Batteesi...

A long while ago, I landed my first job a few months after I had turned 21. That day marked a major milestone as far as my parents were concerned. From that day till date, they have searched fairly enthusiastically for someone for me to get married to. Initially, I was flattered by the sheer number of women who seemed to be in a wild hurry to get married to me, going by the no. of proposals my parents received. While I have come pretty close on more than one occasion to getting hitched to someone they found, there has always been some derailer in the matter. While my parents have shown incredible resilience in the exercise, I have demonstrated a somewhat stubborn attachment to some of my criteria for selecting a life partner, which has somewhat complicated my matrimonial hunt.

I have as I like to say two basic criteria -
one: the person I expect to spend the majority of my life with, must be a strict vegetarian (No! make that militant vegetarian)
two: the person who meets criterion one above, be educated enough to make a decent living for themself.

Surprisingly, criterion one has been the bottleneck so far. I have met a bunch of charming women over the years, nearly all of whom have carried the 'curse' of being non vegetarian and nearly all of them of them were so by choice, leaving me severely heartbroken.

While the above two criteria were fairly explicit, there are other implicit ones to check out when one actually meets the person one is 'checking' out. I did write about some of this, but then, I am sort that feels that once you decide you like someone for whatever they are, the rest can be sorted out. So for ex., while I average almost 1000-1200 miles a year of running, I don't care if my partner ran a mile in the entire year or not. In fact I couldn't care less if the person had no interest in running. However I would hope that such a woman would also be conscious about staying healthy. So I have gone ahead and met several women over the years, once they seemed to meet the above two criteria.

Some have fallen away at this juncture too. Of course, I have encountered 'rejection' at various other steps according to the evaluation criteria of various other women I have met in this regard. The reasons have varied from my 'social' drinking to the fact that someone felt that my harmless enquiring about their apparent reticence was impolite! I found it amusing to see people devote so much attention to the fact that I drink on perhaps less than half a dozen occasions in a year and admit myself a 'social' drinker, but I guess the same could be said about my obsession for vegetarianism.

The title of this blog post is a mock grin at all this. But you know ... ;)

p.s. Hat tip to Skimpy for the solidly entertaining series of posts he has written in the recent past about his own assorted real life experiences, which sort of inspired this post