One should be lucky to have true exchange of love and care in one's life.
dear ravi,
this note not addressed to you, though i have quote-borrowed the sentence above from your post. hope you dont mind.
i think this line referring to luck, which i have come to call, 'random', explains everything in life. let me use those two terms interchangeably and see what develops.
for one to find love, one needs luck. no amount of filtering based on caste, creed or status, can guarantee to find love in a marriage. it is easier to consider marriage as an organized venture between two people, with some fuzzy feelings of religiosity for society's comfort.
it is like a waterfall managed business, with one member taking the lead, and providing direction to the organization, based on income, good administration and efficient use of the resources. somewhere there mutual regard, affection and respect develops. but love?
ravi has defined love, and i broadly accept that. but is love a pre requisite for marriage?
can marriage occurs without love? yes. including mine own, i think, all arranged marriages are marriages that start without love. there is no analysis either in the jadhagam or in the discussions, whether there is love. there is only compatibility of the families and agreement of the horoscopes.
once we have entered into that arrangement, i think, some of us may delude ourselves into feelings of love happening or kindling, but i dont believe it to be true.
if you want marriage badly, dont look for love.look for compatibility to running an household.
has anyone experienced a teenager in love. it is a crazy crazy person we see, always on the phone, unwashed or superbly clean, reaching highs of happiness and willing to drop everything else in the world for his beloved. that, to me, is love. i do not know, whether any arranged husband would ever feel like that to his wife. or vice versa. we miss our spouses, we depend on our spouses, we consult our spouses, we lean on our spouses and finally we part from our spouses. but all without the feeling, that can be called love.
should youngsters wait for love to happen before they marry. it is an answer that they themselves can only answer. all i can say, love is not a pre requisite to a good marriage. in fact there is no guarantee of a good marriage with love. or without love. it is all random.
or as ravi says, one has to be extremely lucky to find love. and even more lucky to find love and good marriage.
i wish the unmarried ones here to luck in. best wishes
ps. i am sure many arranged married folks, would disagree with me, and insist that they 'love' their spouses. if they could verbalize their feelings of love, i would think, it would translate more along the lines of mutual respect, affection and regard. not the love that your teenager experiences. to me, that is 'true love'.