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Setups I have known

Thinking back over the many weddings I have attended within my Indian community, I can only think of two other people who married someone non-Indian. Out of the others, I'm not sure how many were setups. I can think of five that definitely were. Two of those ended in divorce. (In one, the husband turned out to be abusive; in the other, I was surprised to hear she was getting married in the first place.) The other three seem to have resulted in happy couples.

My parents tried quite a few times to set my brother up. He would tell me about these conversations where they would say, "You should meet this girl. She got a 1580 on her SAT! Went to Cornell!" "What's her name?" he'd ask, and they would say, "We don't know. But she was the valedictorian of her high school." He invited one of these girls to the movies, and she said she couldn't go because when the lights went down, she would keep imagining that cockroaches were swarming all over where she couldn't see. Later her parents kept asking why he didn't call back.

One of our friends had an unfortunate setup. They were in the middle of dinner, and things were going well until he joked about the web site where they both had profiles. She stopped eating and asked just what he was talking about. "Um... you know, the web site? My parents saw your profile there and called your parents." She left the table and he could hear her yelling at her parents over her cell phone. Apparently she had no idea that they had posted an ad for her on an Indian personals site and had been looking for potential mates behind her back. He never saw her again.

Though I'm relieved that I never had to go through this, I feel like I missed out on an Indian-American rite of passage: an already-awkward blind date made infinitely worse with the knowledge that your parents will be on the phone with each other a few hours later, speculating about whether you'll end up married.

Full post as published by Magic Cookie on May 19, 2008 (boomark / email).