Skip to main content

Much Choice

I spent a good part of a recent weekend on the phone with a young woman I mentor. P is on the cusp on what could be her first serious relationship. The man in question is a good bit older than her, with more experience and more ready to settle down than she is. He also has a lot more money to spend than she does. Both factors skew the balance of power between them. Some gestures could come across as effusive without it really being so. On the other matters that appear problematic may have a logic path to resolution that a couple with such disparity cannot always solve together. 

P wishes this man would be the one so she would not have to spend the next decade of her life looking for that person and many women her age end up doing. The man wishes the same because P is perfect for him and he does not see the point of staying in the dating game if she decides in his favor. But that is the question that neither can answer. P is too young to make a decision so big. The man has no way of knowing how this woman will morph in the time that it takes for her to make such decision. I was reading Teatime for the Firefly around the time P was talking to me about her concerns. Set in a different place and time, where the couple comes and stays together for reasons that are not grounded in reality of having tried to live the life that would follow after marriage. 

Young people of P's ilk would not understand how one could possibly find a lifelong partner this way. The component of luck is as important as acceptance of the marriage as a final destination is key to things working out. Comparing the two made me think about how a capitalistic outlook towards life impacts attitude towards relationships too. An infinite number of partner choices is not unlike an endless online shopping aisle. People buy and return things all the time, there is no risk or obligation. Compare that to having only one store in town that sells two options of an item that you need with no possibility of return. You will live with your choice. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more