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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us April 22, 2005 Commentary Matchmaker.mom: Arranged marriage? “You should hurry up and get married,” my mother said to me in urgent tones. How old are you now?” Rob Asghar “I’m 39. But there’s no rush. We’ll see how it goes.” “But I can help you. I can find a very good girl for you.” I am not sure why my mother keeps wanting to sign on to Project Sisyphus; she has never struck me as a glutton for punishment. But she and both of my sister-in-laws talked this week about trying to set me up with “the right one,” as did a few friends and other meddlers. Still, no one is more eager to remedy my singleness than my dear mother, and no one is more puzzled by my singleness than my dear father. For them, it was easier: They never met before their arranged Pakistani marriage. They simply reported for duty. What is the solution for singles today: Matchmaker.Com or Matchmaker.Mom? It is a hard choice. While arranged marriages were the norm for my parent’s culture and their generation, it is no longer as common even in Pakistan. In open societies, asking for parental intervention in romance is to pronounce oneself a loser, isn’t it? I am at the vanguard of a non-marrying generation, the first American generation in which bright young girls grew up assuming they would have careers. The consequences have been remarkable. If women can build their own careers and buy their own homes and vacation with their own friends in London, they do not need to settle for a handsome but dumb lug, a smart nerd, or any mere mortal. Men have adapted to this consumerist age too, and we take it for granted that marriage is more trouble than it’s worth unless we find that special woman who does not have the foibles so commonly attributed to, well, women. From 1970 to 2000, the percentage of women ages 30 to 34 who never married almost quadrupled, from 6 percent to 22 percent. The percentage of unmarried men in that same category jumped from 9 percent to 30 percent. And some of us ne’er-marrieds are still going strong. This trend isn’t merely driven by sexual freedom; many conservative women and men have held off on marriage mainly because they are more content to stay single than to risk marriage or its nasty offspring, divorce. Yet whether a libertine or a prude, whether a single perennial or a seasonal single, we know something is missing in our live, even if we hate hearing this from annoyingly domesticated friends and relatives. So we buckle at last. I have posted new photographs of myself on an internet dating site, even though I dread the inevitable moment when a woman in the office approaches me and says something like, “All of us in accounting were looking at that serious shot of you on the Web site. But we prefer that shot of you with the Easter Bunny.” My recurringly single friend Peter has in fact gone the MatchMaker.Mom route, letting his family know that he is willing to meet anyone whom they think is a good match. He used his own judgment in finding his first wife, and he is not so enamored of that judgment now. Can arranged marriages be far off on these shores? Peter too may go the Internet route, as have some 40 million other Americans, but he is rightfully suspicious. In cyberspace, men swarm around the most attractive female packages like so many sperms racing to an egg. Such women spend half their day working and half their day deleting e-mail messages. Meanwhile, mothers around our great nation exhort their embarrassed progeny to find the same marital bliss that blessed or even eluded them. They even browbeat us for wasting our time with some of the characters that we do meet, because our mothers are certain we can do better. Me, I will try to be less embarrassed by our mothers’ (and, yes, fathers’) desires to be helpful. They seek the best for us and they are the only odd souls on the planet who are convinced that we deserve the best. Given that we know in our psychologically astute age that our greatest life obstacles are our lingering anxieties that we did not measure up to our parents’ standards, this should be a heartening thing. They really do care. In the end, that makes this singleness worthwhile. 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