For the next hour or so, I rattled off every trait embodied by my Bollywood crushes as Annie frantically tried to jot them all down. I wanted someone who had #4: Govinda’s SENSE OF HUMOR, #17: Shah Rukh Khan’s CHARMING demeanor, #23: Salman Khan’s MUSCULAR build, and #38: Akshaye Khanna’s SENSITIVE side. As Annie wrote out the final quality—#46: SEXY—on the seventh napkin, I started to see why she may have thought I needed to scale back on my vision of love . . . just a little. However, the idea of giving up any of the qualities listed made me feel like I would be cheating myself out of finding “the one.” So I quickly pushed the thought out of my mind. Besides, this was the person I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with. So what if I had forty-six items on my list? Why should I settle for anything less than my idea of perfect?

As we walked out of the coffeehouse that afternoon, Annie handed me my Mr. Right on seven napkins and left me with her last piece of advice:

“Leila, it’s good to have expectations. There’s nothing wrong with that. All I’m saying is life is not a movie and not everyone experiences that moment you’re so hopelessly waiting for. The longer you hold on to these notions of perfection, the more disappointed you’re going to feel when you don’t find it.”

While I quickly brushed aside the probability of her prediction at the time, looking back on this moment four years later, I now realized that Annie—my annoyingly wise and astute college roommate—might actually turn out to be right after all.

Arrange This

After graduating college, I moved back in with my parents, found a part-time teaching gig, and resumed my casual dating habits—albeit much more discreetly, since my mother and father were still not keen on the whole noncommittal-outings-for-the-sake-of-getting-to-know-each-other idea. My excuses to “hang out with friends” were always met with their silent disapproval. My parents simply couldn’t understand another purpose for dating aside from marriage. They also couldn’t understand why any decent “friend” would choose to pick their daughter up in anything other than a Toyota Camry.

“They really are the most dependable cars,” my mother would casually remark at the breakfast table the morning after my late-night trysts. “You should let your friend know.”

Despite their failed attempts to feign ignorance, I appreciated my parents’ efforts to stay out of my love life. And as a compromise, I made a greater effort to meet more South Asian men, not only to make up for my past non-desi pursuits, but also because I was still harboring hopes of finding my perfect Bollywood hero. I figured if I couldn’t find him in college, now was my chance. Even if my living situation added another layer of complication to my search.

While my quests for love were consistent, they unfortunately did not go as smoothly as I had initially anticipated. It seemed the more I chased after love, the more confused I felt about it. So after a couple of years of numerous failed attempts and crumpled-up napkins, I eventually accepted my fate as “one of those people who are incapable of falling in love,” and decided to surrender myself, voluntarily, to a life of singlehood. That plan, however, quickly changed the night of my twenty-sixth birthday, when my parents excitedly informed me of their plans to arrange my marriage during my home-cooked celebratory dinner. This was not exactly what I had wished for when I blew out the candles on my cake.