Re: Love marriage
You don’t seem to be the kind who can get mesmerized by Bollywood/Hollywood’s overrated portrayal of ‘love’ where the guy goes ga-ga over the girl and the girl is googly-eyed over the guy, fire-works happen and your heart goes into bouts of cartwheels.
I’ve always thought that it’s something that can be built off on mutual respect for each other, accommodating yourself according to your partners needs/wishes, an admiration for the other person’s good qualities and accepting them with their flaws. Your relationship just slowly reaches a different level of affection or ‘love’ once you start living together intimately as husband and wife while you maintain all those other things throughout and you can’t just expect all of that to happen before the wedding. Another thing is people change, marriage changes people and some people have a hard time adjusting to that. Wallah, I’ve seen so many friends go through this now its like I almost expect it. They meet a guy and go through this obsessive phase where they think they found that ‘Mr. Perfect’ and they’re like in another world for a while. They have this glazed look over their faces and at times its even hard to communicate with them because it’s like they’re not even listening to you. They get married and it’s all perfect and bliss for the first couple of months and then here it comes.. the depressive 2-3 months where they think their marriage is falling apart because their partners have changed/in-laws issues/not enough attention etc., surely, they do get over that phase and do just fine later on. I’m very sure guys have issues too , new responsibilities, nagging wife etc., . So you really can’t know it all before your marriage.
But yeah sending a random stranger a wedding proposal is definitely a no. The time required for courting though depends on individual preferences. People have different expectations out of marriage and are looking for different things when selecting that significant other. Sometimes just one meeting is good enough and sometimes multiple meetings might not just cut it and that’s okay as well.