There’s a lot of amazing content she puts out through all these channels, but I must say that I got especially blown away by this one video that she has put up recently. It is a conversation with Urvashi Goverdhan, an actor and model, about “how to get the first date”.
So you might be single and wondering how you can chat up someone of the opposite sex (or in the interest of diversity, should I say “gender that you want to partner with”?). And if you are like what I was until 2009, you have no clue how to do it.
Most of the time you play over conservative and miss out on opportunities. Sometimes you might decide to go aggressive, but do it all wrong (as I kept doing through most of the 2000s), and count yourself lucky that your “target” decides that physically harming you or shaming you is not worth their time.
If you are like that (and I was like that till at least August 2009 – if you’re not convinced go read my blog archives. Everything about my life from 2004 onwards is well documented here), then I strongly urge you to listen to this conversation, as these two wonderful ladies talk about what women look out for in men, and what men need to do to get women’s attention in a nice manner.
Watching this now, I so strongly wish that I had seen this 11-15 years back. I would have been able to make very good use of it back then. Then again, if I had seen this video and been able to make good use of it back in the day, then there is a strong likelihood that I may not have met the person who is now my wife at all (some of you might know – we met through this blog, and then Orkut, and then chatted for long enough that when we met, it was a “qualified lead” that I was able to convert).
It is a long video, but completely worth your time. So go ahead and watch it in full. Oh, and you should subscribe to the Marriage Broker Auntie Youtube channel as well, if you haven’t already.
Still not convinced that you should watch the video pasted above? Here are some pointers I gathered, all from the first 10 minutes of the video:
If a boy is in a group that already has girls, then there is a higher chance of other girls wanting to talk to him
Pick up lines don’t work. At all.
When you repeatedly make eye contact with someone, smile. Don’t stare.
Just to remind you, Suprio Guha Thakurta (former Chief Strategy Officer at The Economist) and I have started The Paper, a 4-days a week newsletter that goes in (some) depth into one business story from India each day. We rely purely on “secondary reporting” (collating from news items), to which we add our own commentary.
Last week we wrote about a new TRAI order about bundling of TV channels. Essentially the telecom (and broadcast) regulator in India has gone to great lengths to ensure that TV channels don’t get bundled in a way that makes it difficult for the customer to choose.
While the effect of this bundling order might be uncertain, one question needs to be asked to TRAI – why are they only concerned about bundling at one level (across channels) and not at the television channel level itself?
After all, television channels are also bundles.
For a fixed fee a month (and a willingness to see a certain proportion of paid content), subscription to a television channel gives you the opportunity to watch any of the programming that the channel offers. Let’s take a sports channel, for example (IMHO, live sports is the only reason you need cable TV. Everything else can be streamed).
Let’s say there is one Sony channel that offers live coverage of UEFA Champions League, NBA and cricket played in England (I know all these are part of the Sony bouquet, though I don’t know if they are regularly broadcast on the same or different channels here. Let’s assume there is one channel that shows all three).
Assume that I’m only interested in the football, but not in either NBA or cricket played in England. In order to watch my football, I’m forced to buy subscription to the entire TV channel (and thus pay for the cricket and basketball as well). Why am I being forced to do this?
Take any channel, and the outcome is going to be similar. You will subscribe to the channel only because you want to watch a few programs, but you are forced to pay for everything. Is this fair?
Let’s move beyond televisions. Consider the Times of India. I’m mainly interested in the local news and the bridge column (OK, my daughter has taken a liking for the cartoon page as well). Still I need to pay for the whole paper. Is that fair?
Essentially, bundling exists everywhere. And it is going to be incredibly hard to regulate it away. TRAI wants to reduce one kind of bundling (across channels), but its regulation seems blind to in-channel bundling. Essentially it is impossible to regulate against in-channel bundling as well.
And in any case, there are clear benefits to customers from bundling, the most important of which is the elimination of “mental cost”. If some day I suddenly want to watch NBA, it’s already there on the Sony channel I’ve paid for, and I don’t need to rush that moment to try and buy subscription.
Yes, pay per view exists in certain markets, and it can be profitably offered for certain kinds of premium events whose viewership is so uncorrelated with viewership of other events that bundling is nigh impossible.
Also, isn’t your spouse or partner also a bundle? To quote Esther Perel:
Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?
Every time we have a sort of financial crisis that has something to do with settlement, and collaterals, and weird instruments, people start questioning why more instruments are not traded on exchanges. They cite the example of equities, which world over are exchange traded, centrally settled, and whose markets function rather efficiently.
After the 2008 Financial Crisis, for example, there was a move to take Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to exchanges, rather than letting the market go over the counter (OTC). Every few years, ideas are floated about trading bonds on exchanges (rather than OTC, like they are now), and the blame falls on “greedy bankers who don’t want to let go of control”.
There is an excellent podcast by Bloomberg Odd Lots where Chris White, a former Goldman Sachs banker, talks about how the equity markets went electronic in the 1970s with NASDAQ, and how the “big bang” in the UK markets propelled equities into electronic trading everywhere.
In any case, I think I have the perfect explanation of why bond trading on exchanges hasn’t really taken off. To understand this, let’s look at another market that I discussed extensively in my book – the market for relationships (that chapter has been extracted in Mint).
The market for relationships is in the news thanks to this Netflix documentary called Indian Matchmaking. I started watching it on a whim on Saturday night, and I got so addicted to it that yesterday I postponed my work to late night so that I could finish the show instead.
Marriage can be thought of as a sale of “50% of the rest of your life“, paid for by 50% of the rest of someone else’s life.
There are two ways you can go about it – either “over the counter” (finding a partner by yourself) or “exchange traded” (said exchange could be anything from newspaper classifieds to Tinder to Shaadi.com). Brokers are frequently used in the OTC market – either parents or friends (who set you up) or priests.
The general rule of markets is that the more bespoke (or “weird” or “unusual”) an instrument is, the better the likelihood of finding a match in the OTC markets than on exchanges. The reason is simple – for an exchange to exist, the commodity being traded needs to be a commodity.
Read any literature on agricultural markets, for example, and they all talk about “assaying” and “grading” the commodities. The basic idea is that all goods being traded on a marketplace are close enough substitutes of each other that they can be interchanged for each other.
Equity shares, by definition, are commodities. Equity and index derivatives are commodities as well, easy enough to define. Commodities are, by definition, commodities. Bond futures are commodities, since they can be standardised on a small number of axes. We’ll come to bonds in a bit.
Coming back to relationship markets, the “exchanges” work best if you have very few idiosyncrasies, and can be defined fairly well in terms of a small number of variables. It also helps you to find a partner quicker in case many others in the market have similar attributes as you, which means that the market for “your type of people” becomes “liquid” (this is a recurring theme in my book).
However, in case you are either not easily describable by commonly used variables, or in case there are few others like you in the market, exchanges are likely to work less well for you. Either of these conditions makes you “illiquid”, and it is not a great idea to list an illiquid asset on an exchange.
When you list an illiquid asset on an exchange, unless you are extremely lucky, it is likely to sit there for a long time without being traded (think about “bespoke exchanges” like eBay here, where commodification is not necessary). The longer the asset sits on an exchange, the greater the likelihood that people who come across the asset on the exchange think that “something is wrong with it”.
So if you’re listing it on an exchange, its value will decay exponentially, and unless you are able to trade soon after you have listed it, you are unlikely to get much value for it.
In that sense, if you are “illiquid” for whatever reason (can’t be easily described, or belong to a type that few others in the market belong to), exchanges are not for you. And if you think about each of the characters in Indian Matchmaking who come to Sima aunty, they are illiquid in one way or another.
Aparna has entered the market at 34, and few other women of her age are in the market. Hence illiquid.
Nadia belongs to a small ethnicity, Indian-Guyanese-American, which makes her illiquid.
Pradhyuman has quirky interests (jewelry and fashion), which his parents are trying to suppress as they pass him off a liquid “rich Maadu boy”. Quirky interests mean he’s not easily describable. Hence illiquid.
Vyasar, by Indian-American standards, doesn’t have a great job. So not too many others like him. Illiquid, even before you take his family situation into account.
Ankita is professionally ambitious. Few of those women in the Indian arranged marriage market. Illiquid.
Rupam is divorced with a child. Might be liquid by conventional American markets, but illiquid in an Indian context. And she is, rather inexplicably, going the Indian way despite being American.
Akshay is possibly the most liquid (characterless except for an overly-dominating mom), and maybe that’s why he’s shown getting engaged.
All of these people will be wasting themselves listing themselves on exchanges. And so they come to a matchmaker. Now, Sima Auntie is both a broker and a clearinghouse (refer to Chapter 3 of my book 😛). She helps find matches for people, but only matches within her own inventory (though she decided Ankita has no matches at all in her own inventory, so connected her with another broker-clearinghouse).
This makes it hard – first of all you have illiquid assets, and you are trying to fulfil them within limited inventory. This is why she is repeatedly showing saying that her candidates need to “compromise” (something that seems to have triggered a lot of viewers). By compromise, she is saying that these people are so illiquid that in case they need to get a deal in her little exchange, they need to be willing to accept an “illiquidity discount” in order to get a trade.
Back to bonds, why is trading them on an exchange so difficult? Because each bond is so idiosyncratic. There is the issuer, the exact date of expiry and the coupon, and occasionally some weird derivatives tacked on. The likelihood that you might find someone quickly enough to take the other side of such a deal is minuscule, so if you were to list your bond on an exchange, its value would drop significantly (by being continuously listed) before you could find a counterparty.
Hence, people trade this uncertain discount to a certain discount, by trading their bonds with market makers (investment banks) who are willing to take the other side of the deal immediately.
Unfortunately, market making is not a viable strategy when it comes to relationship markets. So what do you do if you can either be not defined easily in a few parameters, or if there are few others like you in the arranged marriage market? You basically go Over The Counter. Ditch the market and find someone for yourself, or ask people you know to set you up. Or hire a matrimonial advisor who will tell you what to do.
If this doesn’t convince you on why matchmakers are important, then may be you should read what my other half has to say. If she’s the better half or not, you figure.
After I wrote about “love and arranged jobs” last week, an old friend got back saying he quite appreciates the concept and he’s seen it in his career as well. He’s fundamentally a researcher, with a PhD, who then made a transition to corporate jobs.
He told me that back in his research days, he had many “love work relationships”, where he would come across and meet people, and they would “flirt” (in a professional sense), and that could lead to a wide range of outcomes. Sometimes they would just have discussions without anything professional coming out of it, sometimes it would result in a paper, sometimes in a longer collaboration, and so on.
Now that he is in the corporate world, he told me that it is mostly “arranged jobs” for him now, and that meeting people for this is much less enjoyable in that sense.
The one phrase that he used in our conversation stuck with me, and has made it to the title of this post. He said that “love jobs” work when people meet with a “range of possibilities” in mind.
And that is precisely how it works in terms of romantic relationships as well. When you go out on a date, you are open to exploring a range of possibilities. It could just be an evening out. It could be a one-night stand. It could result in friendship, with or without benefits. There could be a long-term relationship that is possible. Gene propagation is yet another possible result. There is a rather wide range of possibilities and that is what I suppose makes dating fun (I suppose because I’ve hardly dated. I randomly one day met my wife after three years of blog-commenting, orkutting and GTalking, and we ended up hitting the highest part of the range).
Arranged marriages are not like that – you go into the “date” with a binary possibility in mind – you either settle into a long-term gene-propagating relationship with this person or you wish you never encounter them in life again. There is simply no range, or room for any range.
Job interviews in an arranged sense are like that. You either get the job or you don’t – there is one midpoint, though, where things don’t temporarily work out but you keep open the possibility of working together at a later date. This, however, is an incredibly rare occurrence – the outcome is usually binary.
It’s possible I’m even thinking about this “love jobs” scenario because I’ve been consulting for the last 8 odd years now. In all this time I’ve met several people, and the great part of this has been that the first meeting usually happens without any expectations – both parties are open to a range of possibilities.
Some people I’ve met have tried to hire me (for a job). Some have become friends. Some have given me gigs, some several. Some have first given me gigs and then become friends. Others have asked me to write recommendation letters. Yet others have become partners. And so on.
And this has sort of “spoilt” me into believing that a job can be found through this kind of a “love process” where a range of possibilities is open upon the first meeting itself. And when people try to propose the arranged route (“once we start this process we expect to hire you in a week”) I’ve chickened out.
Thinking about it, that’s how a lot of hiring works. Except maybe for the handful of employers which are infamous for long interview processes (I love those proceses, btw), I guess most of the “industry” is all about arranged jobs.
And maybe that’s why so few people “love” their jobs!
Last week I met a single friend at a bar. He remarked that had I been late, or not turned up at all, he would have seriously considered chatting up a couple of women at the table next to ours.
This friend has spent considerable time in several cities. The conversation moved to how conducive these cities are for chatting up people, and what occasions are appropriate for chatting up. In Delhi, for example, he mentioned that you never try and chat up a strange woman – you are likely to be greeted with a swap.
In Bombay, he said, it depends on where you chat up. What caught my attention was when he mentioned that in hipster cafes, the ones that offer quinoa bowls and vegan smoothies, it is rather normal to chat up strangers, whether you are doing so with a romantic intent or not. One factor he mentioned was the price of real estate in Bombay which means most of these places have large “communal tables” that encourage conversation.
The other thing we spoke about how the sort of food and drink such places serve create a sort of “brotherhood” (ok not appropriate analogy when talking about chatting up women), and that automatically “qualifies” you as not being a creep, and your chatting up being taken up seriously.
This got me thinking about the concept of “base rates” or “priors”. I spent the prime years of my youth in IIT Madras, which is by most accounts a great college, but where for some inexplicable reason, not too many women apply to get in. That results in a rather lopsided ratio that you would more associate with a dating app in India rather than a co-educational college.
In marketing you have the concept of a “qualified lead”. When you randomly call a customer to pitch your product there is the high chance that she will hang up on you. So you need to “prime” the customer to expect your call and respond positively. Building your brand helps. Also, doing something that gauges the customer’s interest before the call, and calling only once the interest is established, helps.
What you are playing on here in marketing is is the “base rate” or the “prior” that the customer has in her head. By building your brand, you automatically place yourself in a better place in the customer’s mind, so she is more likely to respond positively. If, before the call, the customer expects to have a better experience with you, that increases the likelihood of a positive outcome from the call.
And this applies to chatting up women as well. The lopsided ratio at IIT Madras, where I spent the prime of my youth, meant that you started with a rather low base rate (the analogy with dating apps in India is appropriate). Consequently, chatting up women meant that you had to give an early signal that you were not a creep, or that you were a nice guy (the lopsided ratio also turns most guys there into misogynists, and not particularly nice. This is a rather vicious cycle). Of course, you could build your brand with grades or other things, but it wasn’t easy.
Coming from that prior, it took me a while to adjust to situations with better base rates, and made me hesitant for a long time, and for whatever reason I assumed I was a “low base rate” guy (I’m really glad, in hindsight, that my wife “approached” me (on Orkut) and said the first few words. Of course, once we’d chatted for a while, I moved swiftly to put her in my “basket”).
Essentially, when we lack information, we stereotype someone with the best information we have about them. When the best information we have about them is not much, we start with a rather low prior, and it is upon them to impress us soon enough to upgrade them. And upgrading yourself in someone’s eyes is not an easy business. And so you should rather start from a position where the base rate is high enough.
And this “upgrade” is not necessarily linear – you can also use this to brand yourself in the axes that you want to be upgraded. Hipster cafes provide a good base rate that you like the sort of food served there. Sitting in a hipster cafe with a MacBook might enhance your branding (increasingly, sitting in a cafe with a Windows laptop that is not a Surface might mark you out as an overly corporate type). Political events might help iff you are the overly political type (my wife has clients who specify the desired political leadings of potential spouses). Caste groups on Orkut or Facebook might help if that is the sort of thing you like. The axes are endless.
All that matters is that whatever improved base rate you seek to achieve by doing something, the signal you send out needs to be credible. Else you can get downgraded very quickly once you’ve got the target’s attention.
When our daughter was young, some friends saw uncanny resemblances between her and me, and remarked that “Karthik could have married an old shoe and still produced a child that looks like this”, essentially remarking that at least as far as looks were concerned, the wife hadn’t contributed much (Bambi eyes apart).
Over time, the daughter has shown certain other traits that make her seem rather similar to me. For example, she has the practice of sticking her tongue out when performing tasks that require some degree of concentration. She laughs like me. Screeches like me. And makes a “burl-burl” noise with her fingers and lips like I do (admittedly the last one is taught). I’ve already written a fuller list of ways in which the daughter is similar to me.
If you are single and looking to get into a long-term gene propagating relationship, you inevitably ask yourself the question of whether someone is “the one” for you. We have discussed this topic multiple times on this blog.
For example, we have discussed that as far as men are concerned, one thing they look for in potential partners is “consistent fuckability“. We have also discussed that whether someone is “the one” is not a symmetric question, and when you ask yourself the question, you either get “no” or “maybe” as an answer, implying that you need to use Monte Carlo algorithms. Being married to the Marriage Broker Auntie, I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed this topic on this blog several other times.
This is a tubelight post – at least two years too late (the “old shoe” comment came that long ago), but this is yet another framework you can use to determine if you want someone as your long-term gene-propagating partner. Basically you replace yourself by an old shoe.
In other words, assume that the genes that you will propagate along with this person will result in kids who look like them, talk like them, act like them, and rather than a “next best thing”, might just be a superior version of them. Ask yourself if you are okay with having a child who is like this, and who you will be proud of.
This is another Monte Carlo type question, but if the answer in this case is no (you may not be particularly proud of a progeny who is exactly like the person under consideration – for whatever reason), you don’t want to risk propagating genes with this person. In case the answer is yes – that you are willing to parent a child who is exactly like this counterparty, then you can seriously consider this long term relationship.
Again, this applies if and only if you’re looking for a gene propagating relationship. If that isn’t an issue (no pun intended), then you don’t need to worry about old shoes of any kind.
One thing relationship gurus parrot often is the need for compromise. Conflicts are inevitable in a relationship, they say, and so sometimes you need to compromise. While sometimes it’s possible to hold back a thought or a statement, and prevent a situation from blowing up, at other times, there’s simply no way out.
Consider the situation last night, for example. The wife wanted to make Maggi for dinner. Now, unlike most Indians of my generation I don’t like Maggi, and I can at best tolerate it for a snack – definitely not for dinner. And so I definitely wasn’t pleased at the proposal that we have Maggi for dinner. The question was how I should react.
I had two choices – either to grudgingly accept, eat Maggi for dinner and feel unhappy about what I had for dinner, or to tell her I would make my own dinner, which would come at the cost of her getting upset that I wasn’t going to eat something she was going to lovingly prepare.
So one way I would feel unhappy, and the other way she would – so the moment she uttered the proposal to make Maggi, some kind of conflict or unhappiness was given.
That, however, doesn’t mean that it was her fault either – to propose that we eat Maggi, because the same tradeoff applies there as well. She could either propose we eat Maggi, with the result that either she’ll get upset or I’ll get unhappy, or she could hold back the thought and silently bottle it in. Both would incur a cost.
And it happens all the time – there are days when I want us to go out, knowing fully well that the wife likes to stay home. If I voice my desire to go out, it will lead to conflict – either I get upset that she refuses or she’ll grudgingly accompany me. If not, I’ll sulk silently at not having explored the option to go out. And it goes on.
How do you even resolve such differences? By backward induction, the conflict happens at the moment a thought is planted in your head – you could say that we should train ourselves that we don’t even get thoughts that could potentially lead to situations that potentially lead to conflicts, but isn’t that possibly taking things too far?
Anyway, last night we “monetised” our anguish, when I said she should go ahead and make Maggi, but only for herself and Berry (who also loves Maggi). I made myself a Halloumi sandwich. As it happened, all three of us woke up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly hungry!
But more practically, I think it’s impossible to louvvu someone unless you have lots of similar interests, and that also means lots of similar ambitions. And in that sense my wife and I have shared quite a few ambitions.
First we wanted to become celebrity bloggers. Then (ok the order gets messed up here) there was the MBA. And before all this there is Ganeshana Maduve (which we re-watched perhaps for the 50th time this weekend).
And adding to all this, there’s the desire to write in newspapers. I remember that over a decade ago I wanted to regularly write in newspapers, and about “policy issues”. I didn’t follow up on that ambition, of course, but through lots of twists and turns and happy coincidences meant that I started writing for Mint in 2013, and some of the stuff I’ve written there are about “policy issues”.
And the wife has had similar ambitions as well, though her methods have been vastly different, and much more focussed. She’s always wanted to write a column on relationships. Rather, she first wanted to be a relationship blogger, and then a relationship columnist, and she’s gone about the process with single-minded ambition.
So, first there was the MarriageBrokerAuntie blog (now hosted here). Then it turned into a Facebook page. It even led to a business that she ran during her maternity and post-childbirth periods (imagine running a business while nursing a tiny baby). And now she’s in the papers. Yay!
It so happens that it’s the same paper that I write for. And it also happens that the edition of the paper where it was published (Mint on Sunday) also happened to carry an excerpt from my book two-three weeks back. And that also happened to be about relationships.
So a long long time ago, a couple of days after we’d first met, she had written about “Arranged Louvvu“. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first piece she’s written for Mint is about “Love, and other arrangements“. It’s about dating apps, and how what they lead to is not “real love” and it’s no different from “other arrangements”. That people think arranged marriage is uncool, but dating apps lead to basically arranged relationships. And so on.
Read the whole thing, it’s damn well written. Oh, and it features 1-6-1 calls, Panchatantra and George Akerlof’s “market for lemons”, among other stud fundaes.
Now the only thing left is for Berry to start writing for Mint. They don’t have a children’s issue (where they feature drawings, poems, etc. written by kids) so I guess she’ll have to wait a while. But I’m damn hopeful!
In any case, for now massive pride is happening on account of the wife!
I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about my biggest concern about hitting on Pinky – I always thought she was “too young”. Coming to think of it now, what I didn’t realise back then was that marrying someone much younger can actually help give you a “second youth”. In other words, Pinky makes me feel much younger!
It’s possibly because of the way it started. Pinky pinged me on Orkut with a link to her blog. She was barely nineteen then, and her posts back then looked like what a teenager would write. Bad spellings. Horrible capitalisation. Trying to sound cutesy. She even spelled her name as “Preanca”!
It was over a year later that we started talking regularly, but the image had been fixed – this was one cute kid who liked to chat to me, and I treated her thus. We used to speak about just about anything, from hugging techniques to bra fits (that one slightly creeped her out, I think).
When I entered the arranged marriage market, she became my go to person for discussing what was happening in the market. She loved it as well (showing early signs of becoming a Marriage Broker Auntie), and told me I was giving her the kind of insight her older cousins who had gone through the market had denied her.
At one point of time, she asked me if she could think of me as a “brother who is getting married” which kinda creeped me out, and I’d blown my top. Soon after she gave me my first cutesy nickname (and she continues to come up with new names every one month or so).
The net result of all this was that while she was 22, and employed, when I first met her, I still thought of her as a “cute kid”. I’d assigned to her the voice of a little girl, which is why I got positively surprised when I first spoke to her on the phone. And when I met her, I realised she was mature beyond her years, and it was an easy decision then to start hitting on her.
Soon after, though, I realised the joys of being with someone so young, one who hadn’t yet been through a quarter life crisis (though I had to live through yet another quarter life crisis when she inevitably went through one). Her thoughts were fresh, and unharmed by the harsh experiences of life. That made her positive, and fun-loving, and hanging out with her became a lot of fun.
She had habits and hobbies one would expect of someone in their early twenties, and I quite enjoyed partaking in them and feeling young again (though one activity she’s consistently refused to share with me is partying!). And of course, I also later realised that marrying a young woman meant that I could put off making babies to a bit later, and we had Berry when we thought we should have a kid, rather than getting spooked by a biological clock.
I still find Pinky cute. There are times when she makes that cute face that reminds me of the cute kid who I didn’t want to hit on! And she finds random things funny and laughs in a girlish manner, and reminds me once again of that “kid” I met in Gandhi Bazaar back in 2009!
I’m suddenly reminded of the day in March 2015 when we were walking down the middle of Avinguda Josep Taradellas in Barcelona, and we suddenly held hands and spontaneously start running. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me young, though my hair and waistline sometimes try to tell me otherwise!
PS: when I met her, I was 26 and she was 22. So we’ve never come close to violating the “N/2 + 7 rule“.
It is rare that someone completely blows you away on the first date. To be fair, the first time I met Pinky wasn’t the first time I’d interacted with her. She and I had been “chat friends” for nearly two years then, periodically pinging each other on Google Talk, and making arbit conversations. Yet, the first time I met her, things changed so much for the better that I was overwhelmed.
She hadn’t wanted to meet me. The evening before we finally met, we had spoken on the phone for the first time, where she had tried to reason out to me as to why she didn’t want to meet me. She had been afraid that she might lose “a good chat friend” after the meeting, since our opinions of each other would inevitably change after meeting (there was a recent cartoon on Twitter I saw to this effect, but I don’t recall it enough now to link).
I wasn’t going to let go of her so easily – given that I was in the market then, and on the verge of giving up, and that I’d always found her cute, I HAD to meet her (incidentally, while I always found her cute, I’d never thought of her as a potential “bladee” because I thought she was too young. Her voice convinced me otherwise). So I made up some reason as to why it was important for us to meet the following day, and even convinced her to come to my part of town.
Thinking back, while I did grab my opportunities and “go for it”, most of the credit for Pinky and I getting married should go to her. It was she who first reached out to me, and contacted me again when I had reacted indifferently and arrogantly at first. It was she who made me talk to her, and made me fall in love with her over time.
And every time I’ve fucked up (and that’s been a lot of times, and fairly often at that), it’s she who’s compromised and made up, and made adjustments so that our relationship goes on. She’s given me multiple let-offs and chances, while I continue to occasionally fuck up.
I’m not of the religious sort, so let me just say that I consider myself extremely lucky to have met her, to be married to her and to make babies with her. The credit is all hers.
Anyway, let me take this opportunity to re-share this video I had made about our first date.
