Dating, Love and Marriage: The Indian Style
by We follow a different sequence of action in India as regards marriage. We don’t go for dating, more dating, more freedom to do anything including trial sex and if everything works out well, go to the marriage altar. In India, usually it is the parents who pick out the Girl or Boy and a meeting called “bride seeing” is arranged wherein the candidates sight the other for the first time for some seconds. If they like eahc other or what one may call it as “love at first sight”, then marriage is fixed. They then start their life from the scratch, understand and adjust to each other and live together as one flesh till death do them part.
Once the Boy likes the Girl and vice versa, the parents would get into negotiations of various arrangements, sharing or meeting of all expenses and fix a date for the marriage. There could be an engagement ceremony to seal the alliance; this, in case the Girl has to complete her studies or the Boy has to stabilize in his job or for some reasons the marriage could take place only several months later. Even during this period, the Boy and Girl normally would not be allowed to date but permitted to see each other for a chit chat but always in one of the two homes.
This is the pattern in nearly 90 percent cases. The remaining ten percent possibly follow the Western model and may have lots of datings and other kinds of outings to find out their compatibility and in this process may have trial sex also. But the experience shows that such marriages break up sooner than later.
As I said before, an Indian looks at marriage as a life time commitment. They would love to live for as long as possible. In one wedding, an elderly lady blessed the young bride and pronounced, ‘May you live long for 75 years.” The young bride retorted back, “ What? Only 75 years !” She was then 22.
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