The Great Escape: Looking For Love In Your 30s

Looking for love in your thirties can be an arduous adventure, thanks to matrimonial websites, their ridiculous demands, and the people that have profiles on them! Here is a look at being single and ready to mingle after thirty.

When in your 30s, most independent singles are looking for these qualities in a prospective partner – a successful professional, can speak well, is well read, is presentable looking, and is liberal. Tedious doesn’t even begin to explain how difficult these are to find.

In today’s world, if one is looking for a commitment, the wise thing to do is to create a profile on a matrimonial platform. The reason one hopes is that the people there are looking for a committed relationship too. Matrimonial platforms usually have an open-ended section where one can write a description or a note. Besides the usual bad grammar and (hopefully) typos like “I should be able to share fillings with each other” here are a few things one often comes across:

“I like to party” – Is that even a thing?
“It is difficult to write about myself” – Pray don’t write!
“As far as I am concerned” – Why were you wasting time talking about others in the first place?
“I am having…”– are words that should be followed by edible items and not adjectives.
And the classic – “I am a good mix of modern and traditional values” – One, the word ‘good’ is subjective. Two, don’t bastardise the word ‘mix’. Most importantly, who is looking for fence sitters?

Then there is the disgracefully unique lot. I’d partly blame the portal for these kind of profiles. What is with shaadi.com profiles that say “Do not include profiles that smoke.” Why is that even an option? If so, the list should be longer. Do not include profiles that gamble or eat junk food, after all these too carry the weight of (albeit stereotypical) negative perceptions? To top it, some of these profiles are smokers themselves. The audacity is laughable.

And then, why have all these subjective parameters like family values, skin tone, body type? If you must, I’d request you to add a scale – like a size chart when buying apparel online. Define each skin tone. Fair = Kareena Kapoor, Wheatish = Priyanka Chopra, Dark = Bipasha Basu. Though for me they are all Asian, and maybe Kareena Kapoor is pink. How about a shadecard?

Also, blood group and how many of your siblings are married are irrelevant, don’t you think?

It all started with my father saying “Please find the person you want to be with. It is not for me to decide who you should spend your life with. It should be your choice at a time when you are ready for it.”

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In my 20s, when friends were going through the pain of formal prospect meetings with families, it seemed like my father had given me the best gift ever. In hindsight, in the name of freedom, I ended up taking a serious and tedious responsibility.When it comes to the task of finding a companion, one sometimes wishes to not be independent. One wishes for someone else to take this responsibility off of our shoulders.

Pic credit: picturepurrfect685 (Used under a CC license)

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