Looking for the perfect stranger

Looking for the perfect stranger How a single, successful New York writer ended up pursuing an arranged marriage in India.
By Anita Jain
Aug. 12, 2008 It was after three years of living in New York that I began thinking something was wrong -- deeply, heart-wrenchingly wrong -- with the Western dating system. I would come home after an evening of swapping New York "war stories" with girlfriends, in which we regaled each other with horrific dates or detailed every phone call and e-mail exchange from a short-lived fling in order to decipher why our intended had unceremoniously disappeared. Most of these evenings ended up with one or another of us whining about our loneliness and wondering when it would end, to be comforted by yet another in our gaggle that we should just get on with our own lives and not worry about men, and that soon enough, when we were least expecting it, love would walk in through the front door or sit next to us on a flight.
The next week we would switch roles and the whiner would offer warm words of advice and hand-holding to the comforter. I heartily participated in all of these discussions, more often than not as the one plunged in despair when I first arrived in New York, and later, hardened and somewhat resigned, as the one extending succor.
After months of these cocktail-drenched evenings, two fleeting thoughts slipped across my mind, which later would take on shape and bulk and eventually morph into full-blown arguments. The first of these took hold when a friend was complaining how a man she'd met at a party two weeks ago had seemed very interested and had taken her number but had not called since. And today she'd discovered that a colleague she had a crush on had a girlfriend. Two leads that had seemed promising just last week had fallen through, which in New York is enough to induce a midmonth slump. ...........(more)