Being single only means constant questioning and my lovely tier-1 friends & well-wishers keep sending me interesting forwards/articles/link..anything and everything related to relationship/marriage. one below was the recent and very nice written article to got. I can totally relate..
Twenty nine years old(In my cases couple of years more.:) and smugly single, I consider myself to be a part of the niche clan of people who have never quite achieved their potential(may be I did or rather maximize very possible opporunity), are lazy(which iam..some what), know they can do much better and aspire only for the best. We are that clan of people who can talk sense and are always open to trying out new things.
We also have aspirations of meeting the perfect one who looks like Monica Belluci and can talk intelligently on literature, music and movies and also be an ideal woman at home. Yes, we aspire nothing less than the superwoman(translation: i can admit i also do have sometime/on somethings/. unrealistic expectations ) but we are rational and practical enough to know our limitations ( oo yes that we do)- that we are mostly Clark Kents and Peter Parkers (without any superpowers).
Over-zealous Aunties/Uncles Inc:
Thanks to the over-zealous aunties and uncles and of course, my dad, who believes that I need to be tied in the "bonds" of holy matrimony and thus fill the void in my life and thus prove my mettle as a man... I am in the dreaded place that is more commonly-known as "the arranged marriage process".
The eagerness of the "concerned" elders, I believe is more to absolve themselves of any remaining responsibilities towards me. I have felt the entire gamut of emotions ranging from despair to desperation thanks to these aunties and uncles especially the ones who have grey hair, bald patches or both. The most common question they put across to me is "What type of girl do you want? ", which is usually followed by, "Do you want a working-type girl or housewife?"( that is such irratating questions) The fact remains that such questions drive me away from the sight of grey hair in any function. Ironically the older these uncles get, they tend to be more sensible in their advice as they mention about waiting for the right girl and going slow :)
Arranged Marriage, a Compromise?
Honestly, arranged marriage is a compromise one makes. You have little time to analyse the stakes or the nature of the opportunity; you are usually sold on the pros, and accepting the cons is a step which is very difficult to make. The time factor becomes the sword of Damocles hanging over your head - so you don't have a choice but to make your decision quickly!
Bearing the above, one must remember that my generation is a confused lot for starters. We find it difficult to let go of Doordarshan serials and admire their simplicity but still want to live a life like Barney Stintson or Robin Schebartsky of How I Met Your Mother! Hope however makes us believe that we can evolve the arranged marriage process and tune it to our constraints.
Achieving "status quo"
With the little experience I have, (thanks to my observation and listening skills), arranged marriage seems to work when you have made up a sketch in your head. Of course, this sketch becomes relevant only after matching horoscopes and family compatibility verification - which is another litmus test and usually is purely subjective. Post that, most men are scrutinised under the following criteria:
a) Decent job with a decent profile and good money (has to be more than what the woman earns for sure!) irrespective of industry or domain.
b) Presentable looks and speaking skills.
c) Reasonable bad habits (Read: Drinking at pubs, etc allowed but not to be publicly declared, smoking a strict no-no at least for appearance sake).
So, if someone fulfils all three above categories, he is a potential life partner. Rest of the parameters are "give or take" wherein all things considered compromises can be made. Lack of common interests can be usually negated, newer tastes magically acquired and pursued in order to achieve status quo. The key aspect being that major points are ticked off and the rest you go with an objective of adjusting and reconciliation.
Screening Prospective Brides
Of course, the trend ensures that men also usually judge the girls on the following parameters only:
a) Looks.
b) Relative smartness.
c) And finally, the ability to make the man feel that he is the hero of her dreams and the apple of her eye.
The irony today lies more in the prevalent lack of faith that all things will fall in place and this makes the prospect of arranged marriage seemingly more archaic and painful.
Things to Consider
I sympathise with the women who are getting their marriages arranged as well. Why? Because they are brought up on par with men like me and enjoy all the freedom and experience similar to their counterparts. Marriage thus demands that they make a much greater sacrifice than the modern man. This is something men have to understand deeply and thus gauge a person not only through their parameters but also do their best to balance the expectations of their future wife and their parents. Having said that, the women of today have to be clear in their head about the level of responsibilities that marriage brings on their shoulders where the presence or absence of the in laws result in equally big responsibilities. The numerous constraints put on us by our culture and to a certain extent, the crazy real estate prices make it difficult to start a life post marriage easily in a new setup.
Arranged Love, Anyone?
I feel for today's women I meet but at the same time can't help but expect her to be a superwoman. I am not hypocritical when I say the above as I can definitely assure that whether she remains a Louis Lane rather than a Bat Girl, I would definitely become the best Bruce Wayne that I can be. One thing that still remains unchanged is the aspect of love which makes a Louis Lane live with all the quirks of Superman and still trust him when he flies away at night:) The key is to try and fall in love with the person you are arranging your life with( provided you have arranged someone who has those potentials/"It could work" feeling otherwise I feel it won't). The rest, as they say, will fall in place.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Dating: Avoiding a bad Equilibrium
Very interesting post from Dan Ariely's blog post
When going on a first date, we try to achieve a delicate balance between expressing ourselves, learning about the other person, but also not offending anyone — favoring friendly over controversial – even at the risk of sounding dull. This approach might be best exemplified by an amusing quote from the film Best in Show: “We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.” Basically, in an attempt to coordinate on the right dating strategy, we stick to universally shared interests like food or the weather. It’s easy to talk about our views on mushroom and anchovies, and the topic arises easily over dinner at a pizzeria – still, that doesn’t guarantee a stimulating conversation, and certainly not a real measure of our long-term romantic match.
This is what economists call a bad equilibrium – it is a strategy that all the players in the game can adopt and converge on – but it is not a desirable outcome for anyone.
We decided to look at this problem in the context of online dating. We picked apart emails sent between online daters, prepared to dissect the juicy details of first introductions. And we found a general trend supporting the idea that people like to maintain boring equilibrium at all costs: we found a lot of people who may, in actuality, have interesting things to say, but presented themselves as utterly insipid in their written conversations. The dialogue was boring, consisting mainly of questions like, “Where did you go to college?” or “What are your hobbies?” “What is your line of work?” etc.
We sensed a compulsion to avoid rocking the boat, and so we decided to push these hesitant daters overboard. What did we do? We limited the type of discussions that online daters could engage in by eliminating their ability to ask anything that they wanted and giving them a preset list of questions and allowing them to ask only these questions. The questions we chose had nothing to do with the weather and how many brothers and sisters they have, and instead all the questions were interesting and personally revealing (ie., “how many romantic partners did you have?”, “When was your last breakup?”, “Do you have any STDs?”, “Have you ever broken someone’s heart?”, “How do you feel about abortion?”). Our daters had to choose questions from the list to ask another dater, and could not ask anything else. They were forced to risk it by posing questions that are considered outside of generally accepted bounds. And their partners responded, creating much livelier conversations than we had seen when daters came up with their own questions. Instead of talking about the World Cup or their favorite desserts, they shared their innermost fears or told the story of losing their virginity. Everyone, both sender and replier, was happier with the interaction.
What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from. The good news is that if we restrict the equilibria we can get people to gravitate toward behaviors that are better for everyone (more generally this suggests that some restricted marketplaces can yield more desirable outcomes).
And what can you do personally with this idea? Think about what you can do to make sure that your discussions are not the boring but not risky type. Maybe set the rules of discussion upfront and get your partner to agree that tonight you will only ask questions and talk about things you are truly interested in. Maybe you can agree to ask 5 difficult questions first, instead of wasting time talking about your favorite colors. Or maybe we can create a list of topics that are not allowed. By forcing people to step out of their comfort zone, risk tipping the relationship equilibria, we might ultimately gain more.
When going on a first date, we try to achieve a delicate balance between expressing ourselves, learning about the other person, but also not offending anyone — favoring friendly over controversial – even at the risk of sounding dull. This approach might be best exemplified by an amusing quote from the film Best in Show: “We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.” Basically, in an attempt to coordinate on the right dating strategy, we stick to universally shared interests like food or the weather. It’s easy to talk about our views on mushroom and anchovies, and the topic arises easily over dinner at a pizzeria – still, that doesn’t guarantee a stimulating conversation, and certainly not a real measure of our long-term romantic match.
This is what economists call a bad equilibrium – it is a strategy that all the players in the game can adopt and converge on – but it is not a desirable outcome for anyone.
We decided to look at this problem in the context of online dating. We picked apart emails sent between online daters, prepared to dissect the juicy details of first introductions. And we found a general trend supporting the idea that people like to maintain boring equilibrium at all costs: we found a lot of people who may, in actuality, have interesting things to say, but presented themselves as utterly insipid in their written conversations. The dialogue was boring, consisting mainly of questions like, “Where did you go to college?” or “What are your hobbies?” “What is your line of work?” etc.
We sensed a compulsion to avoid rocking the boat, and so we decided to push these hesitant daters overboard. What did we do? We limited the type of discussions that online daters could engage in by eliminating their ability to ask anything that they wanted and giving them a preset list of questions and allowing them to ask only these questions. The questions we chose had nothing to do with the weather and how many brothers and sisters they have, and instead all the questions were interesting and personally revealing (ie., “how many romantic partners did you have?”, “When was your last breakup?”, “Do you have any STDs?”, “Have you ever broken someone’s heart?”, “How do you feel about abortion?”). Our daters had to choose questions from the list to ask another dater, and could not ask anything else. They were forced to risk it by posing questions that are considered outside of generally accepted bounds. And their partners responded, creating much livelier conversations than we had seen when daters came up with their own questions. Instead of talking about the World Cup or their favorite desserts, they shared their innermost fears or told the story of losing their virginity. Everyone, both sender and replier, was happier with the interaction.
What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from. The good news is that if we restrict the equilibria we can get people to gravitate toward behaviors that are better for everyone (more generally this suggests that some restricted marketplaces can yield more desirable outcomes).
And what can you do personally with this idea? Think about what you can do to make sure that your discussions are not the boring but not risky type. Maybe set the rules of discussion upfront and get your partner to agree that tonight you will only ask questions and talk about things you are truly interested in. Maybe you can agree to ask 5 difficult questions first, instead of wasting time talking about your favorite colors. Or maybe we can create a list of topics that are not allowed. By forcing people to step out of their comfort zone, risk tipping the relationship equilibria, we might ultimately gain more.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Arranged Marriage
Thanks to Angie, I landed on this wonderful piece from NewYorker
Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived—had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had been tricked (as everyone had predicted she would be) and ended up in a sort of American village. She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern Rochester airport, and of the Pittsford Wegmans—a grocery store that was the first thing she described to her mother once she got her on the phone. When Amina asked about the field, George explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved, and so no one could build a house there. After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which reminded her of her grandmother’s village. She had been born there, back when the house was still a hut, with a thatched roof and a glazed-mud floor. Two years later, her parents had left the village to find work in Dhaka, but she had stayed with her grandmother and her Parveen Auntie until she was five years old. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog hiding in the ragged shade of a coconut palm.
Nanu had had five daughters and two sons, but both of Amina’s uncles had died before she was born. The elder one, Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini during the war, while the younger, Emdad, had stayed in the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Even though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother had loved the best: that was why she’d kept him with her. When you tried to trick God in that way, bad things could happen. Emdad had died first, in a motorbike accident on his way to Shyamnagar, delivering prescription medicines for her grandmother’s pharmacy. Two months later, Khokon had been killed by General Yahya’s soldiers. Those deaths were the reason that Nanu had become the way she was now, quiet and heavy, like a stone.
Little by little, over the six months that they’d spent e-mailing each other, Amina had told George about her life. She’d said that she came from a good family, and that her parents had sacrificed to send her to an English-medium school, but she had not exaggerated her father’s financial situation or the extent of her formal education. She’d explained that she’d learned to speak English at Maple Leaf International, but that she’d been forced to drop out when she was thirteen, because her father could no longer pay the fees. She’d also confessed that she was twenty-eight, rather than twenty-seven years old: her parents had waited a year to file her birth certificate so that she might one day have extra time to qualify for university or the civil-service exam. Her mother had warned her to be careful about what she revealed in her e-mails, but Amina found that once she started writing it was difficult to stop.
She told George how her father’s business plans had a tendency to fail, and how each time one of those schemes foundered they had lost their apartment. She told him about the year they had spent living in Tejgaon, after having to leave the building called Moti Mahal, and how during that time her father had bought a single egg every day, which her mother had cooked for Amina because she was still growing and needed the protein. One night, when she had tried to share the egg with her parents, dividing it into three parts, her father had got so angry that he had tried to beat her (with a jump rope), and would have succeeded if her mother hadn’t come after him with the broken handle of a chicken-feather broom.
Sometimes she got so involved in remembering what had happened that she forgot about the reader on the other end, and so she was surprised when George wrote back to tell her that her story had made him cry. He could not remember crying since his hamster had died, when he was in second grade, and he thought it meant that their connection was getting stronger. Amina responded immediately to apologize for making George cry, and to explain that it was not a sad story but a funny one, about her parents and the silly fights they sometimes had. Even if she and George didn’t always understand each other, she never felt shy asking him questions. What level did the American second grade correspond to in the British system? What had he eaten for dinner as a child? And what, she was very curious to know, was a hamster?
It felt wonderful to have someone to confide in, someone she could trust not to gossip. (With whom could George gossip about Amina, after all?) It was a pleasure to write about difficult times in the past, now that things were better. By the time she started writing to George, Amina was supporting her parents with the money she made as a tutor for Top Talents; they were living in Mohammadpur, and of course they had plenty to eat. She still thought the proudest moment of her life had been when she was seventeen and returned home one day to surprise her parents with a television bought entirely out of her own earnings.
The other benefit of tutoring, one that she hadn’t considered when she started out, was the access it afforded her to the computers that belonged to her wealthy pupils. She saw one of those students, Sharmila, three times a week; Sharmila’s parents both had office jobs, and they encouraged Amina to stay as long as she wanted so that their daughter wouldn’t just sit around with the servants all afternoon. Sharmila’s mother confided that she thought Amina would be a good influence on her daughter’s character; Sharmila was very intelligent but easily distracted, and was not serious enough about saying her prayers. “She has been raised with everything,” her mother said the first time Amina arrived, a sweep of her arm taking in the marble floors of the living room and the heavy brocade curtains on the picture windows overlooking the black surface of Gulshan Lake, which was revealed, even at this height, to be clogged with garbage, water lilies, and the shanties of migrant families. “She doesn’t even know how lucky she is.” Amina nodded politely, but she knew that Sharmila’s mother’s complaints were a performance. She would put on the same show when her daughter’s marriage was being negotiated, exaggerating Sharmila’s incompetence at preparing a simple dal or kitchuri, so that the groom’s family would understand what a little princess they were about to receive.
Amina had sworn Sharmila to secrecy on the subject of AsianEuro.com, and then they’d had a lot of fun, looking through the photos in the “male gallery.” Sharmila always chose the youngest and best-looking men; she would squeal and gasp when she came across one who was very old or very fat. More often than not, Amina had the same impulses, but she reminded herself that she was not a little girl playing a game. Her family’s future depended on this decision, and she could not afford to base it on some kind of childish whim.
According to her mother, the man should not be divorced and he certainly shouldn’t have any children. He had to have a bachelor’s degree and a dependable job, and he should not drink alcohol. He should not be younger than thirty-five or older than fifty, and he had to be willing to convert to Islam. Her mother also insisted that Amina take off her glasses and wear a red sari that she had inherited from her cousin Ghaniyah for the photograph, but, once it had been taken and scanned into the computer (a great inconvenience) at the Internet café near her Auntie No. 2’s apartment in Savar, her mother would not allow her to post it online. “Why would you want a man who is interested only in your photograph?” she demanded, and nothing Amina could say about the way the site worked would change her mind.
“But the men will think you’re ugly!” Sharmila exclaimed, when she heard about Amina’s mother’s stipulations. They were sitting on the rug in Sharmila’s bedroom, with Sharmila’s “Basic English Grammar” open between them. Amina’s student was wearing the kameez of her International School uniform with a pair of pajama trousers decorated with frogs. She looked Amina up and down critically.
“Your hair is coarse, and you have an apple nose, but you aren’t ugly,” she concluded. “And now no one is going to write to you.”
And although Amina had the very same fears, she decided to pretend to agree with her mother, for the sake of Sharmila’s character.
As it happened, George did not post his picture online, either. He and Amina exchanged photos only once they had decided to become “exclusive” and take their profiles down from the site. When he saw her photograph, George wrote, he became even more convinced that she was the right person for him—not because of how pretty she was but because she hadn’t used her “superficial charms” to advertise herself, the way so many American women did.
Amina hadn’t believed that there was a man on earth—much less on AsianEuro.com—who would satisfy all of her mother’s requirements, but George came very close. He was thirty-nine years old, and he had never been married. He had a master’s degree from SUNY Buffalo and had worked as an aeronautical engineer for the I.T.T. Corporation for the past eleven years. He liked to have a Heineken beer while he was watching football—his team was the Dallas Cowboys—but he never had more than two, and he would think of converting to Islam, if that was what it would take to marry Amina.
Both of Amina’s parents had hoped that she might someday go abroad, but it was her mother who had worked tirelessly with her at every step of the four-year journey that had finally led her to Rochester. If you counted their earliest efforts, it had actually been much longer than four years. When Amina was a girl, her mother had hoped to make her a famous singer, but once she discovered that Amina hadn’t inherited her beautiful voice she’d switched her to the classical Bengali wooden flute. Amina had found it easy to work diligently at her studies, but could somehow never make time for the flute; she had abandoned it in favor of “The Five Positions of Ballet,” and then “Ventriloquism: History and Techniques,” both illustrated in manuals that she and her mother checked out from the British Council library.
Amina’s parents’ first really serious idea had been to apply to American universities; Amina had written to ten colleges, six of which had sent letters back. The University of Pittsburgh had encouraged her to apply for a special scholarship. Even with the scholarship, however, the tuition would have been six thousand dollars a year—that was without considering the cost of living in America. Her parents had read the letter from Pittsburgh over and over again, as if some new information might appear, and they had shown it to all the Dhaka relatives, who had, of course, begun to gossip. According to Ghaniyah, they were accusing Amina and her parents of “sleeping under a torn quilt and dreaming of gold.”
A few weeks after the letter came, Amina was listening to the Voice of America. She and her mother had got into the habit of tuning in to the broadcasts in Special English, and even after those became too simple for Amina they continued to turn on “This Is America.” One day the program was dedicated to the different types of student and work visas, and the S.A.T., G.M.A.T., and TOEFL tests that foreign students might use to qualify for them. Amina was only half-listening (these were strategies that she had already considered, and all of them cost money) when the announcer said something that made her look up from her book. Her mother also paused, holding the iron above her father’s best shirt and trousers, which were arranged on the ceramic tile as if there were already a man inside them.
“Of course, the easiest way to come to America is to find an American and get married!”
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of this; ever since she was a little girl, she had loved everything foreign. When other girls traded their dresses for shalwar kameez, Amina had gone on wearing hers: she’d had to put on a white-and-gray shalwar kameez in order to go to Maple Leaf, but when she got home from school she changed back into a dress or a skirt. Her mother shook her head, but her father laughed and called her his little memsahib. Whenever he had money, he’d buy her a Fanta and a Cadbury chocolate bar.
Most of all, she had always loved fair skin. Her father was brown, and before she was born he had worried that she would be dark. But her mother was ujjal shamla, and Amina had come out golden, too. Once, when she was about eight or nine, she had said how much she loved fair skin in front of her father’s business partner, who was as black as the fishermen who worked on the boats near her grandmother’s house. Farooq Uncle had only laughed, but his wife had told Amina seriously that she had once felt the same way, and look whom she had ended up marrying. If you wanted one thing too much, she said, you sometimes wound up with the opposite.
Amina had never forgotten that advice. It was a species of Deshi wisdom that she knew from the village, and it was powerful, as long as you stayed in the village. The farther away you got, Amina believed, the less it held. It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back. That was why, when she heard the announcer’s joke on Voice of America, the first thing she thought of was the Internet.
The thing that had impressed her about AsianEuro.com was the volume of both men and women looking for mates. When Amina joined, there were six hundred and forty-two men with profiles posted on the site, and, even without a photograph, Amina’s profile got several responses right away. As it turned out, the problem was not making contact but staying in touch. Sometimes (as with Mike G. and Victor S.) a man would correspond for months before he suddenly stopped writing, with no explanation. Other times she would be the one to stop, because of something the man had written. In the case of Mike R., it was a request for a photo of Amina in a bathing suit; for “John H.,” it was the admission, in a message sent at 3:43 A.M., that he was actually a Bengali Muslim living in Calcutta.
Her father had used these examples as ballast for his argument that the people who joined those sites could not be trusted, but her mother had weathered each disappointment along with Amina, and her resolve to help her daughter had seemed to grow stronger as the years passed and her father’s situation failed to change. They had never been like an ordinary mother and daughter, partly because Amina was an only child, and partly because they’d spent so much time together after she had to leave school, studying the textbooks they borrowed from the British Council: “Functional English” and “New English First.” When Amina and George began writing to each other, she and her mother had discussed the e-mails with the same seriousness they had once devoted to those textbooks. She had not hidden anything from her mother (not even the Heinekens), and eventually they had both become convinced of George’s goodness. They had been a team, analyzing every new development, and so it was strange for Amina, once things were finally settled, to realize that her mother would not be coming with her.
Amina had been e-mailing with George for three months when he came to Dhaka to meet her family. Their courtship had more in common with her grandparents’—which had been arranged through a professional matchmaker in their village—than it did with that of her parents, who had had a love marriage and run away to Khulna when her mother was seventeen years old. Her grandparents hadn’t seen each other until their wedding day, but they had examined photos. She had thought of her grandmother the day she received George’s photo as an e-mail attachment. The photo wasn’t what she’d been expecting, but once she’d seen it she couldn’t remember the face she had imagined. That face had been erased by the real George: heavy-cheeked and fleshy, with half-lidded, sleepy eyes. His features were compressed into the center of his face, leaving large, uncolonized expanses of cheek and brow and chin. His skin was so light that even Amina had to admit that it was possible to be too fair.
She had put her hand over half the photo, so that only the eyes and forehead were visible. They were blue eyes, close together, with sparse blond brows and lashes. Could I love just those eyes? she asked herself, apart from anything else, and, after a certain number of minutes spent getting used to them, she decided that she could. She covered the eyes and asked the same question of the nose (more challenging because of the way it protruded, different from any nose she knew). She had slept on it, but the following day at the British Council (an agony to wait until the computer was free) she’d been pleased to discover that the photograph was better than she remembered. By the end of the day she thought that she could love even the nose.
Her father went to meet George at the airport, and her mother came to her room to tell her that he had arrived—although, of course, she had been watching from the balcony. The taxi had stopped at the beginning of the lane, which was unpaved. Her mother had worried about George walking down the dirt road to their apartment complex (what if it rained?), and they had even discussed hiring a rickshaw. But they would have had to hire two rickshaws, with the bags, and hiring two rickshaws to take two grown men less than two hundred metres would have made more of a spectacle than it was worth. Even from her hiding place on the balcony, behind her mother’s hanging laundry, she could hear the landlady’s sons, Hamid and Hassan, on the roof, practically falling over the edge to get a glimpse of Amina’s suitor.
“What is he like?” she asked, and her mother reassured her.
“He’s just like his picture. Nothing is wrong.”
George said that he had known when he received her first e-mail that she was the one. When Amina asked how he had known, he was offended, and asked whether this was some kind of test. But Amina hadn’t been testing him: she really wanted to know, because her own experience had been so different. With the men who had contacted her before George, she had wondered each time if this was the person she would marry. Once she and George started e-mailing each other exclusively, she had wondered the same thing about him, and she had continued wondering even after he booked the flight to Bangladesh. She wondered that first night as he ate with her family at their wobbly table, covered with a plastic map-of-the-world tablecloth, which her father discreetly steadied by placing his elbow somewhere in the neighborhood of Sudan, and during the excruciating hours they spent in the homes of her Dhaka aunts, talking to each other in English while everyone sat around them and watched. It wasn’t until she was actually on the plane to Washington, D.C., wearing the gold-and-diamond ring they had bought in a hurry at Rifles Square on the last day of George’s visit, that she finally became convinced it was going to happen.
Her visa required her to marry within ninety days of her arrival in the U.S. George wanted to allow her to get settled, and his mother needed time to organize the wedding party, so they waited almost two months. Amina’s mother understood that it wouldn’t be practical for George to pay for another place for Amina to live during that time, and she certainly didn’t want her living alone in a foreign city. She agreed that Amina could stay in George’s house for those months, but she made Amina promise that she and George would wait to do that until after the ceremony. She talked about the one thing that Amina could lose that she would never be able to get back.
In Dhaka, Amina had intended to keep her promise, although she didn’t entirely agree with her mother. Especially after she got to America, and had time to think about it, it seemed to her that there were a lot of other things that could be lost in an equally permanent way. Her father had lost his business partner, for example, and he’d never found another full-time job; after that, they had lost their furniture, and then their apartments in Mirpur and Savar, and only Ghaniyah’s father’s intervention—securing the apartment in Mohammadpur at a special price, through a business associate—had kept them from becoming homeless altogether. These setbacks had taken their toll on her mother, who suffered from stomach ulcers and persistent rashes; Amina thought her mother was still beautiful, with her large, dark eyes and her thin, straight nose, but her mother claimed to have lost her looks for good. Worst of all, her grandmother had lost Emdad and Khokon, and nothing she could do would ever bring them back.
Compared with those losses, whatever it was that Amina lost on the third night she spent in George’s house was nothing. George had agreed to her mother’s conditions, and had set up a futon bed for her in the empty room upstairs. On the first two nights, they’d brushed their teeth together like a married couple, and then George had kissed her forehead before disappearing into his room. There were no curtains on the window of the room where Amina slept, and the tree outside made an unfamiliar, angled shadow on the floor. Everything was perfectly quiet. Even when she’d had her own room at home, there had always been noise from the street—horns, crying babies, the barking of dogs—not to mention the considerable sound of her father snoring on the other side of the wall.
Ordinarily she wore a long T-shirt and pajama bottoms to bed, but on the third night she experimented by going into the bathroom in only a kameez. “You look cute,” George said, and that emboldened her; when he bent down to kiss her forehead, as usual, she looked up, so that they actually kissed on the mouth. (This was something that they had done downstairs on the couch during the day, but not yet at night.) Amina tried to imagine that her plain, machine-made top was a hand-embroidered wedding sari, and, when she pressed her body against her fiancé’s, a strange sound escaped from him. It was as if there were another person inside him, who’d never spoken until now. That small, new voice—and the fact that she had been the cause of it—was what made her take George’s hand and follow him into his bedroom.
She was surprised by how unpleasant it was, how unlike that kiss in the bathroom, which had given her the same feeling between her legs that she sometimes got when watching actors kiss on television. It didn’t hurt as much as Ghaniyah had said it would, but she was too hot with George on top of her, and she didn’t like the way he looked when he closed his eyes—as if he were in pain somewhere very far away. On the other hand, it was sweet the way he worried afterward, anxiously confirming that it was what she wanted. He asked her whether she minded having broken her promise to her mother, and the next morning, waking up for the first time beside someone who was not a member of her family, she was surprised to find that she had no regrets at all.
She told George that she didn’t need a wedding dress, that she was happy to get married in the clothes she already owned. She had ordered three new dresses before coming to Rochester, because tailoring was so much less expensive back at home.
“That’s why I love you!” George said, slapping his hand on the kitchen table, as if he’d just won some kind of wager. “You’re so much more sensible than other women.”
Amina thought that it was settled, but later that night George talked to Ed, from his office, who reminded him that they would eventually have to show their wedding photographs to the I.N.S.
“Ed says a white dress is better for the green card,” George said. “My cousin Jess’ll take you shopping. Go get something you like.”
Her mother wanted her to get married in a sari. Amina argued that that kind of wedding, with the gold jewelry, the red tinselled orna, and the hennaed hands, was really more Hindu than Muslim, and that as long as she was going to wear foreign clothes they might as well be American ones.
“No need for a red sari,” her mother conceded. “How about blue? Or green?”
“It has to be a white dress,” Amina said. “It has to be a real American wedding.”
“Even a white sari,” her mother said. “Some of the girls are doing it. I saw it on Trendz.” Since she’d left, her mother had been spending hours every day in the Internet café in Savar. It was amazing to Amina that her mother could navigate even English sites like the Daily Star, where she knew how to get to the Life Style page, with its features on “hot new restaurants” and “splashy summer sandals,” its recipes for French toast and beef Bourguignonne, and its decorating tips (“How about painting one wall of your living room a vibrant spring color?”).
“A dress,” Amina said firmly. “That’s what the I.N.S. wants.”
Of course her mother didn’t really care about the dress, just as she would never consider visiting a restaurant (where who knew how dirty the kitchen might be) or painting one wall of the room where she brushed her teeth, chopped vegetables, and did the ironing “a vibrant spring color.” The white dress was a way for her mother to talk about a concern she had had ever since the beginning—that Amina and George were not going to be properly married, by both an American civil servant and a Muslim imam.
The wedding dress was sleeveless white organdie, with white satin flowers appliquéd on the neck and the bust. She and Jessica compromised by eliminating the veil, but even without it the dress cost more than three hundred dollars, not including alterations. Amina stood on a wooden box with a clamp like a giant paper clip at her waist, and tried not to cry.
“Smile!” the saleswoman said. “A lot of girls would kill for a figure like yours.”
“No kidding,” Jessica said. “I wasn’t that skinny when I was fourteen years old.”
“Don’t you like it?” the saleswoman asked.
“She’s dumbstruck. Wait until George sees you in that.”
Jessica chatted happily with the saleswoman as they paid for the dress with George’s card, but once they were in the car she asked Amina whether everything was O.K.
“Everything is fine,” Amina said. “Only it was so expensive.”
“George doesn’t mind,” Jessica said. “Trust me, I could tell. Are you sure there’s nothing else?”
Ordinarily when Amina felt homesickness coming on, she was able to distract herself with some kind of housework. Vacuuming, in particular, was helpful. Now, sitting in the car next to George’s cousin, she was unprepared for the sudden stiffness in her chest, or the screen that dropped over everything, making Rochester’s clean air and tidy green lawns, and even the inside of Jessica’s very large, brand-new car, look dull and shabby. George’s cousin was so kind, and still there was no way that she could explain to her what was really wrong. When they stopped at a red light, Jessica turned to Amina and put a hand on her arm.
“Because if something was wrong between you and George, I want you to know that you could tell me. I’m a good listener.”
“Oh, no,” Amina said, “George is no problem,” and Jessica laughed, although Amina wasn’t trying to be funny. She could tell that Jessica wasn’t going to allow her to be silent, and so she searched for a question.
“What is the meaning of ‘dumbstruck’?” she asked, feeling slightly dishonest. She had encountered that word for the first time in an exercise in a conversation primer, a dialogue between a Miss Mulligan and a Mr. Fredericks—“ ‘Your manners leave me dumbstruck, Mr. Fredericks,’ Miss Mulligan exclaimed”—and for some reason that phrase had lodged itself in Amina’s head. Often, when someone spat on the street in front of her, when a woman elbowed her out of the way at the market, or when she ran into one of her old classmates at the British Council and the girl inquired sweetly whether her father was still unemployed, she had thought of Miss Mulligan and how dumbstruck she might have been had she ever found herself in Bangladesh.
“Oh, um—surprised. It just means surprised. I bet you wondered what I was talking about!”
But it didn’t just mean surprised. It meant so surprised that you could not speak. As Cousin Jessica continued to talk—about her weight and Amina’s, about the foods she ate, didn’t eat, or intended to eat—Amina concentrated on nodding and making noises to show that she understood. It was possible to be struck dumb by all sorts of emotion, not only surprise, and as they drove back toward Pittsford Amina thought that there ought to be a whole set of words to encompass those different varieties of silence.
At the bridal shower, Aunt Louise had wanted to know Amina’s favorite flower, and had listened politely as Amina explained about the krishnachura and the romantic origins of its name. She felt silly when Aunt Louise showed up at city hall on the morning of the wedding, carrying a bouquet of lilacs and apologizing because there were no krishnachura to be found in Rochester. Then George’s mother arrived with her own wedding veil, which she shyly offered to Amina for the ceremony.
“She didn’t want a veil,” George said, annoyed with his mother, but Amina took her mother-in-law’s side, just as a bride would at home. Jessica gathered up a few of the ringlets the hairdresser had created and pinned the veil so that Amina could wear it hanging down her back. Then the small party—Jessica, George’s mother, Aunt Louise and Uncle Dan, Ed from George’s office and his Filipino wife, Min, and George’s college friends Bill and Katie—followed them into the office, where they completed the paperwork for the marriage certificate. Amina thought that this was the wedding itself, so she was confused when the clerk ushered them into a smaller, carpeted room with a bench and asked them to wait.
“Is there some problem?” she asked George, but he was distracted by his friends, who were snapping pictures and laughing. “Is something wrong?”
“Sit down,” George’s mother said, but Aunt Louise grabbed her arm and jerked her upright.
“Careful!”
“What is it?” Amina said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. For weeks she had been convinced that something would get in the way of the ceremony; this morning she had prayed—not that nothing would go wrong but that she would be prepared enough to see it coming and resourceful enough to find a way around it.
“If you sit, your dress will crease,” Aunt Louise said.
“Come on,” George’s mother said, putting her hand on Amina’s back. “It’s your turn.” And Amina was relieved to see that a door had opened on the opposite side of the room, and a short, bald man in a suit, a man who looked as if nothing on earth had ever disturbed his composure, was gesturing for them to enter. She understood that the wedding was continuing as planned, and she looked carefully around the room because she knew that her mother would want to hear exactly what it looked like. There were potted trees with braided trunks on either side of the window, and three rows of white plastic folding chairs, half-filled by George’s family and friends. The deputy city clerk stood behind a wooden lectern underneath two certificates framed in gold. With the light from the window shining on his glasses, Amina couldn’t see his eyes.
She had not expected to be nervous. George had told her what her cue would be, and Amina allowed her mind to wander while she waited for it. When she’d left Desh, there had still been the possibility that her parents would be able to come to Rochester for the wedding. Ninety days had seemed like enough time to plan, but when George went online to check the tickets they were almost fifteen hundred dollars each, even if her parents made stops in Dubai and Hamburg, Germany. George had been willing to help pay for the tickets, but she could tell that he wasn’t happy about it, and so she had called her parents and given them her opinion: it would be a waste of money. The whole wedding would take maybe an hour and a half (including driving time), and Amina and her father agreed that to fly twenty hours in order to be there for something that took less than two hours didn’t make a lot of sense.
In the end, as she’d expected, the problem was not her father but her mother. Her mother had agreed at first, and they’d even made another plan: as soon as Amina and George could come back to Dhaka, they would buy wedding clothes and Amina would go to the beauty salon; then they would go to a studio and take wedding photographs. Once they had the photographs, her mother could look at them all the time: it would be no different than if they’d all celebrated the wedding together for real.
Amina thought that her mother was satisfied by this, but a few nights later she got a call. Her mother was crying, and it was hard to understand her. Her father told her not to worry, but when she asked why her mother was crying he said, “She’s crying because she’s going to miss your wedding. She’s going to miss it because I can’t afford the ticket.”
“No!” Amina said. “We decided—it didn’t make sense. Three thousand dollars for one party!”
“Your wedding party. What kind of terrible parents don’t come to their own daughter’s wedding?”
She started to argue, but her father wasn’t listening. Her mother was saying something in the background.
“What does she say?”
Her father paused so long that she would have thought the call had been dropped, if it weren’t for the sounds in the background. It was morning in Mohammadpur, and Amina thought she could hear the venders calling outside the window: “Chilis! Eggs! Excellent-quality feather brooms!”
“She says it would have been better if you’d never been born,” her father said finally.
“Do you, Amina Mazid, take this man, George Barker, to be your lawfully wedded husband?” the city clerk asked.
“I do,” Amina said.
The question was asked of George, and then the clerk pronounced them husband and wife. “You may kiss each other,” he said.
George leaned toward her and Amina leaped back. From the folding chairs, Cousin Jessica made a hiccupping sound. George’s face tightened like the mouth of a drawstring bag, and when Amina glanced behind her she saw an identical contraction on the face of her new mother-in-law. She hurriedly stepped toward George, smiling to let him know that it had been a mistake, that of course she wanted to kiss him in front of his family and friends.
Many hours later, after cocktails at Aunt Louise and Uncle Dan’s, the reception dinner at Giorgio’s Trattoria, and then sweets, coffee, and the opening of gifts at the house of George’s mother (who now insisted that Amina call her “Mom”), when they were home in bed together so much later than usual, George asked her why she hadn’t wanted to kiss him.
“You didn’t tell me,” she explained.
“You didn’t know there was kissing at a wedding?”
Amina had to think about that for a minute, because of course she had known. She had known since she was nine years old and her Auntie No. 2 had bought a television. She had seen it on “Dallas” and “L.A. Law” and “The Fall Guy,” and then, more recently, on her own television at home. There was no way to explain her ignorance to George.
“I did know. I guess I just didn’t believe it would happen to me.”
“You’ve kissed me a hundred times,” George said, in a voice that suggested to Amina that they might be about to have their first fight. She wanted to avoid that, especially tonight, because if there was anything she believed about marriage it was that arguing the way her parents did was a waste of time.
“Not only kissing. The marriage in total.”
“You didn’t believe we were getting married? What did you think we were doing?”
“In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed.”
“And in America?”
“In America you make your plans and then they happen.”
To her relief, George finally smiled. “So you planned to kiss me, but you were surprised when it actually happened.”
Amina hesitated, but her husband was patient until she found the right words.
“Not only surprised,” she said. “I was dumbstruck.”
Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived—had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had been tricked (as everyone had predicted she would be) and ended up in a sort of American village. She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern Rochester airport, and of the Pittsford Wegmans—a grocery store that was the first thing she described to her mother once she got her on the phone. When Amina asked about the field, George explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved, and so no one could build a house there. After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which reminded her of her grandmother’s village. She had been born there, back when the house was still a hut, with a thatched roof and a glazed-mud floor. Two years later, her parents had left the village to find work in Dhaka, but she had stayed with her grandmother and her Parveen Auntie until she was five years old. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog hiding in the ragged shade of a coconut palm.
Nanu had had five daughters and two sons, but both of Amina’s uncles had died before she was born. The elder one, Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini during the war, while the younger, Emdad, had stayed in the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Even though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother had loved the best: that was why she’d kept him with her. When you tried to trick God in that way, bad things could happen. Emdad had died first, in a motorbike accident on his way to Shyamnagar, delivering prescription medicines for her grandmother’s pharmacy. Two months later, Khokon had been killed by General Yahya’s soldiers. Those deaths were the reason that Nanu had become the way she was now, quiet and heavy, like a stone.
Little by little, over the six months that they’d spent e-mailing each other, Amina had told George about her life. She’d said that she came from a good family, and that her parents had sacrificed to send her to an English-medium school, but she had not exaggerated her father’s financial situation or the extent of her formal education. She’d explained that she’d learned to speak English at Maple Leaf International, but that she’d been forced to drop out when she was thirteen, because her father could no longer pay the fees. She’d also confessed that she was twenty-eight, rather than twenty-seven years old: her parents had waited a year to file her birth certificate so that she might one day have extra time to qualify for university or the civil-service exam. Her mother had warned her to be careful about what she revealed in her e-mails, but Amina found that once she started writing it was difficult to stop.
She told George how her father’s business plans had a tendency to fail, and how each time one of those schemes foundered they had lost their apartment. She told him about the year they had spent living in Tejgaon, after having to leave the building called Moti Mahal, and how during that time her father had bought a single egg every day, which her mother had cooked for Amina because she was still growing and needed the protein. One night, when she had tried to share the egg with her parents, dividing it into three parts, her father had got so angry that he had tried to beat her (with a jump rope), and would have succeeded if her mother hadn’t come after him with the broken handle of a chicken-feather broom.
Sometimes she got so involved in remembering what had happened that she forgot about the reader on the other end, and so she was surprised when George wrote back to tell her that her story had made him cry. He could not remember crying since his hamster had died, when he was in second grade, and he thought it meant that their connection was getting stronger. Amina responded immediately to apologize for making George cry, and to explain that it was not a sad story but a funny one, about her parents and the silly fights they sometimes had. Even if she and George didn’t always understand each other, she never felt shy asking him questions. What level did the American second grade correspond to in the British system? What had he eaten for dinner as a child? And what, she was very curious to know, was a hamster?
It felt wonderful to have someone to confide in, someone she could trust not to gossip. (With whom could George gossip about Amina, after all?) It was a pleasure to write about difficult times in the past, now that things were better. By the time she started writing to George, Amina was supporting her parents with the money she made as a tutor for Top Talents; they were living in Mohammadpur, and of course they had plenty to eat. She still thought the proudest moment of her life had been when she was seventeen and returned home one day to surprise her parents with a television bought entirely out of her own earnings.
The other benefit of tutoring, one that she hadn’t considered when she started out, was the access it afforded her to the computers that belonged to her wealthy pupils. She saw one of those students, Sharmila, three times a week; Sharmila’s parents both had office jobs, and they encouraged Amina to stay as long as she wanted so that their daughter wouldn’t just sit around with the servants all afternoon. Sharmila’s mother confided that she thought Amina would be a good influence on her daughter’s character; Sharmila was very intelligent but easily distracted, and was not serious enough about saying her prayers. “She has been raised with everything,” her mother said the first time Amina arrived, a sweep of her arm taking in the marble floors of the living room and the heavy brocade curtains on the picture windows overlooking the black surface of Gulshan Lake, which was revealed, even at this height, to be clogged with garbage, water lilies, and the shanties of migrant families. “She doesn’t even know how lucky she is.” Amina nodded politely, but she knew that Sharmila’s mother’s complaints were a performance. She would put on the same show when her daughter’s marriage was being negotiated, exaggerating Sharmila’s incompetence at preparing a simple dal or kitchuri, so that the groom’s family would understand what a little princess they were about to receive.
Amina had sworn Sharmila to secrecy on the subject of AsianEuro.com, and then they’d had a lot of fun, looking through the photos in the “male gallery.” Sharmila always chose the youngest and best-looking men; she would squeal and gasp when she came across one who was very old or very fat. More often than not, Amina had the same impulses, but she reminded herself that she was not a little girl playing a game. Her family’s future depended on this decision, and she could not afford to base it on some kind of childish whim.
According to her mother, the man should not be divorced and he certainly shouldn’t have any children. He had to have a bachelor’s degree and a dependable job, and he should not drink alcohol. He should not be younger than thirty-five or older than fifty, and he had to be willing to convert to Islam. Her mother also insisted that Amina take off her glasses and wear a red sari that she had inherited from her cousin Ghaniyah for the photograph, but, once it had been taken and scanned into the computer (a great inconvenience) at the Internet café near her Auntie No. 2’s apartment in Savar, her mother would not allow her to post it online. “Why would you want a man who is interested only in your photograph?” she demanded, and nothing Amina could say about the way the site worked would change her mind.
“But the men will think you’re ugly!” Sharmila exclaimed, when she heard about Amina’s mother’s stipulations. They were sitting on the rug in Sharmila’s bedroom, with Sharmila’s “Basic English Grammar” open between them. Amina’s student was wearing the kameez of her International School uniform with a pair of pajama trousers decorated with frogs. She looked Amina up and down critically.
“Your hair is coarse, and you have an apple nose, but you aren’t ugly,” she concluded. “And now no one is going to write to you.”
And although Amina had the very same fears, she decided to pretend to agree with her mother, for the sake of Sharmila’s character.
As it happened, George did not post his picture online, either. He and Amina exchanged photos only once they had decided to become “exclusive” and take their profiles down from the site. When he saw her photograph, George wrote, he became even more convinced that she was the right person for him—not because of how pretty she was but because she hadn’t used her “superficial charms” to advertise herself, the way so many American women did.
Amina hadn’t believed that there was a man on earth—much less on AsianEuro.com—who would satisfy all of her mother’s requirements, but George came very close. He was thirty-nine years old, and he had never been married. He had a master’s degree from SUNY Buffalo and had worked as an aeronautical engineer for the I.T.T. Corporation for the past eleven years. He liked to have a Heineken beer while he was watching football—his team was the Dallas Cowboys—but he never had more than two, and he would think of converting to Islam, if that was what it would take to marry Amina.
Both of Amina’s parents had hoped that she might someday go abroad, but it was her mother who had worked tirelessly with her at every step of the four-year journey that had finally led her to Rochester. If you counted their earliest efforts, it had actually been much longer than four years. When Amina was a girl, her mother had hoped to make her a famous singer, but once she discovered that Amina hadn’t inherited her beautiful voice she’d switched her to the classical Bengali wooden flute. Amina had found it easy to work diligently at her studies, but could somehow never make time for the flute; she had abandoned it in favor of “The Five Positions of Ballet,” and then “Ventriloquism: History and Techniques,” both illustrated in manuals that she and her mother checked out from the British Council library.
Amina’s parents’ first really serious idea had been to apply to American universities; Amina had written to ten colleges, six of which had sent letters back. The University of Pittsburgh had encouraged her to apply for a special scholarship. Even with the scholarship, however, the tuition would have been six thousand dollars a year—that was without considering the cost of living in America. Her parents had read the letter from Pittsburgh over and over again, as if some new information might appear, and they had shown it to all the Dhaka relatives, who had, of course, begun to gossip. According to Ghaniyah, they were accusing Amina and her parents of “sleeping under a torn quilt and dreaming of gold.”
A few weeks after the letter came, Amina was listening to the Voice of America. She and her mother had got into the habit of tuning in to the broadcasts in Special English, and even after those became too simple for Amina they continued to turn on “This Is America.” One day the program was dedicated to the different types of student and work visas, and the S.A.T., G.M.A.T., and TOEFL tests that foreign students might use to qualify for them. Amina was only half-listening (these were strategies that she had already considered, and all of them cost money) when the announcer said something that made her look up from her book. Her mother also paused, holding the iron above her father’s best shirt and trousers, which were arranged on the ceramic tile as if there were already a man inside them.
“Of course, the easiest way to come to America is to find an American and get married!”
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of this; ever since she was a little girl, she had loved everything foreign. When other girls traded their dresses for shalwar kameez, Amina had gone on wearing hers: she’d had to put on a white-and-gray shalwar kameez in order to go to Maple Leaf, but when she got home from school she changed back into a dress or a skirt. Her mother shook her head, but her father laughed and called her his little memsahib. Whenever he had money, he’d buy her a Fanta and a Cadbury chocolate bar.
Most of all, she had always loved fair skin. Her father was brown, and before she was born he had worried that she would be dark. But her mother was ujjal shamla, and Amina had come out golden, too. Once, when she was about eight or nine, she had said how much she loved fair skin in front of her father’s business partner, who was as black as the fishermen who worked on the boats near her grandmother’s house. Farooq Uncle had only laughed, but his wife had told Amina seriously that she had once felt the same way, and look whom she had ended up marrying. If you wanted one thing too much, she said, you sometimes wound up with the opposite.
Amina had never forgotten that advice. It was a species of Deshi wisdom that she knew from the village, and it was powerful, as long as you stayed in the village. The farther away you got, Amina believed, the less it held. It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back. That was why, when she heard the announcer’s joke on Voice of America, the first thing she thought of was the Internet.
The thing that had impressed her about AsianEuro.com was the volume of both men and women looking for mates. When Amina joined, there were six hundred and forty-two men with profiles posted on the site, and, even without a photograph, Amina’s profile got several responses right away. As it turned out, the problem was not making contact but staying in touch. Sometimes (as with Mike G. and Victor S.) a man would correspond for months before he suddenly stopped writing, with no explanation. Other times she would be the one to stop, because of something the man had written. In the case of Mike R., it was a request for a photo of Amina in a bathing suit; for “John H.,” it was the admission, in a message sent at 3:43 A.M., that he was actually a Bengali Muslim living in Calcutta.
Her father had used these examples as ballast for his argument that the people who joined those sites could not be trusted, but her mother had weathered each disappointment along with Amina, and her resolve to help her daughter had seemed to grow stronger as the years passed and her father’s situation failed to change. They had never been like an ordinary mother and daughter, partly because Amina was an only child, and partly because they’d spent so much time together after she had to leave school, studying the textbooks they borrowed from the British Council: “Functional English” and “New English First.” When Amina and George began writing to each other, she and her mother had discussed the e-mails with the same seriousness they had once devoted to those textbooks. She had not hidden anything from her mother (not even the Heinekens), and eventually they had both become convinced of George’s goodness. They had been a team, analyzing every new development, and so it was strange for Amina, once things were finally settled, to realize that her mother would not be coming with her.
Amina had been e-mailing with George for three months when he came to Dhaka to meet her family. Their courtship had more in common with her grandparents’—which had been arranged through a professional matchmaker in their village—than it did with that of her parents, who had had a love marriage and run away to Khulna when her mother was seventeen years old. Her grandparents hadn’t seen each other until their wedding day, but they had examined photos. She had thought of her grandmother the day she received George’s photo as an e-mail attachment. The photo wasn’t what she’d been expecting, but once she’d seen it she couldn’t remember the face she had imagined. That face had been erased by the real George: heavy-cheeked and fleshy, with half-lidded, sleepy eyes. His features were compressed into the center of his face, leaving large, uncolonized expanses of cheek and brow and chin. His skin was so light that even Amina had to admit that it was possible to be too fair.
She had put her hand over half the photo, so that only the eyes and forehead were visible. They were blue eyes, close together, with sparse blond brows and lashes. Could I love just those eyes? she asked herself, apart from anything else, and, after a certain number of minutes spent getting used to them, she decided that she could. She covered the eyes and asked the same question of the nose (more challenging because of the way it protruded, different from any nose she knew). She had slept on it, but the following day at the British Council (an agony to wait until the computer was free) she’d been pleased to discover that the photograph was better than she remembered. By the end of the day she thought that she could love even the nose.
Her father went to meet George at the airport, and her mother came to her room to tell her that he had arrived—although, of course, she had been watching from the balcony. The taxi had stopped at the beginning of the lane, which was unpaved. Her mother had worried about George walking down the dirt road to their apartment complex (what if it rained?), and they had even discussed hiring a rickshaw. But they would have had to hire two rickshaws, with the bags, and hiring two rickshaws to take two grown men less than two hundred metres would have made more of a spectacle than it was worth. Even from her hiding place on the balcony, behind her mother’s hanging laundry, she could hear the landlady’s sons, Hamid and Hassan, on the roof, practically falling over the edge to get a glimpse of Amina’s suitor.
“What is he like?” she asked, and her mother reassured her.
“He’s just like his picture. Nothing is wrong.”
George said that he had known when he received her first e-mail that she was the one. When Amina asked how he had known, he was offended, and asked whether this was some kind of test. But Amina hadn’t been testing him: she really wanted to know, because her own experience had been so different. With the men who had contacted her before George, she had wondered each time if this was the person she would marry. Once she and George started e-mailing each other exclusively, she had wondered the same thing about him, and she had continued wondering even after he booked the flight to Bangladesh. She wondered that first night as he ate with her family at their wobbly table, covered with a plastic map-of-the-world tablecloth, which her father discreetly steadied by placing his elbow somewhere in the neighborhood of Sudan, and during the excruciating hours they spent in the homes of her Dhaka aunts, talking to each other in English while everyone sat around them and watched. It wasn’t until she was actually on the plane to Washington, D.C., wearing the gold-and-diamond ring they had bought in a hurry at Rifles Square on the last day of George’s visit, that she finally became convinced it was going to happen.
Her visa required her to marry within ninety days of her arrival in the U.S. George wanted to allow her to get settled, and his mother needed time to organize the wedding party, so they waited almost two months. Amina’s mother understood that it wouldn’t be practical for George to pay for another place for Amina to live during that time, and she certainly didn’t want her living alone in a foreign city. She agreed that Amina could stay in George’s house for those months, but she made Amina promise that she and George would wait to do that until after the ceremony. She talked about the one thing that Amina could lose that she would never be able to get back.
In Dhaka, Amina had intended to keep her promise, although she didn’t entirely agree with her mother. Especially after she got to America, and had time to think about it, it seemed to her that there were a lot of other things that could be lost in an equally permanent way. Her father had lost his business partner, for example, and he’d never found another full-time job; after that, they had lost their furniture, and then their apartments in Mirpur and Savar, and only Ghaniyah’s father’s intervention—securing the apartment in Mohammadpur at a special price, through a business associate—had kept them from becoming homeless altogether. These setbacks had taken their toll on her mother, who suffered from stomach ulcers and persistent rashes; Amina thought her mother was still beautiful, with her large, dark eyes and her thin, straight nose, but her mother claimed to have lost her looks for good. Worst of all, her grandmother had lost Emdad and Khokon, and nothing she could do would ever bring them back.
Compared with those losses, whatever it was that Amina lost on the third night she spent in George’s house was nothing. George had agreed to her mother’s conditions, and had set up a futon bed for her in the empty room upstairs. On the first two nights, they’d brushed their teeth together like a married couple, and then George had kissed her forehead before disappearing into his room. There were no curtains on the window of the room where Amina slept, and the tree outside made an unfamiliar, angled shadow on the floor. Everything was perfectly quiet. Even when she’d had her own room at home, there had always been noise from the street—horns, crying babies, the barking of dogs—not to mention the considerable sound of her father snoring on the other side of the wall.
Ordinarily she wore a long T-shirt and pajama bottoms to bed, but on the third night she experimented by going into the bathroom in only a kameez. “You look cute,” George said, and that emboldened her; when he bent down to kiss her forehead, as usual, she looked up, so that they actually kissed on the mouth. (This was something that they had done downstairs on the couch during the day, but not yet at night.) Amina tried to imagine that her plain, machine-made top was a hand-embroidered wedding sari, and, when she pressed her body against her fiancé’s, a strange sound escaped from him. It was as if there were another person inside him, who’d never spoken until now. That small, new voice—and the fact that she had been the cause of it—was what made her take George’s hand and follow him into his bedroom.
She was surprised by how unpleasant it was, how unlike that kiss in the bathroom, which had given her the same feeling between her legs that she sometimes got when watching actors kiss on television. It didn’t hurt as much as Ghaniyah had said it would, but she was too hot with George on top of her, and she didn’t like the way he looked when he closed his eyes—as if he were in pain somewhere very far away. On the other hand, it was sweet the way he worried afterward, anxiously confirming that it was what she wanted. He asked her whether she minded having broken her promise to her mother, and the next morning, waking up for the first time beside someone who was not a member of her family, she was surprised to find that she had no regrets at all.
She told George that she didn’t need a wedding dress, that she was happy to get married in the clothes she already owned. She had ordered three new dresses before coming to Rochester, because tailoring was so much less expensive back at home.
“That’s why I love you!” George said, slapping his hand on the kitchen table, as if he’d just won some kind of wager. “You’re so much more sensible than other women.”
Amina thought that it was settled, but later that night George talked to Ed, from his office, who reminded him that they would eventually have to show their wedding photographs to the I.N.S.
“Ed says a white dress is better for the green card,” George said. “My cousin Jess’ll take you shopping. Go get something you like.”
Her mother wanted her to get married in a sari. Amina argued that that kind of wedding, with the gold jewelry, the red tinselled orna, and the hennaed hands, was really more Hindu than Muslim, and that as long as she was going to wear foreign clothes they might as well be American ones.
“No need for a red sari,” her mother conceded. “How about blue? Or green?”
“It has to be a white dress,” Amina said. “It has to be a real American wedding.”
“Even a white sari,” her mother said. “Some of the girls are doing it. I saw it on Trendz.” Since she’d left, her mother had been spending hours every day in the Internet café in Savar. It was amazing to Amina that her mother could navigate even English sites like the Daily Star, where she knew how to get to the Life Style page, with its features on “hot new restaurants” and “splashy summer sandals,” its recipes for French toast and beef Bourguignonne, and its decorating tips (“How about painting one wall of your living room a vibrant spring color?”).
“A dress,” Amina said firmly. “That’s what the I.N.S. wants.”
Of course her mother didn’t really care about the dress, just as she would never consider visiting a restaurant (where who knew how dirty the kitchen might be) or painting one wall of the room where she brushed her teeth, chopped vegetables, and did the ironing “a vibrant spring color.” The white dress was a way for her mother to talk about a concern she had had ever since the beginning—that Amina and George were not going to be properly married, by both an American civil servant and a Muslim imam.
The wedding dress was sleeveless white organdie, with white satin flowers appliquéd on the neck and the bust. She and Jessica compromised by eliminating the veil, but even without it the dress cost more than three hundred dollars, not including alterations. Amina stood on a wooden box with a clamp like a giant paper clip at her waist, and tried not to cry.
“Smile!” the saleswoman said. “A lot of girls would kill for a figure like yours.”
“No kidding,” Jessica said. “I wasn’t that skinny when I was fourteen years old.”
“Don’t you like it?” the saleswoman asked.
“She’s dumbstruck. Wait until George sees you in that.”
Jessica chatted happily with the saleswoman as they paid for the dress with George’s card, but once they were in the car she asked Amina whether everything was O.K.
“Everything is fine,” Amina said. “Only it was so expensive.”
“George doesn’t mind,” Jessica said. “Trust me, I could tell. Are you sure there’s nothing else?”
Ordinarily when Amina felt homesickness coming on, she was able to distract herself with some kind of housework. Vacuuming, in particular, was helpful. Now, sitting in the car next to George’s cousin, she was unprepared for the sudden stiffness in her chest, or the screen that dropped over everything, making Rochester’s clean air and tidy green lawns, and even the inside of Jessica’s very large, brand-new car, look dull and shabby. George’s cousin was so kind, and still there was no way that she could explain to her what was really wrong. When they stopped at a red light, Jessica turned to Amina and put a hand on her arm.
“Because if something was wrong between you and George, I want you to know that you could tell me. I’m a good listener.”
“Oh, no,” Amina said, “George is no problem,” and Jessica laughed, although Amina wasn’t trying to be funny. She could tell that Jessica wasn’t going to allow her to be silent, and so she searched for a question.
“What is the meaning of ‘dumbstruck’?” she asked, feeling slightly dishonest. She had encountered that word for the first time in an exercise in a conversation primer, a dialogue between a Miss Mulligan and a Mr. Fredericks—“ ‘Your manners leave me dumbstruck, Mr. Fredericks,’ Miss Mulligan exclaimed”—and for some reason that phrase had lodged itself in Amina’s head. Often, when someone spat on the street in front of her, when a woman elbowed her out of the way at the market, or when she ran into one of her old classmates at the British Council and the girl inquired sweetly whether her father was still unemployed, she had thought of Miss Mulligan and how dumbstruck she might have been had she ever found herself in Bangladesh.
“Oh, um—surprised. It just means surprised. I bet you wondered what I was talking about!”
But it didn’t just mean surprised. It meant so surprised that you could not speak. As Cousin Jessica continued to talk—about her weight and Amina’s, about the foods she ate, didn’t eat, or intended to eat—Amina concentrated on nodding and making noises to show that she understood. It was possible to be struck dumb by all sorts of emotion, not only surprise, and as they drove back toward Pittsford Amina thought that there ought to be a whole set of words to encompass those different varieties of silence.
At the bridal shower, Aunt Louise had wanted to know Amina’s favorite flower, and had listened politely as Amina explained about the krishnachura and the romantic origins of its name. She felt silly when Aunt Louise showed up at city hall on the morning of the wedding, carrying a bouquet of lilacs and apologizing because there were no krishnachura to be found in Rochester. Then George’s mother arrived with her own wedding veil, which she shyly offered to Amina for the ceremony.
“She didn’t want a veil,” George said, annoyed with his mother, but Amina took her mother-in-law’s side, just as a bride would at home. Jessica gathered up a few of the ringlets the hairdresser had created and pinned the veil so that Amina could wear it hanging down her back. Then the small party—Jessica, George’s mother, Aunt Louise and Uncle Dan, Ed from George’s office and his Filipino wife, Min, and George’s college friends Bill and Katie—followed them into the office, where they completed the paperwork for the marriage certificate. Amina thought that this was the wedding itself, so she was confused when the clerk ushered them into a smaller, carpeted room with a bench and asked them to wait.
“Is there some problem?” she asked George, but he was distracted by his friends, who were snapping pictures and laughing. “Is something wrong?”
“Sit down,” George’s mother said, but Aunt Louise grabbed her arm and jerked her upright.
“Careful!”
“What is it?” Amina said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. For weeks she had been convinced that something would get in the way of the ceremony; this morning she had prayed—not that nothing would go wrong but that she would be prepared enough to see it coming and resourceful enough to find a way around it.
“If you sit, your dress will crease,” Aunt Louise said.
“Come on,” George’s mother said, putting her hand on Amina’s back. “It’s your turn.” And Amina was relieved to see that a door had opened on the opposite side of the room, and a short, bald man in a suit, a man who looked as if nothing on earth had ever disturbed his composure, was gesturing for them to enter. She understood that the wedding was continuing as planned, and she looked carefully around the room because she knew that her mother would want to hear exactly what it looked like. There were potted trees with braided trunks on either side of the window, and three rows of white plastic folding chairs, half-filled by George’s family and friends. The deputy city clerk stood behind a wooden lectern underneath two certificates framed in gold. With the light from the window shining on his glasses, Amina couldn’t see his eyes.
She had not expected to be nervous. George had told her what her cue would be, and Amina allowed her mind to wander while she waited for it. When she’d left Desh, there had still been the possibility that her parents would be able to come to Rochester for the wedding. Ninety days had seemed like enough time to plan, but when George went online to check the tickets they were almost fifteen hundred dollars each, even if her parents made stops in Dubai and Hamburg, Germany. George had been willing to help pay for the tickets, but she could tell that he wasn’t happy about it, and so she had called her parents and given them her opinion: it would be a waste of money. The whole wedding would take maybe an hour and a half (including driving time), and Amina and her father agreed that to fly twenty hours in order to be there for something that took less than two hours didn’t make a lot of sense.
In the end, as she’d expected, the problem was not her father but her mother. Her mother had agreed at first, and they’d even made another plan: as soon as Amina and George could come back to Dhaka, they would buy wedding clothes and Amina would go to the beauty salon; then they would go to a studio and take wedding photographs. Once they had the photographs, her mother could look at them all the time: it would be no different than if they’d all celebrated the wedding together for real.
Amina thought that her mother was satisfied by this, but a few nights later she got a call. Her mother was crying, and it was hard to understand her. Her father told her not to worry, but when she asked why her mother was crying he said, “She’s crying because she’s going to miss your wedding. She’s going to miss it because I can’t afford the ticket.”
“No!” Amina said. “We decided—it didn’t make sense. Three thousand dollars for one party!”
“Your wedding party. What kind of terrible parents don’t come to their own daughter’s wedding?”
She started to argue, but her father wasn’t listening. Her mother was saying something in the background.
“What does she say?”
Her father paused so long that she would have thought the call had been dropped, if it weren’t for the sounds in the background. It was morning in Mohammadpur, and Amina thought she could hear the venders calling outside the window: “Chilis! Eggs! Excellent-quality feather brooms!”
“She says it would have been better if you’d never been born,” her father said finally.
“Do you, Amina Mazid, take this man, George Barker, to be your lawfully wedded husband?” the city clerk asked.
“I do,” Amina said.
The question was asked of George, and then the clerk pronounced them husband and wife. “You may kiss each other,” he said.
George leaned toward her and Amina leaped back. From the folding chairs, Cousin Jessica made a hiccupping sound. George’s face tightened like the mouth of a drawstring bag, and when Amina glanced behind her she saw an identical contraction on the face of her new mother-in-law. She hurriedly stepped toward George, smiling to let him know that it had been a mistake, that of course she wanted to kiss him in front of his family and friends.
Many hours later, after cocktails at Aunt Louise and Uncle Dan’s, the reception dinner at Giorgio’s Trattoria, and then sweets, coffee, and the opening of gifts at the house of George’s mother (who now insisted that Amina call her “Mom”), when they were home in bed together so much later than usual, George asked her why she hadn’t wanted to kiss him.
“You didn’t tell me,” she explained.
“You didn’t know there was kissing at a wedding?”
Amina had to think about that for a minute, because of course she had known. She had known since she was nine years old and her Auntie No. 2 had bought a television. She had seen it on “Dallas” and “L.A. Law” and “The Fall Guy,” and then, more recently, on her own television at home. There was no way to explain her ignorance to George.
“I did know. I guess I just didn’t believe it would happen to me.”
“You’ve kissed me a hundred times,” George said, in a voice that suggested to Amina that they might be about to have their first fight. She wanted to avoid that, especially tonight, because if there was anything she believed about marriage it was that arguing the way her parents did was a waste of time.
“Not only kissing. The marriage in total.”
“You didn’t believe we were getting married? What did you think we were doing?”
“In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed.”
“And in America?”
“In America you make your plans and then they happen.”
To her relief, George finally smiled. “So you planned to kiss me, but you were surprised when it actually happened.”
Amina hesitated, but her husband was patient until she found the right words.
“Not only surprised,” she said. “I was dumbstruck.”
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Documentary: Remembrance of Things Present
..Point of View..
Synopsis: How to deal with a marriage arranged when one was a child of twelve? What are the answers to the whys and what-ifs of one personal history in a context of general female disempowerment? How to resolve the key conflict of a displaced life after years of nomadic life abroad? Chandra Siddan, a Canadian immigrant, returns to Bangalore, India after 12 years' absence with these questions. Long divorced and newly remarried, she enquires into the reasons for her early first marriage arranged in the mid 70s by her Hindu urban middle-class family and confronts her parents and relatives with her lost childhood, while also presenting them her new husband. Reuniting with her daughter, Smruthi (now in her twenties), Chandra finds her refreshingly liberated. But the life of her parents’ teenage servant, Sudha, shows that that the past is anything but over. Simultaneously a family drama and a social history, "Remembrance of Things Present" rejects a reactionary notion of "home" and theorizes global female migrant labour as an anti-odyssey, a journey without a return.
Synopsis: How to deal with a marriage arranged when one was a child of twelve? What are the answers to the whys and what-ifs of one personal history in a context of general female disempowerment? How to resolve the key conflict of a displaced life after years of nomadic life abroad? Chandra Siddan, a Canadian immigrant, returns to Bangalore, India after 12 years' absence with these questions. Long divorced and newly remarried, she enquires into the reasons for her early first marriage arranged in the mid 70s by her Hindu urban middle-class family and confronts her parents and relatives with her lost childhood, while also presenting them her new husband. Reuniting with her daughter, Smruthi (now in her twenties), Chandra finds her refreshingly liberated. But the life of her parents’ teenage servant, Sudha, shows that that the past is anything but over. Simultaneously a family drama and a social history, "Remembrance of Things Present" rejects a reactionary notion of "home" and theorizes global female migrant labour as an anti-odyssey, a journey without a return.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
One more reason to Divorce
Now many or any reason is good enough for divorce. but then when someone decides to divorce- do they really need a reason!?
Marriages are no longer made in heaven, nor are they ‘Fevicol ki jodis’. Our society and socio-political structures have changed. Relationships are no longer defined by love or commitment alone. They have Unique Identification Criteria of their own; therefore, I shall desist from making blanket statements on what makes for a good/bad relationship or marriage.
Our parents of course can’t even identify with the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the same breath as ‘marriage’. A marriage, they say, is a bond, not just between two individuals, but between their ‘aatmas’ according to the Sanskrit slokas that we’re expected to repeat after the pundit as we sweat and cramp before the ‘homagni’. So, how can something that God proposes and parents arrange be bad? After all, marriages are still arranged based on astrology, caste, creed, religion, gotras, looks, colour of skin and blood, as well as culinary, housekeeping, and pampering skills, the kind of job you hold and your bank balance, amongst a laundry list of other criteria.
Sadly though, none of the above proves good enough for a marriage to last forever.
Most marriages these days are either a compromise or an abscess that you nurse till it splits open and oozes pus. And that’s when it gets really messy these days. There are theories and conspiracy theories about why marriages don’t work. The most common one being ‘stress’— professional stress, stress at home because the maid didn’t turn up and the ‘man of the house’ won’t lift a finger to help, parenting stress—just name it and it’s stressful. Look at what it did to the supposedly perfect marriage of Al and Tipper Gore, even after 40 years of togetherness. And stress is often the easiest excuse to slip up on commitment leading to emotional infidelity, sometimes even the physical kind and for stoking the killer instinct in you. So, the two supposedly mature adults scream, shout, yell, fight, and hurt each other till they decide they’ve had enough and should now part ways, amicably or otherwise.
When things don’t work, we call it a ‘breakdown’, right? And we need a mechanic to either repair it or tow it away, if it can’t be fixed. That’s where the Indian divorce laws come handy. http://www.indlaw.com/display.aspx?2739
Source: Yahoo
Marriages are no longer made in heaven, nor are they ‘Fevicol ki jodis’. Our society and socio-political structures have changed. Relationships are no longer defined by love or commitment alone. They have Unique Identification Criteria of their own; therefore, I shall desist from making blanket statements on what makes for a good/bad relationship or marriage.
Our parents of course can’t even identify with the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the same breath as ‘marriage’. A marriage, they say, is a bond, not just between two individuals, but between their ‘aatmas’ according to the Sanskrit slokas that we’re expected to repeat after the pundit as we sweat and cramp before the ‘homagni’. So, how can something that God proposes and parents arrange be bad? After all, marriages are still arranged based on astrology, caste, creed, religion, gotras, looks, colour of skin and blood, as well as culinary, housekeeping, and pampering skills, the kind of job you hold and your bank balance, amongst a laundry list of other criteria.
Sadly though, none of the above proves good enough for a marriage to last forever.
Most marriages these days are either a compromise or an abscess that you nurse till it splits open and oozes pus. And that’s when it gets really messy these days. There are theories and conspiracy theories about why marriages don’t work. The most common one being ‘stress’— professional stress, stress at home because the maid didn’t turn up and the ‘man of the house’ won’t lift a finger to help, parenting stress—just name it and it’s stressful. Look at what it did to the supposedly perfect marriage of Al and Tipper Gore, even after 40 years of togetherness. And stress is often the easiest excuse to slip up on commitment leading to emotional infidelity, sometimes even the physical kind and for stoking the killer instinct in you. So, the two supposedly mature adults scream, shout, yell, fight, and hurt each other till they decide they’ve had enough and should now part ways, amicably or otherwise.
When things don’t work, we call it a ‘breakdown’, right? And we need a mechanic to either repair it or tow it away, if it can’t be fixed. That’s where the Indian divorce laws come handy. http://www.indlaw.com/display.aspx?2739
Source: Yahoo
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
I loved you first: but afterwards your love
I loved you first: but afterwards your love by Christina Rossetti
I loved you first: but afterwards your love
Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song
As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove.
Which owes the other most? my love was long,
And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong;
I loved and guessed at you, you construed me
And loved me for what might or might not be –
Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong.
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’
With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done,
For one is both and both are one in love:
Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’
Both have the strength and both the length thereof,
Both of us, of the love which makes us one.
I loved you first: but afterwards your love
Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song
As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove.
Which owes the other most? my love was long,
And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong;
I loved and guessed at you, you construed me
And loved me for what might or might not be –
Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong.
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’
With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done,
For one is both and both are one in love:
Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’
Both have the strength and both the length thereof,
Both of us, of the love which makes us one.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Why do some Relationship Fail?
Landed on this.. .thought its interesting to share here..
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman lays out a relatively simple but profound theory based on a very straight forward framework that may have broad relevance.
He believes that there are 5 primary love languages and everybody has a primary (usually one, maybe two) love language which makes them feel loved. Importantly, their primary love language is not necessarily the way they communicate love to others – but it’s how they feel loved by others. The 5 languages are:
Physical Touch – hugs, kisses, physical play, affection, etc.
Words of Affirmation – words of praise, encouragement, adoration, admiration, etc.
Quality Time – focused, attentive time in a joint activity, conversation, etc.
Gifts – self explanatory: meaningful, thoughtful gifts
Acts of Service – helping out with projects, responsibilities, homework, tasks, etc.
So, that’s the framework. The theory on why some relationships are strained is pretty straight forward:
Everyone has a primary love language – which is how they receive love.
People tend to communicate love to others with their own primary love language.
But, if the other person has a different primary love language, they will not feel loved.
For example – your primary love language may be words of affirmation. But, if your child’s love language is physical touch – no amount of verbal praise will replace your child’s need for hugs, physical play, and so forth. Or your love language may be physical touch, but your spouse’s may be acts of service. So, no amount of affection will replace the love communicated through service acts like cleaning up the house, cooking a meal, or taking out the garbage. That’s why two people in a relationship can be trying hard but not communicating love to each other because they don’t recognize the distinction in each person’s primary love languages.
The book gives more insight into how to determine someone’s primary love language, practical ideas around each love language, and more insight and detail on what each love language means. OK, I never thought I’d write a blog post with the word “love” in it 25 times.
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman lays out a relatively simple but profound theory based on a very straight forward framework that may have broad relevance.
He believes that there are 5 primary love languages and everybody has a primary (usually one, maybe two) love language which makes them feel loved. Importantly, their primary love language is not necessarily the way they communicate love to others – but it’s how they feel loved by others. The 5 languages are:
Physical Touch – hugs, kisses, physical play, affection, etc.
Words of Affirmation – words of praise, encouragement, adoration, admiration, etc.
Quality Time – focused, attentive time in a joint activity, conversation, etc.
Gifts – self explanatory: meaningful, thoughtful gifts
Acts of Service – helping out with projects, responsibilities, homework, tasks, etc.
So, that’s the framework. The theory on why some relationships are strained is pretty straight forward:
Everyone has a primary love language – which is how they receive love.
People tend to communicate love to others with their own primary love language.
But, if the other person has a different primary love language, they will not feel loved.
For example – your primary love language may be words of affirmation. But, if your child’s love language is physical touch – no amount of verbal praise will replace your child’s need for hugs, physical play, and so forth. Or your love language may be physical touch, but your spouse’s may be acts of service. So, no amount of affection will replace the love communicated through service acts like cleaning up the house, cooking a meal, or taking out the garbage. That’s why two people in a relationship can be trying hard but not communicating love to each other because they don’t recognize the distinction in each person’s primary love languages.
The book gives more insight into how to determine someone’s primary love language, practical ideas around each love language, and more insight and detail on what each love language means. OK, I never thought I’d write a blog post with the word “love” in it 25 times.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
10things Women should know about Men
10 Things Every Woman Should Know About a Man's Brain
Most popular notions about the male brain are based on studies of men ages 18 to 22 — undergrads subjecting themselves to experiments for beer money or course credit. But a man's brain varies tremendously over his life span, quickly contradicting the image of the single-minded sex addict that circulates in mainstream consciousness.
From his wandering eye to his desire to mate for life, here's what you need to know about guys' minds:
10. More emotional
9. More vulnerable to loneliness
8. Focused on solutions
7. Hard-wired to check out women
6. Must defend turf
5. Embraces chain of command
4. Matures over time, really
3. Primed for fatherhood
2. Daddy-play
1. Covets wedding bells, too
for more : http://www.livescience.com/culture/male-brains-100409.html
Most popular notions about the male brain are based on studies of men ages 18 to 22 — undergrads subjecting themselves to experiments for beer money or course credit. But a man's brain varies tremendously over his life span, quickly contradicting the image of the single-minded sex addict that circulates in mainstream consciousness.
From his wandering eye to his desire to mate for life, here's what you need to know about guys' minds:
10. More emotional
9. More vulnerable to loneliness
8. Focused on solutions
7. Hard-wired to check out women
6. Must defend turf
5. Embraces chain of command
4. Matures over time, really
3. Primed for fatherhood
2. Daddy-play
1. Covets wedding bells, too
for more : http://www.livescience.com/culture/male-brains-100409.html
Friday, April 16, 2010
Having More Dating Choices Makes Us Shallower
Question: Is it better to have more choices when it comes to love?
Sheena Iyengar: What's interesting is that the way we go about finding our marriage partners today is quite different from the way it used to be in this culture. When you look at… I’ve done a number of studies with speed dating and Match.com and what's interesting is that you know we still walk into a speed dating event, you know, thinking about what it is we’re looking for in a mate and so you ask people, like women will say "I’m looking for somebody who is really kind and sincere and smart and funny." And guys will say looks matter, but they’ll also say things like "Well, she should be smart and kind." And you know those are... so the typical responses and if you give them just a few options, like five or six, then they will rate them on the very characteristics that they said were really important to them. You know if they said kindness or funniness was really most important to them then they will be more likely to say yes to the person that they thought was kind and funny. Now if you expand their choice set–say you give them 20 different speed dates–everything goes out the window. Everybody starts choosing in accordance with looks because that becomes the easiest criteria by which to weed out all the options and decide "So who am I going to say yes to?"
Saturday, April 10, 2010
to ruin a Perfectly good Marriage
check this funny page..;) HOW TO RUIN A PERFECTLY GOOD MARRIAGE
LET'S FACE IT. THE ODDS ARE STACKED AGAINST YOU: MORE THAN HALF OF ALL MARRIAGES END IN DIVORCE.
"FOR BETTER OR WORSE" CAN GET A LOT WORSE. YOUR MARRIAGE MAY DO EXACTLY WHAT THOSE ANNOYING STATISTICS EXPECT FROM IT. IT MAY SELF-DESTRUCT.
IF YOUR MARRIAGE IS DESTINED TO FAILURE, WHY WASTE TIME WITH IT? WHY NOT GET TO THE INEVITABLE QUICKLY, SO THAT YOU CAN GET ON WITH FINDING THE TRUE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE?
SOME OF THESE TIPS MAY ALREADY BE CHISELING AWAY AT YOUR MARRIAGE. IF SO, CONGRATULATIONS! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
"FOR BETTER OR WORSE" CAN GET A LOT WORSE. YOUR MARRIAGE MAY DO EXACTLY WHAT THOSE ANNOYING STATISTICS EXPECT FROM IT. IT MAY SELF-DESTRUCT.
IF YOUR MARRIAGE IS DESTINED TO FAILURE, WHY WASTE TIME WITH IT? WHY NOT GET TO THE INEVITABLE QUICKLY, SO THAT YOU CAN GET ON WITH FINDING THE TRUE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE?
SOME OF THESE TIPS MAY ALREADY BE CHISELING AWAY AT YOUR MARRIAGE. IF SO, CONGRATULATIONS! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
Thursday, April 08, 2010
On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning by Haruki Murakami
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.
Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you're drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I'll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.
But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can't recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It's weird.
"Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl," I tell someone.
"Yeah?" he says. "Good-looking?"
"Not really."
"Your favorite type, then?"
"I don't know. I can't seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts."
"Strange."
"Yeah. Strange."
"So anyhow," he says, already bored, "what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?"
"Nah. Just passed her on the street."
She's walking east to west, and I west to east. It's a really nice April morning.
Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I'd really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.
After talking, we'd have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.
Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.
Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.
How can I approach her? What should I say?
"Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?"
Ridiculous. I'd sound like an insurance salesman.
"Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?"
No, this is just as ridiculous. I'm not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who's going to buy a line like that?
Maybe the simple truth would do. "Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me."
No, she wouldn't believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you're not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I'd probably go to pieces. I'd never recover from the shock. I'm thirty-two, and that's what growing older is all about.
We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can't bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She's written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she's ever had.
I take a few more strides and turn: She's lost in the crowd.
Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.
Oh, well. It would have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't you think?"
Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.
One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.
"This is amazing," he said. "I've been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you're the 100% perfect girl for me."
"And you," she said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I'd pictured you in every detail. It's like a dream."
They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.
As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one's dreams to come true so easily?
And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, "Let's test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other's 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we'll marry then and there. What do you think?"
"Yes," she said, "that is exactly what we should do."
And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.
The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.
One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season's terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence's piggy bank.
They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.
Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.
One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:
She is the 100% perfect girl for me.
He is the 100% perfect boy for me.
But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.
A sad story, don't you think?
Yes, that's it, that is what I should have said to her.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Research: Wife should be smarter & younger than you
The Swiss study, romantically entitled Optimizing the marriage market: An application of the linear assignment model, offers solutions to life's biggest problem. The abstract begins by taking all thoughts of love and passion and tossing them down the chasm of objectivity: "Research shows that the success of marriages and other intimate partnerships depends on objective attributes such as differences in age, cultural background, and educational level."
The highlights are, indeed, a joy to behold, squeeze tightly, and never, ever let go. The perfect wife is five years younger than her husband. She is from the same cultural background. And, please stare at this very carefully: she is at least 27 percent smarter than her husband. Yes, 35 percent smarter seems to be tolerable. But 12 percent smarter seems unacceptable. In an ideal world--which is the goal of every scientist--your wife should have a college degree, and you should not. At least that's what these scientists believe.
I know your bit will already be chomped with your enthusiasm for learning these learned scientists' methodology. Well, they interviewed 1,074 married and cohabiting couples. And they declared, "To produce our optimization model, we use the assumption of a central 'agency' that would coordinate the matching of couples." Indeed.
This optimization led research leader Nguyen Vi Cao to speak with some certainty to the Telegraph: "If people follow these guidelines in choosing their partners, they can increase their chances of a happy, long marriage by up to 20 percent."
Up to? Couldn't they be a little more exact? That 27 percent thing seemed pretty exact.
Still, let me tell you about one of these guidelines: marrying a divorcee makes it far more unlikely that you will be happy. I know, I know. It doesn't seem fair, does it? But science has spoken. And when science speaks, you bow your head until your nose tickles the frigid floor tiles.
The highlights are, indeed, a joy to behold, squeeze tightly, and never, ever let go. The perfect wife is five years younger than her husband. She is from the same cultural background. And, please stare at this very carefully: she is at least 27 percent smarter than her husband. Yes, 35 percent smarter seems to be tolerable. But 12 percent smarter seems unacceptable. In an ideal world--which is the goal of every scientist--your wife should have a college degree, and you should not. At least that's what these scientists believe.
I know your bit will already be chomped with your enthusiasm for learning these learned scientists' methodology. Well, they interviewed 1,074 married and cohabiting couples. And they declared, "To produce our optimization model, we use the assumption of a central 'agency' that would coordinate the matching of couples." Indeed.
This optimization led research leader Nguyen Vi Cao to speak with some certainty to the Telegraph: "If people follow these guidelines in choosing their partners, they can increase their chances of a happy, long marriage by up to 20 percent."
Up to? Couldn't they be a little more exact? That 27 percent thing seemed pretty exact.
Still, let me tell you about one of these guidelines: marrying a divorcee makes it far more unlikely that you will be happy. I know, I know. It doesn't seem fair, does it? But science has spoken. And when science speaks, you bow your head until your nose tickles the frigid floor tiles.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Freakonomics: Economic Model of the rise in Premarital Sex
Interesting working paper called “From Shame to Game in One Hundred Years: An Economic Model of the Rise in Premarital Sex and its De-Stigmatization” by Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Jeremy Greenwood, and Nezih Guner.
Summary: Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less than others about the perils of premarital sex, because the latter will lose less from an out-of-wedlock birth. Modern contraceptives have profoundly affected the calculus for instilling sexual mores, leading to a de-stigmatization of sex. As contraception has become more effective there is less need for parents, churches and states to inculcate sexual mores. Technology affects culture.
There is something worth unpacking in just about every sentence there. Also worth reading is the authors’ take, empirical and otherwise, on the sexual revolution:
In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19. Now, 75% have experienced this. Public acceptance of this practice reacted with delay. Only 15% of women in 1968 had a permissive attitude toward premarital sex. At the time, though, about 40% of 19-year-old females had experienced it. The number with a permissive attitude had jumped to 45% by 1983, a time when 73% of 19-year-olds were sexually experienced. Thus, societal attitudes lagged practice. Beyond the evolution and acceptance of sexual behavior over time, there are relevant cross-sectional differences across females. In the U.S., the odds of a girl having premarital sex decline with [Ed.: increased] family income. So, for instance, in the bottom decile, 70% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced it, versus 47% in the top one. Similarly, 68% of adolescent girls whose family income lies in the upper quartile would feel “very upset” if they got pregnant, versus 46% of those whose family income is in the lower quartile.
In SuperFreakonomics, we relate a parallel statistic concerning men and the sexual revolution:
At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute. Now imagine that same young man twenty years later. The shift in sexual mores has given him a much greater supply of unpaid sex. In his generation, only 5 percent of men lose their virginity to a prostitute.
I guess India in future, will show similar stats..
Summary: Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less than others about the perils of premarital sex, because the latter will lose less from an out-of-wedlock birth. Modern contraceptives have profoundly affected the calculus for instilling sexual mores, leading to a de-stigmatization of sex. As contraception has become more effective there is less need for parents, churches and states to inculcate sexual mores. Technology affects culture.
There is something worth unpacking in just about every sentence there. Also worth reading is the authors’ take, empirical and otherwise, on the sexual revolution:
In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19. Now, 75% have experienced this. Public acceptance of this practice reacted with delay. Only 15% of women in 1968 had a permissive attitude toward premarital sex. At the time, though, about 40% of 19-year-old females had experienced it. The number with a permissive attitude had jumped to 45% by 1983, a time when 73% of 19-year-olds were sexually experienced. Thus, societal attitudes lagged practice. Beyond the evolution and acceptance of sexual behavior over time, there are relevant cross-sectional differences across females. In the U.S., the odds of a girl having premarital sex decline with [Ed.: increased] family income. So, for instance, in the bottom decile, 70% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced it, versus 47% in the top one. Similarly, 68% of adolescent girls whose family income lies in the upper quartile would feel “very upset” if they got pregnant, versus 46% of those whose family income is in the lower quartile.
In SuperFreakonomics, we relate a parallel statistic concerning men and the sexual revolution:
At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute. Now imagine that same young man twenty years later. The shift in sexual mores has given him a much greater supply of unpaid sex. In his generation, only 5 percent of men lose their virginity to a prostitute.
I guess India in future, will show similar stats..
Friday, March 26, 2010
Research: Why Beautiful Women Marry Less Attractive Men!
Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups. The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.
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Researchers admit that looks are subjective, but studies show there are some universal standards, including large eyes, "baby face" features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.
..
Past research has shown that individuals with comparable stunning looks are attracted to each other and once they hook up they report greater relationship satisfaction. These studies, however, are mainly based on new couples, showing that absolute beauty is important in the earliest stages of couple-hood, said lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee. But the role of physical attractiveness in well-established partnerships, such as marriage, is somewhat of a mystery.
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Men who are more attractive than their partners would theoretically have access to partners who are more attractive than their current spouses, McNulty said. The "grass could be greener" mentality could make these men less satisfied and less committed to maintain the marriage. Physical attractiveness of husbands is not as important to women, the researchers suggest. Rather, wives are looking for supportive husbands, they say. So it seems the mismatch in looks is actually a perfect match. "Equitable is unlikely to mean the same on every dimension," Ariely said during a telephone interview. "It just means that overall two people make sense together."
Full Article @ LiveScience
..
Researchers admit that looks are subjective, but studies show there are some universal standards, including large eyes, "baby face" features, symmetric faces, so-called average faces, and specific waist-hip ratios in men versus women.
..
Past research has shown that individuals with comparable stunning looks are attracted to each other and once they hook up they report greater relationship satisfaction. These studies, however, are mainly based on new couples, showing that absolute beauty is important in the earliest stages of couple-hood, said lead researcher James McNulty of the University of Tennessee. But the role of physical attractiveness in well-established partnerships, such as marriage, is somewhat of a mystery.
..
Men who are more attractive than their partners would theoretically have access to partners who are more attractive than their current spouses, McNulty said. The "grass could be greener" mentality could make these men less satisfied and less committed to maintain the marriage. Physical attractiveness of husbands is not as important to women, the researchers suggest. Rather, wives are looking for supportive husbands, they say. So it seems the mismatch in looks is actually a perfect match. "Equitable is unlikely to mean the same on every dimension," Ariely said during a telephone interview. "It just means that overall two people make sense together."
Full Article @ LiveScience
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Research: Google tells what men and women want
Given that Mark Zuckerberg has explained to you that privacy is no longer a social norm, your first thought this morning was probably, "How can I get more of my information to be public on Facebook?"
Your second might well have been something to do with improving your current relationship with your beloved.
In a heartwarming analysis of Google searches, Dan Ariely, author of the beautifully named "Predictably Irrational," revealed just how different boyfriends and girlfriends are, when it comes to asking the Google oracle for ways to solve their relationship problems.
Taking the search "How can I get my boyfriend/girlfriend to..." structure, Ariely showed that girls most want to know how to get their boyfriends to propose. Truly, this is one of the most treacherous areas in human life, and I have many deep and forceful opinions on the subject.
Girlfriends are also very keen to know how to get their boyfriends to spend more time with them, love them, and generally be more romantic and less stinky.
Boyfriends, on the other hand, are most concerned to discover how to get their girlfriends to perform oral sex. This revealing bucket of angst is closely followed by the need to get their girlfriends to sleep with them, lose weight, and trust them. Shaving and forgiveness also make an appearance.
While Ariely's discoveries are, well, predictably rational, I decided to take things a step further and discover how these relationships change, once the girlfriend has learned how to get the boyfriend to propose. So I went for the "How can I get my wife/husband to..." paradigm. The last time I enjoyed this much simultaneous fun and tragedy was when I read a Russian novel in a Croatian bar.
You will be moved to tears, or perhaps St. Petersburg, when I tell you that husbands' most frantic search is, "How can I get my wife to love me again."
Before you reach for your handkerchief to dry your eyes, might I tell you that the next most popular googling suggestion is, "How can I get my wife to swing."
You will feel that your world has been temporarily righted when I tell you that the next two pleas involve losing weight and shaving. However, the list is completed with wanting to know how to get your wife to trust you again, love you and, that perennial source of friction, shut up.
What of the wives? Once they are betrothed, do they come to terms with their man's foibles and failings?
Well, the prime Google search for "How can I get my husband to..." is followed by the words "fall in love with me again." Yes, husbands and wives apparently want to be loved by their partners but have no idea how to achieve it.
This plea is followed by wanting their husbands to be "more affectionate" and "to love me again." Forget the "falling in love" part; just give me the basic love thing, these searchers seem to say--the one that involves a little thought and kindness.
Soon, though, the googling warts are exposed. For the next most popular is the need to know how to get the husband to help around the house. This is followed by more intimate needs, like romance and conversation. However, it is rounded out by a need to get husbands to leave the house and stop drinking.
What does this analysis tell us about the state of human relations? Well, there is little hope, isn't there?
Perhaps the planets Mars and Venus will, one day, be the homes of unisexual communities. Once men and women have finally stopped searching for answers even Google can't give them, that is.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Research: Using Math to choose a wife
Perhaps the subject most fascinating to me at the moment is the gamble that is involved in choosing a life partner.
Perhaps I have been unnecessarily haunted since research revealed that Facebook destroys romantic relationships. Still, it was quite odd that a man whom I have chosen to follow on Twitter for his remarkable erudition in social psychology (oh, alright, his name is Dominic Johnson) passed along a quite extraordinary article from New Scientist, one that has made me ponder more deeply than I usually care to.
While the article begins by discussing the mathematical ways in which you can improve your chances in Vegas (or, if your taste and eyes have deserted you, Atlantic City), it goes on to discuss the marriage problem. Apparently, mathematicians have tortured themselves over marriage for some years. I did not know this. I figured that perhaps mathematicians only ever had one girlfriend, whom they married very soon after sex.
May I go down on one knee and admit how wrong I was?
Mathematicians have racked their brains and abacuses, for the good of society, in order to help us all choose wisely the person who shares our king-size. According to New Scientist, the law of diminishing returns has long been thought to be a marvelous indicator of when to stick, rather than turn another card.
Naturally, scientific laws have certain suppositions. And at first glance, I considered the idea of having a mere 100 choices a little unrealistic.
However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a little more natural than it might have appeared. We march our way merrily through life, meeting people and declaring them a "yay" or a "nay."
Oh, we have some supposed criteria in our heads about what makes a "yay"- body type, nose shape, or some such nonsense. But commitment is a very hairy creature, one that barks at us more often than it sings.
So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don't choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)
The "Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best" method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.
However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.
Here's the real beauty of this calculation, though. You don't have to limit yourself to 100. This optimization works for any population. So if you have a world of 26 potential life partners, simply divide by 2.72 and choose the next best one.
Now, I know it is sometimes hard to know exactly how many potential partners are in your firmament. But it is surely not beyond some calculation.
We need a little more stability in this world. We need more happiness. And we need just a little more good judgment. It seems that only math can save us.
There is a small word of warning, however. Some psychologists, such as JoNell Strough at West Virginia University, believe that the more we invest (in a gambling and, one supposes, marriage context), the more likely our decision will be attached to disaster.
However, I would be interested whether any of you number-conscious geniuses out there have also used mathematical principles to choose your betrothed. Perhaps you have done it more than once, but we would still love to hear your number-based criteria.
Source: Cnet
Perhaps I have been unnecessarily haunted since research revealed that Facebook destroys romantic relationships. Still, it was quite odd that a man whom I have chosen to follow on Twitter for his remarkable erudition in social psychology (oh, alright, his name is Dominic Johnson) passed along a quite extraordinary article from New Scientist, one that has made me ponder more deeply than I usually care to.
While the article begins by discussing the mathematical ways in which you can improve your chances in Vegas (or, if your taste and eyes have deserted you, Atlantic City), it goes on to discuss the marriage problem. Apparently, mathematicians have tortured themselves over marriage for some years. I did not know this. I figured that perhaps mathematicians only ever had one girlfriend, whom they married very soon after sex.
May I go down on one knee and admit how wrong I was?
Mathematicians have racked their brains and abacuses, for the good of society, in order to help us all choose wisely the person who shares our king-size. According to New Scientist, the law of diminishing returns has long been thought to be a marvelous indicator of when to stick, rather than turn another card.
Naturally, scientific laws have certain suppositions. And at first glance, I considered the idea of having a mere 100 choices a little unrealistic.
However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a little more natural than it might have appeared. We march our way merrily through life, meeting people and declaring them a "yay" or a "nay."
Oh, we have some supposed criteria in our heads about what makes a "yay"- body type, nose shape, or some such nonsense. But commitment is a very hairy creature, one that barks at us more often than it sings.
So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don't choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)
The "Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best" method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.
However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.
Here's the real beauty of this calculation, though. You don't have to limit yourself to 100. This optimization works for any population. So if you have a world of 26 potential life partners, simply divide by 2.72 and choose the next best one.
Now, I know it is sometimes hard to know exactly how many potential partners are in your firmament. But it is surely not beyond some calculation.
We need a little more stability in this world. We need more happiness. And we need just a little more good judgment. It seems that only math can save us.
There is a small word of warning, however. Some psychologists, such as JoNell Strough at West Virginia University, believe that the more we invest (in a gambling and, one supposes, marriage context), the more likely our decision will be attached to disaster.
However, I would be interested whether any of you number-conscious geniuses out there have also used mathematical principles to choose your betrothed. Perhaps you have done it more than once, but we would still love to hear your number-based criteria.
Source: Cnet
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Research: Living together Doesn’t make Marriage Last
Couples who live together before they get married are less likely to stay married, a new study has found. But their chances improve if they were already engaged when they began living together.
The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.
The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.
“From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish,” said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don’t believe that.”
The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.
Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years.
“The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women,” said Kelly A. Musick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.
Couples who marry after age 26 or have a baby eight months or more after marrying are also more likely to stay married for more than a decade.
“Cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first co-residential union formed among young adults,” the study said. “As a result of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, the number of children born to unmarried cohabiting parents has also increased.”
By the beginning of the last decade, a majority of births to unmarried women were to mothers who were living with the child’s father. Just two decades earlier, only a third of those births were to cohabiting couples.
The study found that, over all, 62 percent of women ages 25 to 44 were married and 8 percent were cohabiting. Among men, the comparable figures were 59 percent and 10 percent.
In general, one in five marriages will dissolve within five years. One in three will last less than 10 years. Those figures varied by race, ethnicity and sex. The likelihood of black men and women remaining married for 10 years or more was 50 percent. The probability for Hispanic men was the highest, 75 percent. Among women, the odds are 50-50 that their marriage will last less than 20 years.
The survey found that about 28 percent of men and women had cohabitated before their first marriage and that about 7 percent lived together and never married. About 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together.
Women who were not living with both of their biological or adoptive parents at 14 were less likely to be married and more likely to be cohabiting than those who grew up with both parents.
The share who had ever married varied markedly by race and ethnicity: 63 percent of white women, 39 percent of black women and 58 percent of Hispanic women. Among men in that age group, the differences were less striking. Fifty-three percent of white men, 42 percent of black men and 50 percent of Hispanic men were married or had been previously married at the time of the survey.
By their early 40s, most white and Hispanic men and women were married, but only 44 percent of black women were.
Source: Nytimes.com
The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.
The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.
“From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish,” said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don’t believe that.”
The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.
Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years.
“The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women,” said Kelly A. Musick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.
Couples who marry after age 26 or have a baby eight months or more after marrying are also more likely to stay married for more than a decade.
“Cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first co-residential union formed among young adults,” the study said. “As a result of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, the number of children born to unmarried cohabiting parents has also increased.”
By the beginning of the last decade, a majority of births to unmarried women were to mothers who were living with the child’s father. Just two decades earlier, only a third of those births were to cohabiting couples.
The study found that, over all, 62 percent of women ages 25 to 44 were married and 8 percent were cohabiting. Among men, the comparable figures were 59 percent and 10 percent.
In general, one in five marriages will dissolve within five years. One in three will last less than 10 years. Those figures varied by race, ethnicity and sex. The likelihood of black men and women remaining married for 10 years or more was 50 percent. The probability for Hispanic men was the highest, 75 percent. Among women, the odds are 50-50 that their marriage will last less than 20 years.
The survey found that about 28 percent of men and women had cohabitated before their first marriage and that about 7 percent lived together and never married. About 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together.
Women who were not living with both of their biological or adoptive parents at 14 were less likely to be married and more likely to be cohabiting than those who grew up with both parents.
The share who had ever married varied markedly by race and ethnicity: 63 percent of white women, 39 percent of black women and 58 percent of Hispanic women. Among men in that age group, the differences were less striking. Fifty-three percent of white men, 42 percent of black men and 50 percent of Hispanic men were married or had been previously married at the time of the survey.
By their early 40s, most white and Hispanic men and women were married, but only 44 percent of black women were.
Source: Nytimes.com
Friday, February 19, 2010
Relationship Traditions of tribe in India
This documentary (video is in tamil without subtitles) explains very old tradition of tribe in south part of India(from the region where I came from) about their live-in relationships and how people there give less importance for marriage. They believe its important to be with someone who they love and all other things are not mandatory. They have no religious beliefs & they have rejected modernity. Its very interesting to learn about their love, trust, acceptance and simplicity of the lifestyle.
And To me- its yet another eye opening, joyfully experience of learning yet another culture & tradition of India and her diversity.
And To me- its yet another eye opening, joyfully experience of learning yet another culture & tradition of India and her diversity.
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