Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

Up until encountering The One, my love life was dull. Much like Vidya, I had failed to find the right man but had miraculously found the right work. Suddenly, I’d become a sum of my professional competencies. And just as suddenly, my competencies seemed like disabilities in the dating pool. Men explained my job to me, finding my obsession with it an ungainly, unattractive attribute for a woman. My passion for what I did and my ferocious attachment to it became a deficiency that no cosmetic product could hide. In my early thirties, I finally understood that many of the straight men my age, those who operated outside the arranged-marriage market, had been socialized into desiring women who were cheerleaders or status symbols. I stopped blaming these men for their romantic choices, realizing that we were all victims of our unequal society and circumstances.