My parents were practical strangers on their wedding day. They had been introduced to each other by their families and had only met three or four times before, never alone. Their parents hovered over the courting, passively negotiating the terms of their potential union. A marriage between acquaintances—unheard of in the US, but the usual setup in India, where they emigrated from.
My mother was a ballet dancer, and my father was a working Indian immigrant with no college degree. The stars—meaning a Vedic synastry reading using their birth dates and times—said they were a match. Of course, astrology was simply due diligence, a way to seal the deal before any arranged Hindu marriage. Their families had already decided for them. They had no other choice but to marry each other; it was in their best interests. If they worked hard, they could maybe one day love each other. They were taught that love was earned.
When I look at my parents’ wedding photos, I see fear in their eyes. It’s the fear of the unknown—a deeply human, all-encompassing, universal feeling.
Despite being a first-gen Indian American, I never felt like I had something to prove. I thought about love and relationships differently than my family did and never felt that marriage was an indicator of success. I did not feel I had to find the love of my life to break metaphorical generational shackles, nor to carry a metaphorical torch toward a Western ideal of progress.
Instead, I grew up wanting out of the whole thing. I didn’t want to prioritize romance, love, or relationships. I viewed relationships as frivolous, wasteful pastimes that Americans aspired to and an economic institution that, at the very least, Indians were not in the business of sugarcoating. Love was always a choice, and it seemed hard. Romance in the dreamy, escapist sense was meant for television, film, music, and books. I avoided a broken heart at all costs.
I read about broken hearts instead. The first romance I ever read was Wuthering Heights. I was assigned the book in high school and annotated it diligently. We were told to focus on Emily Brontë’s diction and syntax, but slowly I became interested in the characters’ actions and inner worlds. The tumultuousness of Catherine and Heathcliff’s story felt so different from any tumult I experienced in my own life. Eventually, I wrote a 12-page paper: “Reading Wuthering Heights gives its reader an experience of emotional cruelty” was the thesis. The cruelty I was referring to is, of course, Heathcliff’s campaign of vengeance—bred by childhood abuse at the hands of Catherine Earnshaw’s brother and compounded by Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar Linton.
But despite the many ways this book bore no resemblance to my life or conception of romance, something was surprisingly familiar at its core: a marriage rooted in convenience and material concerns.
“He will be rich,” says Catherine, explaining why she is thinking favorably of a marriage with Edgar Linton, “and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband.” Just like my mother, Catherine did not marry for love. She chose social mobility over her truth. She chose the illusion of safety, a falsified sense of certainty. Heathcliff’s heart was collateral damage.
Choosing Heathcliff would have come with a price as well. Loving him wasn’t without cost; love isn’t always as free as we think. Often it’s something we have to fight hard to protect.
The two worlds Brontë presented in her two houses—the unruly Wuthering Heights and the decorum-bound Thrushcross Grange—came to symbolize how I think about the spectrum of love. The Grange represents refinement and restraint, and the Heights wildness and darkness. The kind of unwieldy love we read and watch about—the kind of love Catherine sacrificed—stands opposed to the restrained kind of love that brought my parents together, a love devoid of romance but full of promises of social status, economic security, and comfort.
An arranged marriage or a marriage of convenience aren’t the only forms of restrained love, of course. Love is restrained through the confines of modern dating: desire driven by algorithms, checklists instead of intention. Love can be restrained by heteronormativity, by institutional violence, by class, by religion. The expectations of the societies we live in, along with our own levels of cowardice, constrain love. Catherine’s choice is an example of this.
Fear drove Catherine to sacrifice her love for Heathcliff for a safe life with Edgar Linton. It’s the same kind of fear that brought my parents together, because their parents wanted them to have a life of safety and comfort. Marriage, not love, was the vehicle for security.
My parents divorced shortly after I was born. It was an act of love of its own kind. I still grew up listening to them spend hours on the phone together, talking as best friends. Divorce was, and is, still taboo in the Indian diaspora. But it was what my parents needed, even if others didn’t accept it.
I believe they made a brave choice to part ways. They were able to know each other on their own terms and have something together that was just theirs: me.
This is why, to me, a clear reflection of love will always be courage.