On binge-watching love and marriage
“Have you watched ‘Indian Matchmaking’?” Sure have. After everyone and their mom texted, tweeted and DMed me to watch the new Netflix docuseries about an elite Mumbai matchmaker rubbing her palms to conjure up couples — the show is fascinating, psyche-revealing, often infuriating — I happened to also find myself in the throes of TLC, some days later, watching a tentative Nigerian man walk his American bride-to-be, three decades his senior, through a market in Lagos.
She — a grandmother of six from Georgia named Angela — was dressed in a pink tee blasting the word FLAWLESS, but she was anything but amused. Prompt: Pandora and her box.
After seeing a goat’s head, she fully freaks, almost pushing her boy toy, Michael, to the ground, and then veers between screaming and vomiting. “You want me to live like a Nigerian woman! I am not! You can take that green card and stick it up your a--,” she rants. Prompt: the serving of pizza to Michael’s side-eye-giving mum when she comes over later. Love in the age of COVID? Oh, something like that, given that I watched this evidently previously shot footage in the latest ep. of “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After” (one of the many shows in the 90 Days reality ecosystem), during a time when a good chunk of the world ain’t even accepting American visitors. Seriously, what’s funnier right now than watching this series — which has long pivoted around the magical balm of U.S. citizenship and played like a collision course between cultures? Some green card.
It pulled me back to that other series, the Indian one — specifically to a scene in which a jittery mother named Preeti measures her blood pressure in front of her son, Akshay, in an attempt to emotionally blackmail him because he is stonewalling on a wife prospect. Both shows — though different in style, but cringe-y in their own ways — share this much: they are peeks into the marketplace of marriage. Lids looking for pots. Selves in search of a “we.”
And speaking as someone who has never been married — never, ever had the itch for it — I couldn’t get enough. I never really can when it comes to narratives about marriages and near-marriages, vows and disavowals. An eternal subject, for sure — mused on everywhere from Jane Austen novels to “This Is Us” — it is in part because I look at marriage the way people in Barbados might think of snow. A profound fascination, indeed — but from a safe distance.
All my life I have been sifting. I read and reread books about Jackie and John, and Jackie and Ari, John and Yoko, Bill and Hill, Johnny and June, Edward and Wallis, Scott and Zelda, Liz Taylor and her eight. It is why one of my must-watch new shows of 2020 is “The Great,” in that it circles the union of Catherine the Great and Peter III (it is a raunchy hoot — watch it! It’s on Amazon Prime in Canada).
As a teenager, I ate up movies like “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Heartburn” (even though my parents remained steadfastly married). I tracked the machinations of Charles and Di like some kids collect hockey cards. And, even now, when someone announces their divorce (celebrity or not), I am never surprised, but instead mentally thought-bubble: wow, they lasted this long? Marriage, to me, has always seemed like one of those eggs being carried on a spoon in an obstacle course.
For one, my fascination churns on the idea that marriages are a lens into everything. They are, for one, intensely political — legislatures of two, when you think about it. All those silent concessions. The wobbly division of powers. The dynamics within the extended family (diplomatic relations!). Who gets assigned the emotional labour in a relationship and who does not? And how these roles sync up early and then later, rinserepeat. How a spouse winds up holding a mirror to you — both your best and worst.
Regarding the particular ins and outs of “Indian Matchmaking,” writer-activist Shahmir Sanni summed up its allure, both positive and negative, when he tweeted: “It’s an incredible insight into the deep-rooted classism, casteism, Brahmin/upper caste privileges, colourism within South Asia. India is the biggest consumer of bleaching products,” he wrote.
He added: “People forget that there is several hundred years of colonial influence … no matter how globalized the world gets. India is complex & marriage is actually the most clear insight into the dynamic of Indian culture. Everything centres around it.”
Another great portrait of slow-crash matrimony, courtesy of reality TV? The rise and fall, and fall some more, of Shannon and David Beador on “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” portrayed over many seasons — a portrayal, all things considered, even more exhaustive than the Oscarnominated film “Marriage Story” last year. Seriously! One saw Shannon and David trying to cover up the cracks, the lies within lies and even, during one infamous scene, agreeing to an exercise (after he’d admitted to infidelity) of acting out their respective deaths. The scene of David speaking to Shannon at her make-believe grave (erected in therapy) remains seared into my brain.
My bookshelves, too, teem with books about marriages — particularly those of the bestlaid-plans species. Two faves from last year include the novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and the truly lustrous memoir “Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me.” A perennial, meanwhile, is Lauren Groff’s novel, from 2015, “Fates and Furies,” in which a character wisely shares: “Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste.”
To have and to hold, indeed.