I have been trying to avoid thinking about this for a while but I can't any longer.

Disclaimer: when reading this post, please keep in mind that I am fully aware of how "wrong" my "wrong" statements sound and that they may seem to be phrased more negatively than I intend them to.

So. My love life is a big question mark these days and I constantly find myself agonizing over why and why not and what if and when and what if not. I try to recognize when these thoughts present themselves, and acknowledge the feelings attached and let them go. But the last part is just so hard to do. Lately I can't just let it go.

You, dear reader, may or may not be aware that when I first moved to Albany three years ago I had just become the victim of infidelity and I was seeking to meet people for the main purpose of distraction. The chronicles of my painful recovery are in the archives of this blog, if you care to read them. Well, I ended up meeting quite a few people back then. Two of the men I met were relatively new divorcees back then. They were both desi men.

I got kind of emotionally attached to one of them (let's call him JT) and the other I just conversed with on an irregular basis (let's call him M). JT, after a few of my emails to him were ignored, told me "do not get involved, not good for both of us!" Ok, fine. I had responded that I would not get emotional but I appreciated replies to my emails all the same since "any response is better than none". After this, he never contacted me again. However, we had never deleted each other off of Facebook. We spied on each other throughout the years without ever interacting. I came to find through his profile updates that he had become engaged to a little delicate-looking redheaded white woman. I kind of lost actual contact with M, too, and just kept him as a Facebook friend. I discovered that he, too, remarried, also to a white woman. One fine day I find in my Facebook inbox a message from JT asking me if I still live in Albany (this was roughly 2.5 months ago). We resumed communication by that point and we started talking about our love lives. He asked me about mine and I told him the whole story. I told him I knew of his engagement and that I was happy for him.

But in reality, I was dripping from head to toe with jealousy. I was jealous that these were the women who had made these men stop wanting to be emotionally detached, and I was jealous that they were white women. I recalled a point when JT and I had first interacted and the subject of white women came up and he shocked the hell out of me when, totally unprovoked, he asked me incredulously "you think I'm not good enough for one?" WTF, dude. And that was the moment that popped into my head when I found out that he had chosen this fragile snowflake of a woman to be his, all his, to display to the world like a trophy and custom tailor to his ideal balance of Western and Eastern culture. These are just two examples of men having been traumatized by desi wives and marrying white women after their divorces.

My dad told me once that his reluctance to get together with a white lady stems from not having enough confidence. This is just one of the many things I think about when considering the obstacles involved in finding a life partner.