Marriage

My head hurts as I write this post.

I'm a 27 year old, unmarried, Indian girl, with zero decent relationships under my belt.

For Indian society, I am already above marriageable age, and I better get my act together, or I will stay a 'spinster' (God how I hate that word).

"Darling, who will marry you when you are 30?" I often hear my mum saying to me. "By that age, all the good men are taken, and you will be left with divorcees, widowers or people who everybody else has rejected."

WHAT?

I understand my mum's concerns. She believes that there is a 'time' for everything. A time to get married, a time to enjoy your marriage, a time to have children, etc etc. And when you start missing that 'time', things start falling out of place.

I do have respect for the arranged marriage scene and I have seen it work across most of my family.

A cousin of mine once explained the concept to some Spanish friends in a wonderful way: "Western people first fall in love, get married, and then worry about all the problems they have to worry about (families getting along, finances, future, life plans etc). In India, we do it the other way around. First we clarify all the foreseeable problems, then we get married, then we fall in love."

It has been proven that 'arranged' marriages have a significantly higher success rate than 'love' marriages (as we call them in India) - for the way they get the problems out of the way first.

So even though my parents are amazingly supportive and have always respected my decisions, they keep sprinkling 'suitable bachelor' information into our conversations, and showing my astrology charts to guru's in India.

As for me, irrespective of how many times my heart has been bruised, I still believe in falling in love. If I ever choose to get married, I would like it to be for love, rather than for the sake of getting married so as to not grow old alone (or whatever the reason is for an arranged marriage.)

Having said all of that, marriage is out of the picture for me at the moment.

I'm all over the place, with so many dreams, so many aspirations, so much happening around me - why would I want to get married right now? My life would take a serious hault and then a serious diversion that I am really not prepared for.

But when you marry for love - you are willing to put all those things on the line, because that what love does. (Well, that's what I'm told anyway :)

On the other hand, though I repel the thought of having an arranged marriage, I also realise how I always seem to to attract disastrous men in my life who have done me no good.

At 27, you'd think I'd have atleast one relationship that I could talk about fondly. Nope. Each one has been more messed-up than the other.

So, while all my friends (literally, ALL of them) have found love and are happily married, and putting my relationship-life in context, I sometimes wonder if I will ever have a guy in my life more than a few months (let alone to marry!). And that's all I'd like at the moment, you know?