What happens in this series? The One is set “five minutes in the future,” where dating has become revolutionized through DNA testing. This is a world where one test can find your perfect partner – the one person you’re genetically predisposed to fall passionately in love with. “The idea is simple, but the implications are explosive. We will never think of love and relationships in the same way again.”
Hi everyone. It’s me, your Feisty Indian Aunty who wants to know if any one of you will want to be matched in this way in order to find The One who is your soulmate? I used to think that Indians were great at these things. God knows my parents, and their parents, and their grandparents were all involved in some sort of matchmaking. They found – or claimed to find – the “perfect” matches for their children using nothing more than word of mouth and some pretty impressive investigative skills. Remember that this was before Facebook and Instagram. Before idiot children would happily broadcast all of their shame and shortcomings for everyone to see.
Now none of their matchmaking had to do with DNA. They relied on family background, wealth, mental illness in the family (if any), dowry (if you were the girl), a good profession (for the boy) – a doctor was great, a teacher maybe. The boy should be better educated than the girl, and the boy will never marry above his station. These marriages were made on earth and they survived for years, for better and worse, with many children to boot. That’s just how it used to be.
So, imagine my curiosity when I saw the The One get recommended to me on Netflix. It caught my fancy. You will find the love of your life with one hair molecule or a swab from the nose? The app will find your perfect match – anywhere in the world. My parents would have certainly forbidden me from doing this.
If such an app was available, would I now, a married woman of 48 years, dare to find out if I had a perfect match somewhere in the world? (I might. Just out of curiosity.) But what if you were happily married and you find out that your match is someone less educated than you, less successful than you, less wealthy than you, and worse looking than your present spouse! It would be a disaster. But what if the spark is there! Is it only sexual? Is that what the app means?
Love is not only about sex. We are not ants. Human beings think, feel, and care about the person who is our chosen mate. You don’t need an app to tell you who to love and who to choose to be your life partner. Love is about giving and receiving. Love is about sharing and growing old together, up to that point when conversations do not matter anymore. The comfort of a person who grows old with you, even when the sexual act is no longer relevant, is The One.
An old lady once told me that she was always fighting with her husband. Now that he is dead, she misses him terribly. I asked her why she missed him if she was always fighting with him. She told me, “Aiya, at least I had somebody to fight with. Now I have nobody.”
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