Tag: phallus

Head, heart, phallus and arranged louvvu

In response to my arranged scissors series, my stalker has started her own thing called the “karabath series“. In the first (and so far, only) post in that series, she talks about this concept that she describes as “arranged louvvu”. It is a bit convoluted but the essence is that in “arranged louvvu” you don’t blindly get into it. Instead, you put on a rational approach to decide if the counterparty is best for you and if the cost of giving  up on all the other women in the world is covered by the joy this woman brings you, and then make sure that the counterparty satisfies all CMP constraints and only then, in a phased manner, do you fall in louvvu with the person.

It is a nice concept but unfortunately I think the way the stalker has explained it is extremely convoluted, and I think using the head-heart-phallus framework (Kunal Sawardekar, you can abuse me for this also) I can explain this a lot better. So basically the idea is that the phallus is the quickest to react, followed by the head and the heart takes the longest to react.

The way most louvvu happens, the way they show it in the movies is that phallus reacts first (it’s a purely biological reaction, so it’s quick and trustworthy). And then, quickly enough, the heart gets involved. And the thing with heart involvement is tthat it is an extremely illiquid investment – it is really tough to liquidate the “heart investment” without booking significant losses. And since the heart entered the scene before the head also gave its verdict, when the head finally comes into the picture, it finds the whole thing irrational, and thus it goes “love is blind”.

The typical arranged scissors process, however, doesn’t leave you with enough time for the heart to enter the process. And since relatives can’t help you with the phallus process (and since that’s anyway instantaneous) it’s the head that gets involved. It’s the head, the rational head that takes all the decisions there. The heart enters only later, in most cases after marriage.

So the funda is that the stalker is confusing “head involvement” for “arranged process”. What she calls as “arranged louvvu” is a case where one holds back the heart (yeah, it takes effort to do that after phallus has said yes) in order to allow for the head to take a rational decision, and then go ahead with “heart investment” only after head has said yes. This way, the head always has buy-in on any relationship that the heart has gotten into, so irrationality gets minimized to a large extent. And some of the problems of “pure louvvu” are hedged off.

Yeah, it takes effort. It takes effort to hold back the heart once the phallus has given go-ahead. But getting the right amount of head involved at the right time helps in preventing much disaster. It’s the logical way to go about things. “Arranged louvvu” is only a fancy name people give it. And now I don’t really know if the head-heart-phallus framework has made it any easier for you to understand this.

Arranged Scissors 14 – Losing Heart

I’ve been in this market for a while now. It was sometime in February that my mother decided that I had utterly failed in my attempts to find myself a long-term gene-propagating female partner, and that she needed to step in and find someone for me. It was sometime in March that I went to this shady photo studio at DLF Galleria in Gurgaon and got a “wedding profile” snap taken. Later in March, I got listed at some shadymax exchange in Malleswaram. And there was the “market visit”.

The last weekend of this March I was in Bangalore, and was taken to this shady-max exchange in Malleswaram for a “market visit”. My uncle had told me that we needed to go sufficiently early, since there were apparently profiles of six hundred girls that I had to inspect that day, and make a shortlist. We had had a hurried breakfast at a Darshini in JP Nagar and then headed out to the exchange. My uncle, aunt and mother took turns to go up to the counter there and fetch the “smartha brides” files one by one. And I would spend about a minute on each file – which had fifty profiles. The six hundred profiles were done in less than a quarter of an hour. Phallus had simply refused to budge.

Aadisht, via his friend Vishakh, came up with this awesome framework of “head, heart, phallus“. The basic funda is that in order for you to enter into a long-term gene-propagating relationship, your head, heart and phallus need to independently like the counterparty (women insert appropriate substitute into the 3rd component). There is nothing earth-shaking about this framework as another of my friends pointed out, but the important thing is that it distinguishes between heart and phallus. Which I think most other explanations of louvvu (including bollywood movies) tend to ignore. And people also ignore it and get confused between heart approval and phallic approval, leading to disaster.

I had taken a long break from this arranged scissors market – a combination of being generally disgusted, poor health and being in between jobs. Recently (with the advent of Navaratri) I’d gotten back, and realize that I’ve lost my heart. Yeah, you might think this sounds funny but it’s not. I’ve truly lost my heart. And the only good that can come out of this is that if a crocodile catches and threatens to eat me, I can tell it the truth.

This whole arranged scissors concept seems to dehumanize the wonderful concept of long-term gene-propagating relationships. You are expected to make your decisions quickly, and you are expected to design “questionnaires” so as to get the maximum amount of info through each meeting. You are expected to browse through files containing six hundred profiles and make a shortlist. And when you are in the process of making the shortlist, you have your mom and aunt peering over your shoulder with helpful comments such as “this girl’s mouth is too wide” or “that girl’s nose is too blunt”.

For a while you resist, and resolve that you won’t get sucked into this mess. You resolve that you are still looking for “true louvvu” (whatever that is) and won’t settle for a common minimum program. You resolve that you’ll use the arranged marriage exchange as a dating agency. And soon it begins getting to you. You begin to see the merits of judging noses as too flat and mouths as too wide. You start breaking a girl down into components, and giving marks to each, and taking a weighted average to see if it is beyond “pass marks” (ok I’m obviously exagggerating here). You agree to meet potential counterparties even if you know that it’s improbable that you’ll like her.

My head, I think, is doing quite fine. So is the phallus. However, I think I’ve lost my heart. It’s been three and a half years since I even hit on someone. My heart seems to have forgotten how to love, and to have a “crush”. I’ve forgotten how my heart used to react during prior blades. In each of those cases, if I remember right, it was the heart that initiated it, and the head and phallus only gave approval later. Now, I have no clue how that used to happen. That seems so improbable.

This whole concept of meeting people with the explicit intention of evaluating them for long-term gene-propagating relationships is seedy. I think it goes against the laws of nature, and completely ruins that wonderful feeling that one usually associates with louvvu. It makes you too judgmental (I’m judgmental otherwise also, but not this judgmental), and you are so busy evaluating her that you don’t enjoy it at all. And how can you trust your judgment when you know that you haven’t liked the process of judgment at all?

Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.