Logically ‘Arranged’ Marriage

Disclaimer: The content of this post might seem immature/male chauvinistic to a majority of the readers, but this is just a conversation between a bunch of guys high on spirits. and this is part-true-part-fiction.

Sometime in January this year, when I was in India on a short trip after an year long stay in the US, I happened to meet a few of my B.Tech. batch mates at a get-together organised by a close friend ‘H’. Because it happened to be organised by a bachelor at his residence late in the night(starting at 9 pm) and the menu being limited to drinks from the local liquor store and food from ‘Cafe bahar’, all the married junta from our batch opted out.

The first half n hour went by with everyone talking about what they are up to in life and general updates about the batch mates they are in touch with. It didn’t take a long time for this group of bachelors to start discussing the topic of marriage. It should be noted though that a bachelor would never discuss marriage with his married friends. Married folks would have as much fun poking their bachelor friends as an EAMCET/AIEEE top ranker would have, while bombarding a guy who just failed his intermediate examination with questions like:  ’Whats the problem? Why is it so hard for you?’

At 27 or 28, love marriage is mostly ruled out, which leaves with the default Indian option of ‘arranged marriage’. When you are young, you think that arranged marriage is only for the socially inept, but as wisdom(most importantly in the form of age) looms on you, it becomes the only viable option.

Getting back to the topic, on that day each of us in the group had a different ‘problem’ with regards to marriage. One of them couldn’t find a girl who would understand his career aspirations, one of them just got out of a relationship and is taking a break, one of them couldn’t find a girl whom his parents would approve of to start with and so on. Most of us though didn’t understand how much you can know about a person in a few interactions and yet make the most important decision in life. That’s just when H came up with the most logical approach to the NP hard problem of arranged marriage.

To give a brief introduction about H:  H is the kind of guy who can take any side in an argument and convince you about it. The amusing thing about him is that he can switch the side after proving a point on one side of the argument and then start the process all over again for the other side.

Given his MBA background, H approached the whole arranged marriage concept as a hiring process for a job and he started out by listing the primary and secondary stakeholders: yourself and your parents. He made a list of competencies on which you can evaluate the various candidates(girls) on.  H goes on to list the key competencies:

1) Looks: I don’t need to say much about this competency, but I will provide a perspective on how things change over time. When you are still on the right side of 25, you would give 80% weight-age to this category, but then over time, again as wisdom(read age) looms on you, the weight-age goes down. You would also come to a realization that the guy you see everyday in the mirror is no super model

2) Career: Compatibility in terms of careers is one of the most important things. If your partner’s job requires her to work from locations where you can’t have any career, things might not work out in the long term. ‘A’ pitched in with his experience when he asked a girl he met as to whether she would be willing to move to US, if he gets an opportunity onsite and the girl almost immediately said ‘no’ and that was the end of the discussion.

3) Compatibility of thought: Overall compatibility in terms of thought process, approach to different things etc.  Some guys are nervous and not sure what to talk about in their first meeting with the girl, so end up asking lame questions like ‘whats your favorite color, who is your favorite actor’ etc, but that’s not at all what compatibility of thought is about.

4) Dowry: As much male chauvinistic as it gets at this point, this is a key criteria in some cases for the secondary stakeholders in this process especially if you belong to certain castes in South India.

5) Family compatibility: This is another competency which is more relevant to the secondary stakeholders in terms of how her parents get along with your parents and the potential for any compatibility issues as such.

Though mostly intuitive, H captured the attention of everyone by organizing all the information this way. He went to the topic of adding weight-age to each of the competencies and the actual selection process. Each of the stakeholders gets to vote on all the prospective candidates on a 1-10 scale. How much weight-age each of the stakeholders gets for his/her vote on a competency is pure negotiation between the two stakeholders. For example, your vote might get more weight-age on competencies 1,2 and 3, while your parents vote might get more weight-age on competencies 4 & 5. H took this to the next level by putting everything in an excel sheet with the right weight-ages added as rules in excel. (As much geeky as it gets )

Right when everyone thought H nailed the problem of arranged marriage, A asked what if there’s a tie. There was a wicked smile on H’s face as if he knew this question was coming, and he took his time to reveal a cheat code. He said he added a competency called ‘Feel’, which had the most weight-age and is based on how you feel about the girl after a few interactions. Making this vote is the most difficult thing indeed. The moral of the story was that you have to make some decisions in life yourself and you can’t apply logic to everything.

In a very objective and inhumane sense, arranged marriage is like shopping for something you don’t even know yourself for sure. And the constraint is that you can’t go back to something you rejected in the past in the hope/greed of finding something better. And it shouldn’t definitely be treated as a race against time.

Thanks to H, everyone had a lot of fun that day.

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