Dating Culture in India

 Form the inflated chimerical notion of one love for life to the inchoate  casual dating scene, it seems our dating culture mirrors the country in  its diversity. But the prevailing norm suggests that relationships, not  just in teenage but even in the twenties, are not received with an open  mind. From Gupta aunty's gentle reprove and Sharma uncle's wrath to  Bansal aunty's gossip, a relationship in our country manages to garner  one concocted fable over another. ( Gupta, Sharma and Bansal are all popular Indian surnames, aunty is just a variant of aunt)

  Even though the society somehow seems to relent with its  draconian mindset, relationships are still viewed with a sense of  haughty mockery and those who choose to continue anyway are labelled as  purposeless strays who shall later lament their misspent youth. After  all your parents hard-earned money cannot be squandered off at your  frivolous pastimes. You have to enter a certain age and have a career,  and thereafter these “limiting caps” can be revised; thereafter you  should be brimming with lust and romantic feelings for a partner your parents will arrange. So pucker up, winnow down, accept these norms or  else be branded as a ignorant deviant who couldn't care less about  driving his family name through the dirt. It is the way it is as more  than 70 percent of the marriages are arranged, and I dare say more than  40 percent are forced. 

 Let us try to look into why is that the things are the way they are.  There seems to be an overwhelming dependence on academics to bag a job  and make a living. The fierce competition conjures a distorted sense of  reality, especially for the parents. The teenage students and even the  college going students are heavily dependent on their parents. For  countless other cultural reasons, people accept their parent's decision  with humble obedience. A teenager's decision are sometimes consensual,  and mostly forced upon, like say opting for a vocation or applying for  college, or choosing a stream. The need to focus on career goals coupled with a distressing dearth of autonomy promulgates an erroneous notion of relationship that skews towards the “very bad” scale of the moral  compass and it bears consequences for their sexual tendencies as well. 

 

Sex and all that comes with it too seems to be mired in  confusion. Sex education is as insignificant as a whisper in a windstorm  and the parents and schools alike, deem it just as important. The  children are thus bombarded with complete hokum they surf on the  internet, and they start developing execrably insidious notions about  the same.

The young boys and men thus think of sex  as a forbidden fruit and women alternate between apathetic nonchalance  and feeling abashed of their urges.

Add  to it the inflated sense of romance, where loving comes much before  liking and compatibility doesn't matter. The idea of jumping from one  woman to the other (or the other way around) is aberrant and  contemptible. So dating is pretty much left futile.

The  lack of autonomy devolves into a very inchoate understanding of  consent, mainly because even in today's modern age, society demands  strictures on men and women along with strict adherence and conformity  to expected norms. 

Things  are changing, slowly but just so, they definitely are. The millennials  are much open minded and the digital age has had it's influence. But  from where we are now, it basically is a downward spiral that circles  from lust to infatuation to lust to love to dejection and eventually into feigning apathy.