Form the inflated chimerical notion of one love for life to the inchoate casual dating scene, it seems our dating culture mirrors the country in its diversity. But the prevailing norm suggests that relationships, not just in teenage but even in the twenties, are not received with an open mind. From Gupta aunty's gentle reprove and Sharma uncle's wrath to Bansal aunty's gossip, a relationship in our country manages to garner one concocted fable over another. ( Gupta, Sharma and Bansal are all popular Indian surnames, aunty is just a variant of aunt)
Even though the society somehow seems to relent with its draconian mindset, relationships are still viewed with a sense of haughty mockery and those who choose to continue anyway are labelled as purposeless strays who shall later lament their misspent youth. After all your parents hard-earned money cannot be squandered off at your frivolous pastimes. You have to enter a certain age and have a career, and thereafter these “limiting caps” can be revised; thereafter you should be brimming with lust and romantic feelings for a partner your parents will arrange. So pucker up, winnow down, accept these norms or else be branded as a ignorant deviant who couldn't care less about driving his family name through the dirt. It is the way it is as more than 70 percent of the marriages are arranged, and I dare say more than 40 percent are forced.
Let us try to look into why is that the things are the way they are. There seems to be an overwhelming dependence on academics to bag a job and make a living. The fierce competition conjures a distorted sense of reality, especially for the parents. The teenage students and even the college going students are heavily dependent on their parents. For countless other cultural reasons, people accept their parent's decision with humble obedience. A teenager's decision are sometimes consensual, and mostly forced upon, like say opting for a vocation or applying for college, or choosing a stream. The need to focus on career goals coupled with a distressing dearth of autonomy promulgates an erroneous notion of relationship that skews towards the “very bad” scale of the moral compass and it bears consequences for their sexual tendencies as well.
Sex and all that comes with it too seems to be mired in confusion. Sex education is as insignificant as a whisper in a windstorm and the parents and schools alike, deem it just as important. The children are thus bombarded with complete hokum they surf on the internet, and they start developing execrably insidious notions about the same.
The young boys and men thus think of sex as a forbidden fruit and women alternate between apathetic nonchalance and feeling abashed of their urges.
Add to it the inflated sense of romance, where loving comes much before liking and compatibility doesn't matter. The idea of jumping from one woman to the other (or the other way around) is aberrant and contemptible. So dating is pretty much left futile.
The lack of autonomy devolves into a very inchoate understanding of consent, mainly because even in today's modern age, society demands strictures on men and women along with strict adherence and conformity to expected norms.
Things are changing, slowly but just so, they definitely are. The millennials are much open minded and the digital age has had it's influence. But from where we are now, it basically is a downward spiral that circles from lust to infatuation to lust to love to dejection and eventually into feigning apathy.