Single, 30-something – and running out of time?

Netflix reportedly lost a million subscribers in the second quarter of this year as the cost of living crisis bit – but so far I’m hanging in there. I came for Stranger Things 4. I stayed for the second season of my ultimate guilty pleasure: Indian Matchmaking.

It’s a reality show in which Mumbai-based matchmaker Sima Taparia – ‘Sima Aunty’ to her clients– travels across India and the US, making matches for wealthy singletons. Each episode follows a similar pattern. We see successful and glamorous men and women in their 30s living their best life – drinks with friends, sessions in the park with their personal trainer, tours of their chicken-farm machinery business – before they admit to camera that they’d really like to meet that special someone.

Sima Aunty arrives to hear their list of ‘preferences’ – what they’re looking for in a partner – and to meet with their families. The client is handed the ‘bio-data’ of a couple of potential matches to select from. Some time later, the cameras return to film the first – usually awkward – date. Nine times out of ten they decide to ‘just be friends’. Maybe it’s the film crew.

The first season came under fire for perpetuating colourism and caste hierarchies. As a result, in season two no one says they’re looking for a partner who is ‘not too dark’. Instead, most ‘preferences’ focus on oddly-specific shared interests: someone who likes pilates, is open to skydiving, ‘can talk science-y’. There seems to be little awareness that sometimes differences are enriching; or that relationships shape and change us; or that there’s joy in partnering with someone who is the very things that you aren’t. You don’t have to be married to know these things to be true.

So, the show’s a little trashy – but a fascinating window into the human condition too. Here are these smart, successful women in their 30s – who’ve spent over a decade going through college, building their career, and ‘working on themselves’ – sitting in their palatial city apartments, with almost everything the world can offer. And yet they’re unhappy, because they’re missing one thing: marriage and children – this entirely ordinary thing that humans have been doing for millennia. It’s as if the urge to pair up and procreate has been wired into us in a way in which none of the trappings of modernity can undo completely. Because, well, it has (Gen. 1:27-28).

And yet these women are running out of time. Some of them say so outright; others merely imply it. But it haunts them. It’s as though you can hear the biological clock ticking behind the upbeat contemporary soundtrack. While one of Sima’s male clients can shrug off a disappointing date assuring himself that ‘there’s no timeline – that’s the beautiful thing about America; you can do anything at any time’, the women don’t have that luxury. To watch Indian Matchmaking is to confront the cruelty of female biology: so much to do, so little time.

And yet, I’m reminded of an article from author Zadie Smith that I came across when researching my book, A Brief Theology of Periods (Yes, Really): ‘Without that dreaded “biological clock”, without the menopause … what or who will tell a man that he is old?’ she asks. ‘The truth is … age exists for us all. … I think on the whole, I’d rather be sad than deluded.’ And she’s right. That desperate feeling that we’re running out of time is in fact entirely rational for a human being in a fallen world. Because we are. We’re all on a timeline. The women in Indian Matchmaking might be concerned about a more immediate horizon, but in the end it’s all part and parcel of another reality that none of the trappings of the modernity can undo. The sand is running through the hourglass. We are all going to die. It feels tragic, because it is.

Mostly though, as a single woman newly in my thirties (how smart or successful, you be the judge), Indian Matchmaking makes me grateful for the rich vision for kingdom life that the New Testament gives us. The trappings of modernity are not all we have to live for; and ultimately, unlike for an unbeliever, pairing up and procreating is not the closest we’ll get to Eden. Before then, the time is short; but the opportunities to expend ourselves doing that which is truly worthwhile – those are boundless.