14 ms·
Letting shit go is more or less what I hear from those 25+ year Indian couples with arranged marriages (from Netflix show, “Indian Matchmaking”), though they ca
by hosh 3y ago
Letting shit go is more or less what I hear from those 25+ year Indian couples with arranged marriages (from Netflix show, “Indian Matchmaking”), though they call it “tolerance”.
The thing is, how many people truly and honestly let shit go?
- hosh 3y agoContinuing from above — in “Indian Matchmaking”, what pops up over and over again is that you will never have “100%” of what you are looking for in a partner. Every young person she helps with always start a list of qualities of their ideal partner, some of them are really small things. Yet despite telling them, it is not “100%”, they can’t let that go even before dating starts. And then you see how it sets the tone for the dates and all the drama that comes of it, and they have not even married yet. I remember watching that and thinking, yeah, that’s obvious. Glad I know better. But thinking about all of this, I realize, it doesn’t end at the dating. Your partner wasn’t “100%”, and as people grow and change, they are not “100%” different ways, over the years. There are different things that comes up in which to let shit go. It might be why arranged marriages and strong cultural values around it works. There is no illusion of an ideal partner to begin with. (And you get the shadow side too, like anything else when there are bad actors)
- laratied 3y agoNo doubt. The people I have known in an Indian arranged marriage actually understand relationships. They aren't trying to live in a Disney movie or Goethe novel. My understanding is that Goethe and romanticism really messed up our views in the West about romance. We have unrealistic beliefs from trying to live up to fiction.
- superposeur 3y agoYes, and music and all other parts of culture too: the lone genius model of human achievement, suffering=greatness, the primacy of emotion, and many other tropes that are now our cultural “defaults”. It’s hard to see clearly because we’re still inside the romantic movement.
- stocknoob 3y agoArranged marriages work in the same sense that 98% of people found deep satisfaction in their career as a peasant farmer 300 years ago.
- reaperman 3y agoThere's a juxtaposition I don't get - on one hand, the super high prevalence of arranged marriages in Indian culture, on the other hand is the super high prevalence of "finding romance" stories in Bollywood movies.
- hosh 3y agoI’m not an Indian, though I don’t find that paradoxical, since I know how influential the story of Rama and Sita is to the Indian culture. That story is held as the ideal of relations between a husband and wife. And then there is the story of Krishna and the cow maids. When you watch the “Indian matchmaking”, you see the parents of the current generation letting their kids find their way, even though they themselves did not. But you also hear about how the older generation met — it’s an arranged marriage, but their parents typically let their kids choose from a small pool of their choosing.
- kiratp 3y agoThe audience is all dreaming of what could have been in another life.