When simran arora returned to New Delhi from London, master’s degree in hand, her parents welcomed her with an enough-is-enough ultimatum: she was twenty-six, and it was time to settle down with a good Punjabi boy of their choosing. “I said sure, why not,” recounted Simran, four years older (and wiser, as I was to find out). “If the guy is Mr. Right, who cares if it’s an arranged marriage?” Simran isn’t her real name. She asked me to keep her identity secret because she didn’t want her family and friends to learn the details she was about to tell me. “It’s a complicated, messy, crazy story,” she warned me. Simran’s willingness to be matched by her parents was not unusual. The 2012 India Human Development Survey found that a mere 5 percent of women picked their own husbands; 22 percent made their choices along with their parents or other relatives, and 73 percent had their spouses picked for them with no active say. When marriages are “arranged,” parents usually filter candidates based on compatibilities of caste, class, and family. In many cases, the stars must be aligned—quite literally—as astrological charts are matched to ensure a future of marital harmony. Not everyone follows convention. A small but growing number of Indians, mostly young urban professionals, dismiss the prospect of being set up. Their alternative is the curiously named “love marriage”—a union that implies not only the serendipity of falling for someone but also a proactive, defiant choice. Adding the prefix “love” attaches a hint of illicit romance to what is known in most other parts of the world as, simply, marriage. The choice isn’t always binary. Sometimes unions nestle between “arranged” and “love.” There is, for example, the increasingly common “arranged-to-love” approach, where old-school-but-liberal parents allow a family-matched couple to go on several dates in the hope of Cupid doing his thing. (Incidentally, Indians have their own version of the Greek god: the Lord Kāmadeva is often depicted as a handsome man with green skin, wielding a sugarcane bow with a bowstring of honeybees.
