Whatever Happened To Marrying For Love?

Facing iffy job prospects, home-loan hell and an exhausting dating scene, young women are re-thinking their happily-ever-afters.

- Molly Rosen Guy

Consider this modern millennial fairy tale: our heroine, Avni, is 28 and living in a cramped, overpriced apartment in the crazy-expensive city of Mumbai. She works up to 12 hours a day in a fairly new startup, six days a week, after being fired from her previous corporate job.

She has no health insurance and no time to pursue her creative passions, and she owes her friends 50,000. Then she gets a text late one night.

Hey...we should just get married...

The sender is a high-school friend named Jayant, who’s been in Avni’s social circle for years. They never actually dated, but they did sleep together a few times in college. Jayant comes from a wealthy family and they want him to get married asap. He doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage, but wants to get done with it so that a) his family is happy and b) he gets to live life on his own terms. Hence, the deal he is proposing: (an open) marriage for him; cash for Avni.

At first, she laughs. She writes back to name her price as a joke (‘1L?’). But then Jayant starts to seem dead serious. Hours later, lying awake in bed that night, Avni thinks of his Instagram feed and the stories she’s heard about his luxurious, mysterious life full of bougie trips to France and China and expensive weddings in Italy. Meanwhile, she’s begging her parents to help her buy a plane ticket to Dubai for her best friend’s bachelorette party. Jayant is offering her the life she had dreamt off, plus the money she needs to help pay her rent and credit-card debt. She doesn’t even have to sleep with him, he informs her. She’ll just get her letters forwarded to his place to make the union seem legit.

Our heroine faces a choice. Keep waiting for love, or start negotiating? She needs the funds badly. And she wants the Instagram-worthy travel. When Jayant agrees to help her see the world, Avni writes back: