By “What do millennials want?” is a lament that has echoed for the past decade. “Millennials” is a word to indicate the generation that grew up with the Internet, with the luxury of access to information, but a dearth of attention to consume it, the generation that is called too sensitive (you’re telling me I can't call them mannequins? Womanaquinns sounds weird!), yet too entitled. It’s the one flouting conventions of pairing off into couples, having babies at the time deemed appropriate by dadima, and (thankfully) acknowledging that sexuality is not binary, but a spectrum. For a group of people that actively defy classification — what do millennials want?
At the risk of sounding cliched (a phrase that is always followed by a resounding cliche), we all want the same thing as the generations before us — love. It’s an easy cliche to indulge in because love is such a catch-all term. It means a myriad of things to different people and, for that same reason, sometimes ends up meaning nothing to everyone.
The task of being a millennial finding ‘love’ in 21st century India is one fraught with ambiguity. If anything, it is the defining quality of this generation. It manifests itself in everything — our films teach us that ‘gusse se nahi, pyaar se darr lagta hai’ (we don’t fear anger, but love) and our news channels teach us that if we hold hands in public we might have to spend the night in jail. Families police our childhoods into reductive gender roles, telling us not to talk to strangers, but have no qualms shoving us into the arms of strangers when they think our age is right. The revelations of the #MeToo movement have shaken the foundations of what gender behaviours will look like in the future. Embodying the millennial paradox, we trawl the Internet looking for love in dating and marriage sites, and yet only a minority of us marry outside our castes and social circles. Millennial Indians have to straddle the line between ghosting and gotras and in it we have to find the definition of love as it might feel right to us.
And here’s a little secret — no generation ever knows what they want till they have it or have just lost it. Everything will be clearer in retrospect, when think tanks classify the generation that detests classification, but till then we have our beloved ambiguity, we have trial-and-error, we have an expanded vocabulary of what love might mean, an evolving world that’s (slowly) accommodating the spectrum of love and sexuality.
When the opportunity to write this column came along I wondered if there was the need for a heterosexual woman’s point of view. My experiences will only be able to reflect the view of an upper caste, upper class, urban, privileged woman. How would I be able to encompass the vastness of the experience of love? Maybe not knowing is why I might make a decent millennial columnist? While I promise that subsequent columns will have humiliating (and possibly hilarious) anecdotes from my personal love life, I hope that you will know that my inbox and heart is always open, to share in your ambiguity about love — for now, that’s what this millennial wants.
Aditi Mittal is a writer, comedian and a sentimental fool.