Hope, negotiation, rejection, despair, sympathy – I have been living this loop for the last 12 months. Being a 29-year-old bride-to-be is never easy, especially when you are searching for a ‘suitable match’ through matrimonial sites. Among various other problems of this system, the major one is the people here never mean what they write on their profile and never write what they are actually looking for in a prospective bride. If you go through the profiles of any matrimonial site, every guy declares that he is looking for ‘a good looking girl who can understand him and support the family’. But the parameters of measuring these desired qualities are quite irrational and devoid of any logic.
To give you a perspective, a guy named Sidhu requested me to add my education details. Then he showed his interest and shared his number. But when my maa called them to take things further, they simply rejected as I don’t possess any technical degree. Now, his profile claimed that he is “in search of a soulmate who could stand by him in both shine and shade” and I fail to understand what it has to do with educational degree??
Sambit’s profile declared that “they are a family with liberal thoughts and are searching for a girl who can gel with their family easily”. And their first objection was how, being a girl, I made the first move by calling the prospective groom. Moreover, he wanted me to clear banking exams (specifically) if I want to marry him. Very liberal values, of course, I believe. For him, holding a bachelor’s degree is equivalent to being illiterate and he had the audacity to say it rudely on my face, all of this during our first meeting.
I am appalled by the increasing importance of academic qualifications over personal morale and values, even in the case where one is exploring the possibilities of being a man and wife. At times I felt like my identity has been reduced to the mere certificates of what I learnt.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a plethora of such instances and dozens of profiles which turned out to be completely different from what they pretended online. I wonder if we can ever put in place the checks to get rid of this. Of late, I am trying to figure out whether it is merely my personal problem or has it anything to do with the mindset of our ‘developing’ society as a whole. Aren’t we holding onto the irrelevant while missing on the relevant things?