“Don’t freak out.  I would like to buy a cow,” I told my husband, Ram.

Ram glanced up from the newspaper he was reading, his gaze a measured opposite to my skittering nervous energy.

We had an arranged marriage, Ram and I: unlikely candidates brought together by a tradition deemed archaic by most Western societies but still practiced in India.  I was 25 in 1992: a feminist art student, educated at Mount Holyoke and drawn to dysfunctional backpackers.  He was 29: an analyst on Wall Street who loved puns and had a laugh that could crack the clouds and make the moon smile.  Persuaded by family, nursing heartbreak, and swayed by his confidence and humor, I said “Yes.”  If it didn’t work out, I could always get a divorce, I thought.  

Neither of us was in love when we got married.  Then again, we didn’t expect to be.   Love would come later, as it had for our parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.  Marriage in India was an “alliance” between families and described as such in countless matrimonial advertisements placed in newspapers.  “Seeking alliance for US-educated daughter,” begins a typical one and, truth be told, one that we could easily place today for our two daughters.

Our elder daughter, Ranju, is 21.  She majors in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) in Carnegie Mellon.  She is smart, self-assured and studies subjects whose titles I don’t understand, let alone their contents: “Networked Cyber-Physical Systems.”  Ranju believes engineering can solve many of the world’s problems.  When she comes home for holidays,, I present her with a more pressing question: Can love be engineered? Indian arranged marriages are predicated on the notion that it can be; that love will blossom between a man and a woman when there is a bedrock of family, shared values and, well, astrology.  

As a first step to our union, Ram’s horoscope was matched with mine.  Only after that did our families meet, and only after they liked each other did Ram and I meet.  We had veto power, so in a sense it was like a blind date set up by adoring if ever-watchful parents.  When American friends ask if I want to arrange my daughters’ marriages,  I always say “No.”  My girls are American-born and educated.   I wouldn’t dream of insisting that they follow India’s ancient system.  

The truth, as always, is more complicated.  

No, I don’t want to arrange my daughters’ marriages.  But I do want them to be open to the ideas embedded in and epitomized by an arranged marriage: that relationships are sacrosanct, that tolerance can and should be cultivated, that shared values are more important than shared interests (krav maga, mountain biking, yoga, the opera) or shared principles (I could never marry a capitalist,” I thought and look at me now, 25 years later).

After Ram and I got married, I finished my stint at an artist’s colony in Vermont and moved into his—“our,” he said from Day One— two-bedroom apartment in Stamford, Connecticut.  We quickly discovered how different we were.  In the beginning, we tried to be civil about it.  He was a meticulous planner.  I thought plans were for accountants.  To me, spontaneity meant waking up in the morning and saying: “Let’s drive to Acadia National Park today.”  He scheduled conversations about vacations:  “Let’s discuss the Maine trip this weekend.”  I disdained routine and all forms of paperwork.  He quietly filed our taxes, filled out my application to the Columbia Journalism program without telling me, and spotted errors in every spreadsheet that came across his desk. The low point was when I unknowingly threw my Green Card— a long-awaited hard-won document that would allow me, finally, to work in the US—into the garbage, since it was in the middle of a pile of what I thought was junk mail. Late at night, armed with a flashlight, we jumped into our dumpster and combed through smelly and very unpleasant garbage bags.  We didn’t find the Green Card, and I had to reapply for it.  I never touched the mail again.  

I keep telling my daughters that if their father and I had met in a bar, we wouldn’t have sought each other out, let alone asked each other out.  He would have thought me a wild gypsy and I would have thought him an arrogant straight-laced banker.  Being together has been an exercise in bemusement (“You cannot just say, “Take Merritt Parkway from Stamford and keep the yellow line always to your left—that’s not giving directions to New York City,” Ram said.  “Perhaps,” I retorted.  “But it works.”  He insisted on an experiment to prove me wrong.  I was right.), belligerance (“Normal people do not allow their child to write on the living room wall and call it creativity.”) and reluctant admiration (“Wow, planning does make things better.”)

We had some similarities, too.  We were both screamers who didn’t—couldn’t—go to bed angry.  Like dogs with a bone, we would chew over the same issue, bring in his mother and mine, insult and call each other names, till one of us, whoever was  more exhausted, apologized.  The other similarity was our attitude toward family.  We both came from large, close-knit families and expected the other to not just be polite but actually get along, to integrate with ours.  Family was non-negotiable and extensive—not just parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents but also an assortment of aunts and uncles who lived in Long Island and Los Angeles.  Naturally, they came to visit and, naturally, we each thought that the other’s family was weird.

Every relationship is held together, or torn apart by three things: passion, principles and people.  Most Western marriages begin with lust and passion.  For us, passion came later.  I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when regard turned to respect, and then to love and finally desire.  In that sense, our relationship’s path was topsy-turvy.  And this is the nub of what I want to tell my daughters: that love doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that love can be engineered.  I was a tree-hugging socialist who spit on—figuratively speaking—capitalist pigs but Indian marriages are built on the “jaane dho,” or “let it go” principle.  It’s a kind of tolerance.  Assume goodwill, even when you want to chew the other person’s head off.  Or her cow’s in my husband’s case, which would be an oxymoron given that we are Hindu vegetarians who don’t eat beef and revere the cow.

For me buying a cow was straightforward. Our milk-lady, who supplied fresh milk to the entire neighborhood, needed a new cow.. I would give her money to buy the cow.  In return, she would care for it and we would get free milk for the rest of our lives, plus naming rights.  

“But I don’t want free milk,” Ram cried.  He wanted (insert curl of my lip here) homogenized, pasteurized milk in sanitized packets, from earth-degrading, bovine-hormone-injecting corporations, like 98% of the civilized world.  He thought it was safer. I, on the other hand, wanted to buy raw milk from Sarala, who milked her small herd of cows across the road from our apartment building, as cars and motorbikes swirled all around.  I thought it was safer.  

Our daughters, Ranju and Malu, watched us bicker about bovines. Ram hated arguing in front of the children.  I thought that it was healthy for them to watch us fight and make up.  Over the years, we reached a happy—or unhappy depending on how you view it—medium.  We bickered and argued in front of the kids, but kept the cussing and screaming private.

But after we’d been going around in circles for a good while, Ram let me buy a cow.  The truth is that I simply wore him down in my passive-aggressive way.  

When our daughters asked why he had agreed, this most private of men who wouldn’t even hold hands let alone utter, “I love you,” in public, said something that made my heart sing:

“I do this because it makes your mother smile.”

“Ewwww,” chorused our daughters.

Lifelong love takes a zig-zag path.  Part of the trick is to recognize that buying a bovine is just as much a serenade as shouting eternal love (that ends up going bust) from the rooftops.  I wanted the latter and ended up with the former.

And in case you’re wondering, we named our cow Ananda.  It means blissful.