88.

Last night I found out my cousin is engaged. She's my age, and when we were kids she was the one who hung out with me and my sister in Hyderabad, she was the one who talked to cab drivers and tour givers, she was the one who haggled with cotton merchants and jewelry vendors. Thanks to her I got great deals on custom salwar kameezes, and thanks to her I had a friend when I went to India.

She's exactly my age - maybe a month older. Even though plenty of my girlfriends (read: sorority sisters) plan to get married right out of college, my cousin's announcement shook me in a way none of theirs did.

She met the boy through her family. She's probably talked to him for a total of an hour, he's older than she is, and he's a little bit bald. In spite of all this, I know for a fact it's what she wants. I know, also, that she'll be happy (because she's like that).

I dashed off a congratulatory email and then wandered up to my bedroom to try and concentrate on other things. But the truth is this: hearing about her decision made me question all of mine.

Everyone says she's being smart. Girls in our community marry young (20-24). They always have children before they're 30 (a goal many of my classmates claim but I suspect few will meet). My cousin has never traveled more than 50 miles from her hometown, she has an undergraduate degree, she's always lived at home.

But in the eyes of everyone I know, she's making the right choice. She'll get married, she'll get to know her husband for a few years, they'll have children, she'll be satisfied. The truth is that the old ideals of marriage and motherhood hold strong sway for all my relatives: even if she designed clothes for the Queen of England, if she was unmarried, everyone would assume she was unhappy.

All my cousins are getting married. And I wonder, as this happens, if there will come a point when I'll have nothing in common with them. When I'll stop seeing them to avoid inevitable conversations that lead nowhere good. When I'll think they did it right, and like everyone else I know, I should have lived life with a bit more of a plan. I've always been close to my family, and the thought is unpleasant.

But beyond my near-sighted self-pity (which I'll get over in a minute) it is true that it's getting harder to laugh and change the subject when my family members bring this up to me (and they do, a little too often.) I realize this is how most American woman feel, although maybe not when they're as young as me, and I also realize that...well, I'll say this in one breath - moving to Illinois was a bit of a romantic nonstarter for me.

There are a lot of reasons things worked out like this. I don't like living my life according to a predetermined set of rules, and of all the injunctions I disliked, the one I thought the most idiotic and small-minded was the recommendation that young Indians should only marry inside their community. (I won't say "race" since anyone with eyes and an encyclopedia will know that Indians are not, in any biological sense, a "race." Not that anyone is, in a biological sense, a race.) Returning to the main point, if I can belabor it: humans share 99.2 % of their genes with chimps. Considering this, I think we're all well enough off so long as we marry within our species.

I realize not everyone feels this way. But until I went to school, I assumed the only people who didn't feel this way were at least 80 years old, and born to an America before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Was I in for an awakening, or what.

I'll spare everyone the stories of the times I hauled my slack jaw off the floor when classmates casually - casually! - expressed the view that they only want mates of their own religion, class or creed. They must be joking, I thought. And went on my way.

I'll blame my parents for this. In spite of many, many opportunities, they never saw the need to tell me about the narrowness of the wider world. And this is all well and good, and not even a mistake.

By and large, the men I've been involved with at school are either black, Hispanic or South Asian. And when I say "by and large" I mean "exclusively," although this was not true before. The men I've met in bars and clubs - too many of those! - are the same. This was also not true before. Have I changed?

I'll confess something else unfashionable, and probably paranoid: when I meet white guys from the Midwest nowadays, I almost always write them off as not attracted to nonwhite women, unless they visibly demonstrate otherwise. It's self-limiting, I know. And I hate that I do it, even though plenty of other people would say it's not a bad strategy. It's not how I want to live my life.

Race blogger Candace Miller writes "I suspect that deep down many African American women don't believe that non-black men find them attractive." And her comment cuts to the heart of the 'marriage squeeze' question. It relates to the reason I gave up on buying fashion magazines. The international requirements for a model are that she be at least 5'10", an arbitration that means more than 99% of the world's Asian and Latina women will never participate in the industry. I grew tired of flipping through those pages in vain search of someone with my height, shape or coloring. Once, passing through Ohio, I saw a church bulletin board on which was written, "God doesn't believe in atheists." To which I could add, "Fashion magazines do not believe in Asian women." After a while, I started to feel entirely invisible.

Miller says the many African American women don't look outside the race because they're afraid of rejection. I know I am. And I also know that I'll get over this attitude. Leopards can't change their spots, I can't go from believing one thing (that people are similar) to another (people are fundamentally different based on their background.)

In the Bhagavad Gita, the battlefield revelations of Lord Krishna to the archer Arjuna, God identifies many ways in which men and women should be matched to each other. He says they should share their sense of dharma, a word that encompasses everything from service to others to physical health. In the Upanishads it is written, "Your soul is the whole world." Your soul, not your body.

When the Inupiat people of Barrow, Alaska, go out on a whale hunt, they don't ask God for success. They ask for strength for whatever lies ahead. When Arjuna went out to fight the Pandavas, he didn't ask to win. He asked only for justice, whatever that might be.

If all this amounts to, stems from, or relates to a crisis of faith, I want to adopt the attitude of the Inupiat. Unlike my cousin, who is marrying a nice boy of her own community chosen by her family at the age deemed most appropriate for marriage, I don't ask for success, and I don't want my life to be easy.

I only want greater wisdom to understand it, and greater courage (because I'm not proud of the attitude I've adopted here) for when it is not.