Another great piece by Samir Varma on Indian marriages—where deep traditions endure, even as subtle revolutions unfold around the edges.. It starts with this kicker:
When I told my mother I was marrying my girlfriend, an Italian Jew, she called all my friends in the US asking them to break us up.
When that failed, she faxed my future father-in-law threatening to disinherit me and never speak to me again. When that failed, she tried to get my PhD advisor to “tell us to break up.” (Luckily, he was relaxed enough to laugh about it with me, though it was embarrassing and deeply unpleasant.) Then she invited my girlfriend to India to “meet the family,” where my girlfriend paid a significant fraction of her yearly income as a starting engineer to fly over.
The pièce de résistance? My mother threw a party to “introduce her to everyone” — and spent the entire time complaining about her to all the guests. About 100 of those guests came to talk to me afterward, apologizing profusely, saying Indians aren’t like this and I should explain so she doesn’t think all Indians are nuts.
At my wedding, I had exactly zero relatives present. We didn’t speak for three years.
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