all within approximately 3 hours. So I drifted around in life with the perfect 4-step plan.
1. Wait for "Miss Right" to come into the picture
2. Feel more and more crazy about her over due course of time
3. One fine day, gather all the courage in the world to propose her
4. She agrees and we live happily ever after!

As it happens with most plans made by lazy people, the 4-step plan never took off. And hence came the need to do something different! Something exciting, something radical, something which is done in clandestine by most people....create a matrimony profile :P. It did not turn out as straightforward as making a facebook profile though. You are not supposed to be funny when you fill tricky questions like "Describe yourself" or "Define your partner expectations". Neither are you allowed to simply copy paste book or movie quotes into such fields. So after some more deep thoughts about it (read as laziness) and substantial amount of self-pity, I finally went live on a matrimony portal. Soon it became 3 portals..and henceforth began the get or post of interests and subsequent acceptances or denials. Things went a bit further with few prospective matches into the randomized and mysterious world of matrimony interviews via IM or phone.

There are no books out yet to help one prepare for a matrimony interview. Until then, one pretty much has to define a strategy which seems right in his head. Mine turned out to chat for approximately a month, meet once or twice in person and then came the judgement time. It seems equivalent to two strangers who have hopped on a train journey. The conversation topics wander around hobbies, personal goals, career goals, current affairs or the daily mundane stuff. Either of them can decide to get down the train at the next stop, forget the previous conversations quickly and follow the same routine all over again. We all wear the cloak of logic to identify whether the journey can continue forever. But beneath the cloak I still kept hoping for a DDLJ story. Over a period of 8 months, the journey count kept growing. Journeys continued though the routine became more and more mundane and tiresome.

 On the fine evening of October 17th 2011, my cellphone rang. She had arrived! :-)