I've been thinking a lot about relationships lately, particularly opposite-sex romantic relationships. Relatedly, S and I just finished the latest season of Indian Matchmaking on Netflix. It's pretty good because there seem to be some actual lasting matches. For the first two seasons, the title should have been Indian Mediocre Dating. The reason there are so few success stories, I think, is because the matchmaker, Sima Aunty, doesn't put enough emphasis on physical attraction. She will match two people, and I'll be thinking to myself, just based on their looks, There's no way this will work, and sure enough it doesn't. I swear, like half the commentary on the show is participants trying to find polite ways to imply that their match wasn't hot enough for them. Rarely do they come right out and say it, but there's a lot of talk about a lack of a "spark" or bad "chemistry."
The starkest example of this came from this woman on the show named Arti. The best way to quickly describe her is a cross between Indian Matchmaking and Jersey Shore. She lives on Miami beach, wears tons of makeup, heels, low-cut outfits, etc., and Sima Aunty set her up with this perfectly fine, kinda soft-looking, normal dude. Predictably, their one perfunctory meeting went nowhere. So, Arti started using an app instead and found this guy whose profile looked like an application to a bodybuilding competition.* She met him, they started dating and got engaged. (They seem like a really sweet couple, actually.) I believe this is the first engagement from the show, and it came when somebody decided to specifically stop using the matchmaker -- not the best look for Sima Aunty.
*At one point, Arti was describing what she liked about his profile pictures, saying stuff like, I just thought he looked fun and that we would get along really well. And S and I are both like, R-i-i-i-ght... so the fact he has biceps the size of cantaloupes has nothing to do with it?
The success of Arti and her fiancé aside, it's probably not a good thing that we put so much emphasis on sexual attraction in finding a mate. But it is definitely a thing. I guess evolutionarily it makes some sense. When you die at 35, like our ancestors did, you gotta find a partner you want to procreate with a lot pronto. Our superficiality might have helped keep us from going extinct. One thing I noticed from the show is that women seem to care maybe just a skosh more about looks than do men. I mean, everybody cares, regardless of sex, but on the show they list the match-makees criteria, and when it's a woman there is almost always at least one physical criterion,* and for the men there is only sometimes.
*Often it's height. So many women only want to date tall men, and being that the average male height is around 5' 7", such a criterion immediately eliminates like 60% of the eligible pool.
Now, it could be that men just don't want to say how important looks really are, but I don't think that's it, because stats from dating apps, which are obviously very looks-based, tell a similar story to Indian Matchmaking. I heard that something like 10% of the men get 70% of the attention.* With women it's not like this. In fact, it's the exact opposite, and some apps put safeguards in place so that dudes can't just strafe the field hoping to get a hit, any hit, by sheer volume of attempts.
*I'm so vain that when I heard this my first thought was: I bet if I was on the apps, I'd be in that 10%.
Again, evolutionarily this makes some sense. From a purely reproductive standpoint, the best way for early man to pass on his genes was to spread his seed as far and wide as possible. For early woman, it was to find one virile man who could provide for and protect her and her offspring. In fact, in Carol Hooven's (very good) book T, she documents how roe deer exhibit exactly this type of mating behavior. The females all mate with the same small percentage of strongest males, and if you are a buck who can't get into that elite group (the males actually battle physically to determine who gets the females), well, that's just the way it goes.* At least roe deer don't have to worry about potentially violent incel groups fomenting online.
*She said that sometimes an outsider male will sneak up on a doe when her buck isn't around and try to mate with her on the sly. When I read this, my first reaction was, Yeah, good for him, before immediately thinking, Wait, no, that's actually terrible. Then I thought it's probably best to just not moralize at all when it comes to wild animals -- although what I just described is kinda the deer-version plot of Revenge of the Nerds.
All this makes me think that maybe arranged marriage is actually the way to go. The idea there is that you dispassionately prioritize long-term compatibility and let the physical attraction develop over time -- and that does happen. Millions of couples can attest to it, and personally speaking, there are definitely women I found attractive only after I got to know what cool people they are. Plus, the success rate of arranged marriages versus "love marriages" speaks for itself. It's below 50% for the former and above 90% for the latter. Now, there are undoubtedly some confounding factors in play, but still, that's a huge gap. And the vast majority of couples I know who had arranged marriages -- and I know a decent number across the age spectrum -- seem no more or less happy, satisfied, supported, etc. than other couples I know.
With all that said, I totally understand why so many younger Indians, especially those raised in the US, are eschewing arranged marriage today. There's no way I would do it were I Indian (and somehow still me), and what's more, there's no way I would have given S the time of day if I wasn't immediately attracted to her (it was her shiny lip gloss that really did it for me). I got lucky that she was also a wonderful person. So, I'm kinda talking out of both sides of my mouth on this one. But that's exactly my point: Left to our own devices, the allure of physical attraction is almost impossible to overcome (especially when we are young) when choosing a potential life partner, even though we totally understand it's not a great criterion to weigh so heavily. Just because we are smart enough to know we are behaving like animals that doesn't always stop us from doing so.
Anyway, I think that's all for this post. I was going to comment on this NYT op-ed by Jessica Grose, about how the work-leisure balance is skewed in favor of men in opposite-sex relationships, but I don't have the time. It's a topic I've thought about before (I remember reading a similar NYT op-ed a few years ago) and workload-balance between S and I is something I'm very cognizant of. Maybe I'll write about it next weekend as S will be on one of her work trips, so, having to tend to the boys on my own, I'll be commenting from a position of strength.
Until next time...
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