Devi Mehta and Sahil Rajan were married in June 2014.
Sahil Rajan hadn't yet figured out how to upload his profile picture to eHarmony, but when the site's matchmaking voodoo put forward a brown-eyed New York City beauty who also professed an interest in books, he pinged her anyway. He asked Devi Mehta what she was reading.
Although Mehta, a 31-year-old ad agency account manager, couldn't see what the guy on the other end looked like, she took a chance, too. "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," she replied. And him?
Rajan, a 29-year-old software developer who lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, was deep into "Atlas Shrugged."
It was January 2011, and Rajan and Mehta, both Indian-Americans, were tentatively back on the market after recent relationships had flamed out. When they met at a restaurant, however, their differences seemed to compound.
"He's, like, 40 pounds lighter than me," Mehta recalled thinking. "He's my height."
"I don't know about this Devi Mehta chick," Rajan told friends.
On the surface, this would not have the makings of a love story. And yet, it is one.
Mehta's parents had an arranged marriage. Though Rajan's parents were in love when they wed, they had been steeped in Indian culture, which values community and family over romance.
Rajan and Mehta were adamant that they didn't want arranged marriages themselves. Yet after unsuccessfully dating the American way, both decided to try splitting the difference. They would search for partners, rather than relying on anyone else to arrange a union.
Sahil Rajan and Devi Mehta on a walk through the Potomac, Md., neighborhood that Sahil grew up in. In the stroller is their daughter, Diya.
But they would focus on potential spouses who shared the same culture and offered the same promise of stability and commitment to family they had seen in their parents' marriages - and not worry so much about romance.
Almost five years later, I met the couple in Washington's bustling Union Market to discuss marriage and love. Rajan, a Maryland native, joked that their marriage had been arranged, after all - "by an algorithm."
Mehta said that for her, the turning point came when she realized that sometimes "you have to go back and listen to the people who've been married 50 years.
"Indian parents always say stuff like, 'It's not about love, it's about family,' They married for family." She paused. "What is it they always say? 'The love comes later.' "
She looked over at Rajan. Bouncing on his knee in a pink fleece and tiny flowered leggings was Diya, the couple's bright-eyed 7-month-old.
Rajan and Mehta may not be alone in forging what I call a "practical marriage" - focusing first on cultural similarities, financial goals and family, and trusting love will follow. Across the United States, thousands of Indian Americans are meeting via sites such as
Shaadi.com, BharatMatrimony and the app Dil Mil, which allow them to search for such unromantic attributes such as language, education and economic status. It's unclear how many of them are children of arranged marriages and how that has shaped their views on love.
I first learned of Rajan and Mehta's unusual approach to marriage a year ago, while hanging out with a cousin who is close to Rajan. I was intrigued. I, too, am a child of an arranged marriage who has long heard the parental adage that love can come later. And, after failing more times than I care to admit at dating the American way, I've become more amenable to the idea of a new kind of search.
This is a radical change for me: I was only 7, maybe 8, the first time I insisted to my mother that I planned on falling in love and getting married. After all, my generation camped out in front of the television in the early-morning hours to watch Diana Spencer marry her prince, and went to the movies to see Richard Gere shower Julia Roberts in gems as if she were Eliza Doolittle in thigh-high boots. I wanted that kind of romance, the meet-cute, for fate to arrange my love life.
For a long time, despite my youthful protestations, my parents expected my love life would go the way theirs had. My mother, Lakshmi, met my father, Raghupathy, at her parents' house in 1973 in what was then Madras, in southern India. He was 28 and set to leave in weeks for a postdoctoral fellowship 8,000 miles away in Philadelphia. But first, prodded by his parents, he took an overnight train to meet the 22-year-old beanpole of a girl with a promising horoscope and a thick braid of jet-black hair running down her back. They talked, briefly, about her cooking skills and whether she hoped to work after marriage (her music degree, my father says, made him worry about her job prospects).
I asked my parents, now married for more than 40 years, why they'd agreed to let their parents dictate their love lives.
"It was all we knew," my mother said. She had seen so many good marriages, she trusted the system would work for her.
So, could there be some truth in our parents' insistence that romance grows over time? And does it mean that we, no matter our ethnicity, should focus on other, more practical matters in our search for a mate?
Indian parents aren't the only ones who believe it. Research backs the theory.
Pamela Regan, a psychology professor at Cal State University in Los Angeles, conducted a study that compared arranged marriages and love marriages among Americans of Indian descent. She found that 10 years into the relationships, satisfaction and passion among the couples whose marriages were arranged nearly mirrored those of the love matches.
"I love romantic love," she said. "But these things do fade. They're probably not the best thing to focus on when choosing a partner."
Mehta and Rajan say they hope their relationship can last that long. They moved in together in Jersey City in August 2012, remodeled a condo and married in 2014. Diya was born a year later.
Sahil Rajan plays with his daughter, Diya, his wife, Devi Mehta (right), sister, Sheila Rajan (seated at left) and mother, Mamta Rajan (at left, walking out of the frame).
When they compare their marriage to that of their friends who may have had more hot-and-heavy beginnings, how do they think they're faring? I asked.
"I think we're happier than they are," Rajan said. "I do."
© 2016 The Washington Post
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