The question landed with a clang on the snow-white tablecloth. I imagined everyone in the room heard it—the married couple with a kid at the next table, the group of businessmen having a work lunch, the server who looked 100 years old and was hovering around us with a knowing grin. He was probably used to waiting on tables like ours: a man and a woman on a first date with only one intended outcome—marriage.

This essay originally appeared in the Privacy & Perception Issue of Vice Magazine, created in collaboration with Broadly. You can read more stories from the issue here .

When we were finally heading out the door, I caught my server’s eye. The nosy bastard gave me a wide-grinned thumbs-up. No wonder they say marriage in India is a collective effort.

Abhay’s parents had contacted mine via a typical Indian matrimonial website, and then the two parties exchanged (their kids’) numbers. At first, I asked if we could just meet for coffee, so it’d be relatively quick and painless. Abhay, however, requested we meet for lunch. As we sat there, a few minutes into politely discussing work and where we had studied, it was time to address the elephant in the room.

Being a woman in her early 20s who had only just begun to (secretly) explore the world of casual dating on Tinder, the modern arranged marriage process felt bizarrely streamlined. The pressures of tradition were so strong, though; I couldn’t refuse to participate.

To be fair, it wouldn’t be decided on today. If all went well, there’d be more dates over the next few months before the wedding was arranged. But the only reason I was meeting this 28-year-old Merchant Navy officer—Abhay, we’ll call him—for a weekday lunch in an upscale restaurant in central Mumbai was to see if I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

Did we know anything more, though? The thought drunkenly flitted around my brain as I kissed my date outside the bar. We went back to his place for a typical mildly disappointing hookup.

During my Tinder date that weekend (the app had just launched in India), I brought up the question that Abhay had asked me. We mulled it over while drinking pints of cheap beer in my favorite dive bar, before bursting out laughing at the thought of Abhay’s supreme earnestness. What did he know about life, this 20-something who would happily get married to a relative stranger; who would probably never read, watch, or experience all the cool things we were sure to with our modern lifestyles?

It didn’t, though—at least not the constant, all-consuming pressure of it. Marriage, or an arranged marriage, to be more specific, was the unceasing background hum to growing up in India—one that grew louder and louder the further I progressed into my 20s. My parents, like most, planned their finances around it—meticulously ensuring they’d have enough to pay for an extravagant ceremony. The concept of casually dating around for a bit barely existed at all. The idea was: In my mid 20s, I’d get married, and in my late 20s, I’d start having kids.

Months later, in a moment of loneliness, I idly wondered what would have happened if I’d agreed to meet with Abhay again. Would I be picking out pre-bridal packages at my local beauty salon?

The second I turned 24, the massive family network cranked into gear to find me an “eligible” groom with whom to fulfill my obligatory life plan. “We need to start looking now because it might take as long as a couple of years to find the perfect match,” explained Grandma. By then I’d be 26, quickly careening toward spinsterhood.

My casual dating and sex life unfolded in secret. My first job—at a self-consciously hipster culture magazine—had me commuting to the more “cosmopolitan” south Mumbai, building a new social circle of women who drank, had premarital sex, and discussed “fuccbois” and “wokebois” and intersectional feminism. Like me, they too were negotiating what they wanted out of life and pushing against what they were expected to want.

Even though she didn’t know about my Tinder use, my mum and I still had frequent raging fights about my new Mumbai “lifestyle.” Add to this an army of enthusiastic relatives keen on finding me a husband. Soon enough, I was living a double life: making my first forays into casual sex with guys off Tinder while simultaneously meeting prospective grooms as part of a system where a woman’s “purity” was prized.