Love has no boundaries – except in pandemic

Under normal conditions my taxi driver would have been back to India by now to marry a young woman, chosen in the traditional way.

A traditional Indian wedding.

We have spent 15 months recording the unexpected consequences of Covid-19 – from cleaner air to a boom in home office furniture – but there’s always room for a surprise.

The Indian-Australian taxi driver tells me the pandemic has ruined his chances of getting married anytime soon. Under normal conditions he would have been back to India by now to marry a young woman, chosen in the traditional way via family and friends and a matchmaker.

Instead he worries it could be years before he has a chance to find a partner, and no, hooking up with someone here, of Indian or non-Indian background, is unlikely. The young man is circumspect but hints that young women brought up in this country are not suitable partners (different values) and that some, like him, must go home to find a bride.

It’s momentarily confronting to think there’s an assumption that marriages are made in India, not here.

Shouldn’t this young man adopt the social and cultural values of his new country and assimilate more rapidly? And surely it’s a 10th-order issue compared with the problems so many other Australians are facing because of closed borders.

But this is his reality and it’s hard not to feel a little sad – and concerned – at how this disruptive virus could damage the complex transition from migrant to full-fledged, settled Australian.

Marriage, children and the establishment of family units are not essential to healthy mass migration but they certainly help the process. Second-generation Indian-Australians, for example, in general sidestep their parents and tradition and find their partners as and how they choose.

The loneliness of migrants, particularly migrant men, is nothing new and earlier waves of newcomers have always looked – often pragmatically – to their home countries for marriage partners.

Growing up in a family of Italian background, we knew of men who had been married by proxy to Italian women whom they had never met. Even as kids, we understood that the adjustments for both parties when the wife arrived in Australia were considerable. We knew other men who had worked for years in Australia and, just like that Indian taxidriver, had gone back to Italy to find a bride and return here.

We took it for granted that everyone sought a wife but that it wasn’t always easy for men, often with limited English, to crack the broader local marriage market. But it was many years later, seeing the single Italian and Croatian men living in boarding houses in my inner-Sydney neighbourhood, before I understood just how lonely and isolated some migrants can be. These old men spoke in dialect as they sat on the benches at the local park or the bus stop.

Perhaps they had a great life here, but they seemed pretty alone now, a long way from the extended family and social life they might have enjoyed back home.

The mental health of migrants is surely one of the untold stories of Australia in the 20th century, before cheap airfares and What’sApp shrank the distance between family and friends and the new life, and before you could live on the other side of the world but still chat over breakfast.

Back then in the 1920s and ’30s and even after World War II, European migrants knew there was little chance they would be able to visit their country of origin. Many did eventually manage it but only after decades of annual letters and no phone calls, of long delays in discovering the death of loved ones.

For those who never married, or married and divorced, those who did not make their fortune here but worked for wages all their lives, Australian society could remain alien and second-best, no matter how much they yearned for a broader connection.

Thank goodness technology has shrunk the globe, but fair play to the Indian migrants lamenting the adjustments they face thanks to Covid-19.

It’s as real a loss of hope as that felt by other young Australians whose chances of finding love and romance were cruelled by months-long lockdowns.

On the upside, it’s possible the border closures will change the marriage market for the taxi driver as more people sign up to the online matchmaking sites for Indians in Australia.

Parul Mehta, who runs the Indian Matrimonial site in her spare time, says that as time passes more people will look for options beyond returning to India to find partners. Her site accepts only men and women living in Australia and New Zealand and is positioned as a matchmaking platform designed to lead to marriage, not dating.

“In general people who have been living here for 15 or 20 years would not typically look for someone raised outside of Australia,” Bankstown, NSW-based Mehta says. “They prefer someone local.”

The traditional arranged marriage no longer exist in Australia, she says, but some people who have been here for relatively short periods have used matchmaking services in India to find partners there. “Love has no boundaries,” Mehta says. Except, of course, in a pandemic.