The Internet Personified: Love Is Blind, arranged marriages & my two cents on settling
Love Is Blind is a dating reality show on Netflix
Hi, my kittens,
I’m going to be talking about this one dating reality show on Netflix called Love Is Blind. It’s all anyone on Reddit/Vulture etc is talking about, and obviously, the shit that’s happening in our country is like a horrific reality show in and of itself, but should you want a brainless break to just watch slightly dumb people do stupid things, it’s an instant classic.
[I don’t know what you want though—this newsletter experiment has been so fun, and I really enjoy sending you this email, it helps me sort through my own thoughts as well, but there’s no pattern to what you open and what you don’t. I don’t know why I have 700 subscribers and only 460 people, on average, opening up the email. I tried to change up the platform, the headlines, to see if that would make a discernable difference, and it doesn’t, except for me to see what links you like better, and the links are nice and all, but they’re just an extra, not really the reason for you to read this. It remains one of life’s mysteries! I’m glad you’re reading this, and hi! Thanks for letting me ramble on to you.]
Anyway, Love Is Blind: quick summary. There are a bunch of single people and they are put together in these pods where they can’t see each other but they can talk, the idea being that you can fall in love just based on personality alone. After they chat for a while, couples are encouraged to propose marriage, and only once you are engaged do you meet in real life. Then they’re all whisked off on a “getting to know you” holiday in Mexico, where most people have sex pretty soon, and then back home to Atlanta, where the new partners are introduced to family members and then they get married like a week or two after that. Needless to say, you can change your mind up until the very end. Needless to say, several couples did.
I started to wonder as I watched it, if I would have ever fallen in love with someone sight unseen. It’s not a new concept for India, that’s how my grandparents met and started a family, that’s the way it’s been going on for generations, and still does, in some cases. We operate—traditionally—on the idea that your family knows what’s best for you, and since you are getting married to join two families together, it makes sense for your parents to pick out someone they think a) you’ll like and b) who will fit in with their ideals as well. In some cases, mostly in the olden days, the “will my son/daughter like their future spouse” question didn’t arise at all, you married who you married, you had children, and they married who you decided for them, just as you were married in your time and before and before and before, till marriage looks like a convenient way to keep your pedigree intact, except unlike dogs or horses, you have to live with whoever you’re stuck with.
Last week, we had gone to our maid’s son’s wedding. It was a nice affair, a large lunch and then, I was asked if I wanted to “see” the bride. “Sure,” said I (K was made to stay behind in the gents section, where we both had our lunch) and they took me into the women’s tent and there, sitting in the corner, a red and gold dupatta draped so far over her head that no one could see anything, was the bride. At this point, she just looked like a bundle of clothing, a small bundle of clothing, the reason everyone was there to celebrate, but no one was really talking to her, except a bunch of her new in laws who sat around her proprietorially. “Say namaste,” one of the aunts demanded, a concession to my “Hindu” status I assume, since everyone else got a “salaam aleikum.” They lifted the scarf off her face, so I could see it, a small scared looking girl, she didn’t look older than 16 or 17, but she could have been about 20 or 21 too, all young people are blurring into an amorphous lump of ages to me at my grand old age of 38. She kept her eyes closed the entire time, like she was napping, and I tried to make conversation, but she wasn’t having it, and as soon as she could, she dragged the scarf over her face once more. “I was a bride two years ago, but I wasn’t this shy,” I said, and then added, “Ha ha?” but no one thought it was very funny. Oh well. As I sat there, two teenage girls came up to us and stood around, and the aunt said, “You’ve come to see the bride?” and pulled her dupatta off her face again, and they stared at her face, with this expression that I’ve only seen before when people are watching TV.
There’s one Love Is Blind episode, where all the newly engaged couples get to see each other for the first time. There’s only one interracial couple, and the (black) woman said she’d never dated a white guy before, so I was poised for some drama, but they were actually very sweet and became the realest couple of the entire lot. (Her father, when he met the white guy—Cameron— said, “Have you ever been the only white man in a room full of black people before?” which I thought was an interesting and revealing question, because of course, that situation might arise once they got married, and you and I might never even consider it.) Anyway, so the respective men and women are shown in silhoutte, and then they are revealed to each other, and all of them are all polite, and “Oh my god, yay, you’re so attractive” etc. (Point of note: everyone in the show is attractive in that skinny white person way except for the three black people who are ridiculously attractive also and then two of the black people drop out.) But, as time goes by, you get that certain couples aren’t really that into the way the other person looks.
This newsletter sent to me by Ameya (spoiler alert by the way) talks about one of the women who ditches one of the men because she’s just not physically into them, and I have been there before, trying to manufacture feelings for someone who is just SO PERFECT on paper. I’m afraid I even hurt some feelings, but you can’t say I didn’t try. I really thought, once, that love could be conjured up, but what is romantic love but just plain old love with sexy feelings attached. I wanted so much, in my twenties, to be part of something, a duo, a partnership, that I kept mixing up my own feelings: I should have kept the friends as friends, I should have kept the people I had brief flings with as brief flings, and not tried to invent something out of nothing. I kept getting hurt and hurting other people, it was awful. See, sometimes a kiss can awaken something inside of you, a fluttering, an urgency, a need to know more, and sometimes no matter how many times you kiss someone, you’re left with a flat feeling, like soda that’s been out on the counter too long.
You can absolutely be attracted to someone based on the way they laugh at your jokes, or how they like sitar music or the smell of jasmine in their hair, but attraction has to grow into love and not the other way round. You can fall in love with people you’re attracted to, but not vice versa. Those arranged marriages that last fifty years are great, inspiring stories, but those people were thrown together by families, and sometimes love happens out of those circumstances and sometimes, you think settling is love, and maybe it is, for you, but if you are dating right now, and wondering if this is all there is, you’re wrong. Real love, actual love will never make you think that.
Well, that’s my love lecture, chickens. I hope those of you who are single will forgive me for pretending like I’m the Ultimate Authority on all things love related, and I hope those of you that are with people are feeling the feels.
Other Very Interesting Things To Read:
If you’d like more of my thoughts on reality shows, here’s another newsletter I did.
The man in the iconic brutal picture of the Delhi riots tells his story.
Ramona Quimby, childhood heroine.
Grown women playing with dolls.
Another You’ve Got Mail takedown, and as always, hilar.
The unspoken rules of communicating with friends (although she missed the I’m-in-your-neighbourhood drop-in.)
Have a great week!
xx
m
Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you?Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)
Got sent this newsletter? Sign up here to subscribe!
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the increasing sun indicating winter is over if you didn’t.
Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.