What I Want!!!

Someone once asked me, quite simply, what kind of girl I wanted to spend my life with. It was meant to be an easy question, the sort you answer in one line over chai. Naturally, I could not manage that. The poet in me, or whatever passes for one after too many late nights and too much filter coffee, took the question and ran with it for several paragraphs. I am still not sure she got the answer she was looking for. I definitely did.

Here, roughly, is what young, wildly overconfident me came up with.

I wanted a girl who was somehow both a fairytale and completely unimpressed by fairytales, someone who could laugh at my jokes, cry at old songs, and still keep both feet on the ground while I built increasingly elaborate castles in the air. I wanted someone who dreamed big and, more importantly, was reckless enough to actually go do something about it, because I had plenty of dreams myself and absolutely no follow through.

And then, because apparently a personality was not specific enough, I went and wrote myself a full specification sheet. Somewhere between twenty eight and thirty three, but younger looking. A certain height, a certain build, not too polished, not too casual, somehow both effortless and high maintenance at once, whatever that means. Someone who liked the kind of music you'd find at a rock concert rather than a wedding sangeet. Someone with her own career, her own money, her own opinions, and, ideally, her own gym membership that she used just enough to stay fit and not so much that I felt personally judged.

Reading it back now, I have to be honest. I did not invent this list. I borrowed most of it, the way half of us in our twenties borrowed our best lines from somewhere on the internet, dressed it up as a personal manifesto, and posted it like I had just discovered love itself. It sounded impressive. It sounded like I knew exactly what I wanted. It was, in hindsight, a checklist wearing the costume of a love letter.

Which brings me, years later, to the actual point of this piece.

I have watched a lot of people my age, and younger, struggle with exactly this same thing. We have turned finding a life partner into something closer to reviewing a resume. Does she like the right shows. Does he have the right job. Is she a nine, is he tall enough, does she post the right things online, does he have the right friend circle, would she embarrass me in front of my college group, does he tick the box for ambitious but not so ambitious that he outshines me, does she tick the box for traditional but not so traditional that she expects me to touch anyone's feet at Diwali. We have built ourselves elaborate spreadsheets of a person, and then we wonder, with genuine confusion, why nobody ever quite fits all the columns.

Here is the part nobody wants to hear. The checklist was never protecting you from heartbreak. It was just delaying the moment you had to be honest with yourself about what you actually feel when you are around someone. You can meet somebody who checks every single box on your very reasonable, very sensible list, and feel absolutely nothing when they walk into a room. And you can meet somebody who checks almost none of them, too short, too loud, too unemployed, too obsessed with a sport you have never watched, and somehow you cannot stop thinking about them for three days straight. Instinct does not read spreadsheets. It never has.

I say all this as someone who spent a genuinely long time running exactly this experiment, checklist in one hand, an increasingly tired heart in the other. I got married at forty, which by most Indian family standards is somewhere between a minor miracle and a cautionary tale whispered at other people's weddings. And the person I ended up spending my life with did not arrive because she checked the boxes I had so carefully written out in my twenties. She arrived because something about her simply refused to leave my head, in the particular, illogical, slightly inconvenient way that has nothing to do with height, income, or how she felt about rock music.

If you are out there right now, running your own version of that spreadsheet, comparing candidates like you are hiring for a role instead of falling for a person, I say this with all the affection of someone who wasted a fair number of years doing exactly the same thing. Burn the list. Or at least stop consulting it so religiously. The right person is rarely going to check every box. They are just going to make you forget you were ever keeping score.

If you think you may have found that feeling, whatever it is, however few boxes it checks, hold onto it. Keep Smiling.