A number of my readers asked me to write about this topic. I’ve often referred to anecdotes about dating as an Indian woman and indeed prior dating blog-posts are written from my perspective as an Indian woman, but you wanted me to address it head-on. Here it is!
The prohibition
When I was growing up (the 90s and 00s), dating was a taboo in large tracts of Indian society. I wasn’t allowed to date when I was a teenager, and even into my 20s, there were rules and principles governing dating, some unsaid and some explicitly expressed.
Many Indian parents’ prohibitive attitudes towards dating were/are based on several factors:
- The taboo of pre-marital sex and the value placed on virginity
- The fear of losing one’s culture and becoming fully “westernized”
- The fear of unwanted pregnancy or STIs
- The fear of going “off track” academically or in your career because romance is a distraction
- The belief that engaging in any form of romantic/sexual activity should be geared towards marriage and is a waste of time if not
- What relatives, family friends and “society” at large will say if they catch whiff of dating — essentially that they will insinuate that you have failed as parent by exposing your child to all the hazards 1-5 above
The challenger’s perspective
When I dug deep into why I so opposed each reason, I uncovered philosophical and deep rifts between the average Indian parent’s mindset and my own. Here’s my challenge to all the reasons above.
The Pre-marital sex ban: a way of owning women
As my boyfriend put it “In every other field, more experience is considered better. And yet when it comes to sex, some people reverse the logic. It doesn’t make sense”.
I went through the dilemma during my early 20s on what decisions to make, and ultimately I concluded that I was not someone who was going to be judged by narrow-minded men. The ban on pre-marital sex is very asymmetrically applied across genders. Needless to say, the rule is more for women than men.
The desire of men to be the “first” has a lot of negative connotations: the desire to control a woman; to desire to deny a woman a reference point (or several); the desire to be able to get away with being not that great in bed as a result; the desire to get a woman to be attached to you because she hasn’t had the experience to realize that sex is just sex, and sex is not love. Furthermore, given that the average age of marriage creeps up every year and many marriages are now happening when people are in their mid-30s, it’s absurd to deny people their basic biological needs for so long.
Yet parents somehow are attached to the idea of sending their daughter into a marriage with no dating or sexual experience – which surely can’t serve you well, but then they’re not prioritizing you, are they? The ban on pre-marital sex is deeply patriarchal and misogynist.
Now, it would be equally unprogressive of me to say that people should be engaging in pre-marital sex. What I’m against here is the “should” and “should not” language and moral weight Indian society has put on sex. My belief is it’s a personal choice, based on the logic that each person owns their own body. To argue that it is not a personal choice and add moral weight to it is to imply that each person’s body is owned by not just that person but also society. This may sound absurd, but a lot of Indian cultural rules are based on joint ownership of people’s bodies, minds and lives.
Fear of “westernization”: a way to put blockers on adopting new ideas
I believe people should be free to adopt whatever practices and rituals make them happier, and “losing culture” should be a secondary concern. Ultimately, though we are very distracted by success, money, prestige, status etc., life is about the pursuit of happiness. All those things are supposed to make you happy. No one’s getting brownie points for keeping impractical aspects of various cultures alive if they have no modern relevance and compromise your happiness. But the rift here between parents and children comes down to philosophy again – as you’ll see further in this article.
Fear of STIs and unwanted pregnancies: a lack of understanding of risk management
Firstly, heard of contraception anyone? Thankfully, we were taught about it in school, because there was no way we were learning about it from our parents on time. I really want to do a skit where an Indian parent decides to talk about contraception when someone is 35, finally declaring they might be ready.
By neglecting to talk about contraception and instead harping on the unrealistic abstinence bandwagon, most Indian parents are actually putting their children more at risk of a negative outcome.
Fear of going “off track” : what is the “track” anyway?
Indian parents must be very romantic in some sense, because many believe that romance is so all-encompassing that you might forget to go to class, to study, to eat even. You may end up being a drunk poet like Devdas, unemployed, and obsessed with your one love, chasing it like a moth to the flame. If your learnings about love are from Bollywood movies, you may believe this to be the case. If you get some real-life experience (my recommended option), you may discover the following:
i. Your romantic life is one out of many aspects of your life – your attention will never be 100% on it, because you are a complete human with friends, hobbies, a career etc. Balancing all these things effectively can definitely be challenging at times and sometimes one aspect looms larger than others and causes you to neglect others. Effective balance is a learned skill, a muscle. The more practice you get, the better you get as you learn your own priorities and about yourself. By being forbidden to date earlier, you put off developing this muscle until later.
ii. It’s totally possible to work effectively through break-ups and in fact break-ups can trigger immense personal growth. I had a break-up in April 2019, and knocked my work project out of the park at that time – getting glowing reviews and a promotion a few months later.
Fear of wasting time: Is fun and being happy a waste of time?!
There is a pervasive belief that dating should only be marriage-oriented. To some extent, I understand. Casual dating is no utopia, it can be a real mine-field. But to some extent, dating only for marriage excludes a lot of fun and learning. As I mentioned earlier, the point of life is to have a good time as much as circumstances permit. There is a philosophical divide between Indian parents and their children on this very issue. Many Indian parents would not agree that the primary purpose of life is having a good time and being happy – they view life as a duty to the community, a duty that involves “timely” achievement of milestones such as a stable job, marriage, children and as much as possible a life that is “mistake-free”. This comes into conflict with a lot of us who will not necessarily become happy by hitting those milestones at those times.
“Love is waste of time” – Tongue-in-cheek song from PK
We are different, we scream. We need to discover and build upon our differences through experimentation in all areas of our life, including dating. Most dates teach you something about yourself or about the human condition – even if they are boring or don’t go anywhere and even if they are mean.
Concerns around what others will think: the timeless problem
Anxiety around ‘what society thinks’ is a problem that afflicts older and modern generations alike. Our parents cared what Auntie down the road would think, we care what our Instagram followers think. Different flavor, same core problem. For evolutionary reasons, we’re hard-wired to care what other people think. All we can do is i) consciously try to care less what others think and ii) to try to shift society to a new equilibrium of lower judgment and more love and acceptance of differences. Within reason, the ideal society would simply think “Each to their own”.
The consequences of not being allowed to date
Indian parents are often stunting the development of women. The dating prohibition prevents girls from becoming women who are comfortable with their sexuality, know how to flirt, and know how to date. A number of my Indian women friends, now in their late 20s or early 30s often tell me they still feel nervous going on dates and understanding the dynamics of the modern dating world because they got so late to the game.
The prohibition distances girls and women from their parents: they feel like they can’t be themselves and have to be secretive about dating. And in some cases, it actually puts them in more dangerous situations as a result of having to be secretive.
Mean things exist in the world and being sheltered from them doesn’t make them go away. By holding back women from experiencing the full world, warts and all, Indian parents are compromising the development of women into confident, worldly adults.
What a mess: where do we go from here?
I believe Indian parents really do love and want their children to be happy. The more broken step is that they don’t really understand what makes their children happy. They believe the key to happiness is a safe life and a dutiful life that has the stamp of approval from “society”. We know it is the life that is truest to ourselves that makes us happy – and yes, we’re constantly changing – we want the freedom to grow, learn and express our true selves. And dating is a key field where we grow, learn and express our true selves.
We need more honest conversations with our parents – ones that take us to the deeper philosophical rifts and surface them, laying them bare so we can examine if this is how we want to live, ones that call to test our love for each other – hopefully it is stronger than our fear of what Auntie will think. I believe it is – and that we have made and will continue to make ever more progress, but this post is dedicated to all you girls out there, who have been pushing the boundaries and fighting the good fight – you are tired but you are winning, keep it up.
