The checklist

The Indian Matchmaking, that’s the name of the show on Netflix I was watching other day. Not a great show for my taste but good enough to put in background at times. Interestingly I got hooked onto one of the guy‘s story on the show and somehow I found it a learning to share.

So the format of show is simple, a matchmaker meets her clients and asks them what kind of partner they are looking for. Almost every time the answer begins with ‘nothing very special, the other person should be loving, caring, tall, fair, love poetry, writes, love travel, calm, family person, good sense of style…’ and the list easily reach to 10-15 attributes.

At this point the matchmaker does bring the clients to reality that at most they can expect 70% of the list to keep the expectations real. However the human mind is such, it wants what it wants and the ego doesn’t make it easy to accept anything less.

Coming back to story of this guy, let’s call him Ram as I clearly missed the name. So this guy has a long list in which one criteria is the girl should be speaking Hindi. Now he goes and meets a good looking girl, much younger to him and after meeting 2-3 times, he rejects her basis on the language issue, as she didn’t speak Hindi.

He meets another girl and same story after few meetings reject based on this specific criteria. Now as he meets third girl, things are different, he really enjoys her company and loves being around her, looking forward to meet her and very happy with the great job matchmaker has done.

But wait even this third girl doesn’t know to speak Hindi. At this point I notice she doesn’t even fit few other criterion that he started with. Still he is fine with this girl and looking forward to proceed with her.

Whether they marry or not, I don’t know. But here is what shocked me, even though this girl didn’t meet multiple criterion for him, he wasn’t even thinking about those anymore. He was just enjoying the person. The checklist was practically thrown out of the window.

And then I saw similar pattern emerging in other stories as well. That made me think, maybe people are horrible in articulating what they want, maybe they don’t know or maybe they can’t communicate.

Or maybe the checklist is only used for rejection, when we meet someone if we don’t like something about them, it is hard to be expressed and we find some item from our checklist not being fulfilled. However when we find someone who we like to be with, all the items in any list are practically discarded and we simply want to be with that person, at least for foreseeable future.

This brings me to the point quoted in Siddhartha by Hermen Hesse, if you seek too much you won’t find. Practically that’s what is happening with all of us lot of times. We are so focused on seeking a specific goal, person or achievement that we are missing on what is offered to us, in other words we aren’t able to find.

So be aware and accepting to what life has to offer, be a receiver, not a seeker, so you can find and find well.