My tryst with online matrimony sites
It’s been 5 years since I first discovered the magic of match-making at the press of a button. It started with a fun-filled, frolicky profile on Bharat Matrimony, a site universally acknowledged by professionals to be the best for potential partner searches.
At that time I was not aware of scanners so my profile missed a photo. But nevertheless, the search went on at office hours, with so many funny proposals coming my way. Well, what else do you do at office? Just look at your profile, then your friend’s profile and laugh at the proposals and the dour looking ‘gentlemen’. Needless to say, some of them turned out to be just desperate proposals for a bailout. Looking grim, down and out and essentially sad, read pathetic, some of the potential grooms were just meant to be scoffed at. Then my office colleague would say, ‘I got another one better than you’ and we would laugh till tears rolled down.
More recently, the search has become a lot more fun, what with a blow by blow account of every hit at your profile. I got 3,000, yay, must say, people really like to ‘check out’ the madam and hear her sultry, resonating voiceover. I need to add, the preliminary effort bore no fruit and very soon, I had forgotten about the whole exercise. Then came the bad experience at work, the tables had turned, and now, I was in looking for a bailout!!
So, a sincere attempt at reconciling and looking for a steady, secure relationship forced me to go on to the second site. Simply Marry it was called, here too I got the most mismatched proposals, so much so that I ended up rejecting people without opening their messages. There is something about gents with mooches, they just turn me off and to my wits end I got all of them with their manly pride properly in place. So, at Simply Marry, although I was a paid member, I got no one remotely close to my expectations and before long, the desire to get that elusive message faded away like a long lost idea. You might think that would be the end of my search, but no, the thrill of late night beeps and buzzes kept me going and I enrolled for a third and fourth and now a fifth site. Call me addicted, or call me a desperado, but I do this just for fun and to let my parents think that I am really keen on settling down and have no other tricks up my sleeve!! So my aunt and my mum ruminate over all the hits and misses. ‘Oh, he’s from the US, but you don’t want to settle there!!!’ Or better still ‘Really, he actually wrote to you, being 4 years younger?’
LOL, there’s no better way to de-stress than look at the beaming, apologetic, painstakingly beseeching images, implying you for that initial contact, imploring to be taken seriously!!
My fourth site was JS, or Jeevan Saathi, and I was beginning to get decent proposals. One guy actually posed and looked like a film star. And yes, he did write, we went as far as chatting on Yahoo messenger, but then he got extremely busy, and I got extremely tied down with work and it fizzled out!!! I got another extremely good looking proposal on the same site, he even flew down to Bombay at the pretext of work, but very soon we had both lost interest and I was up and looking for the next one!!! And I struck gold, but the only problem was that the guy just kept changing his messenger image with his moods and was too lazy to write or call. I had to keep eulogizing over his image and never make real contact! Talk of virtual worlds, this one was absolutely ethereal, even a filmy fantasy.
By this time, I was running out of patience, and I had already given up hope, basking in the relief that it was never going to happen. So here I am, having come full circle, and back with BM, hoping for that final click, or a magical, romantic association. Actually, I must confess, I do sadistically enjoy turning proposals down so much that now it’s become a reflex action!!! But now it has struck like lightning that maybe these matrimonial sites are really up to no good and no one ever really found a true match here. But hope floats and mum still believes that there is someone out there meant for me! Hopeless romantics, didn’t someone tell them that there is something called rationality???
Neha Singh
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Love thoughts this Valentine’s Day
