The Tyranny of True Love

The Tyranny of True Love

"Are you my true love?"

I planned to have auditions for an English contest last week. When I went to go get the students to tell them that we could start the auditions, I saw one tenth grade girl arguing with a tall boy who then started to pull her by her forearms as she became more and more upset and yelled at him. Fearing that the altercation would get more violent, I went up to both students and told the boy he had to stop and to go away, not knowing what else to say or do (disciplining children in a nonnative tongue is not the easiest task). The boy left the scene and the girl fainted, her friends surrounding her as they carried her to the campus mosque, where they fanned her and gave her sips of water.

I found out later that the boy wanted the girl to come with him while she wanted to stay at school and that they have been dating since middle school. This kind of incident can and does happen (perhaps without the girl fainting) at American high schools. Toxic relationships and obsessive behavior exist everywhere. But it did reinforce to me the sheer power, influence, and significance of romantic relationships on many of my students’ lives, emotional health, and well-being, and caused me to think about what I've seen of romantic love in Indonesia.

If this were fifty to sixty years ago, my student who fainted because of her boyfriend would likely already be married to a man that her parents chose for her. She probably wouldn’t even being going to high school, and there would be no debate over whether or not she should be with her partner or join an English competition. Even in the year 2016, some of her neighbors or cousins around the same age as her with less money or less progressive parents still don’t have the romantic choices that she does.

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"Sometimes your true love is next to you and feels close but you don't realize it"

The woman I live with in my village, whom I call Ibu, which means mother or madam, is somewhere in her sixties. Every time I ask her age, she gives a slightly different answer. Sometimes she sixty, sometimes sixty-five. Her younger sister told me that she is sixty-seven. She never went to high school. Her parents asked her what she wanted to do when she was young. She said she wanted to cook, and they decided to marry her at age twelve, thirteen, or fourteen to a man in his twenties that she did not really know and that she was “scared of because he was an adult.” She has never, as far as I know, had a boyfriend, and even though her husband died a few years ago, she has no intention of remarrying, despite the encouragement of her friends. “I am old. For what do I need a husband?” she often asks me.

If she ever had problems in her marriage, her parents warned her not to complain. She had money and a roof over her head. What would she have if they divorced or argued?

In two years, I will be thirty, but I haven’t married yet. This is shocking for many Indonesians I meet in my village. When people ask me when I will marry in front of Ibu, she tells me not to worry. Get experience first. She wishes that I will find a man who is good to me. That I choose. But I must marry she reminds me. I must marry a man eventually.

Yay...I guess?

Her grandson is nineteen years old. He recently broke up with his girlfriend because she wanted to marry, and he wasn’t ready. He is still a small child, says Ibu. He isn’t really. He is more than six feet tall and not thin. A nineteen year old is a legal adult. Probably still too young to marry. But no, he isn’t a small child.

Ibu went to Saudi Arabia when she was in her thirties against her husband’s wishes. She worked as a maid there for nine years. She sent back a lot of money, and her husband was able to build a few houses for their family with her money. Her family has more money and land than many other families in our neighborhood. But she left behind a little three year old boy while she was in Saudi. And that little boy died of a fever while she was gone.

Ibu’s older daughter is in her forties. She was married a few times and divorced before she married her current husband, who is the father of her two children and whom she has been with now for almost thirty years. He married her even though he had never married before, and she had been divorced. When she was sick last year, her husband massaged her and cooked for her. “It isn’t fair if the wife has to do all the cooking,” he told me one day.

Ibu’s granddaughter started dating her husband in high school. They have a four year old daughter now. She is a math teacher, and he works in a factory. Ibu’s children and grandchildren were able to marry for love and choose their partner.

My student can break up with her boyfriend. She can find a new one. She and her friends will talk about love and couples and complain about being single. They will share Facebook posts about true love and the nature of soul mates.

Indonesians are some of the most active social media users in the world. I get three to ten friend requests from Indonesians I may or may not have met in person on Facebook every week, and would likely get even more if I accepted all the requests I received. If I open my newsfeed on Facebook, a huge portion of the posts and statuses made by Indonesian friends are about being single and lonely. About dating. And about finding your true love.

On my birthday, one of the women who works in the office at my school took my hand warmly. “Cepat Jodoh,” she wished me with a giggle. Almost everyone who wished me a happy birthday added that line as well. Cepat jodoh. Find your true love fast.  There is a partner for everyone I am told. God has a plan for every soul, and every soul has a true love.

"You will surely meet your true love!"

A twenty-eight year old male elementary school teacher I am friends with once showed me a picture of him and his girlfriend that he broke up with a few years ago. I watched him as he photoshopped brooms sweeping her face away, out of the picture. “Her parents didn’t approve of me,” he told me. Months later, I heard she is getting married to another man. I did not see him around at that time, but his friends said he was galau—confused, depressed, out of it. He wrote odd posts on his Facebook.

His friend, also in his twenties, was in love with a Javanese girl. He is Sundanese. His family didn’t approve of the match. When he was galau, he sat in the corner of his house and wrote about love in the little English he knew on the white board that I used to teach the local elementary school kids.

Jodoh kamu, your true love, is someone else, his friend reassured him. He is younger, only twenty-one. He wants to get married fast. He has a new girlfriend every few months. Each time he has a new girl, he tells me he will marry her.

A twenty-nine year old man with short curly hair smoked a cigarette as he looked out onto the road. He used to have long dread locks and more piercings, and his back is still covered in an elaborate tattoo. “I want to find a wife. I need to find a wife,” he told me. “But who wants to marry a man with no job and who just got out of jail after three years?” he asked me without bitterness, but with sadness and a toothy grin. “But I know I will find my jodoh. Definitely, she is out there.”

Of course Americans also have some obsession with true love. Single people can find hundreds of English articles with advice or reasons about why their still single and haven’t married yet. There are plenty of movies (especially those marketed to women) showing how unhappy women are until they find a boyfriend or husband. Most action or adventure movies made in America have some romantic pairing.

"Six things for getting the best partner/true love"

American pop-culture obsession with “true love” has also not been free of criticism or rebellion either. People of my generation are familiar with the joke that Disney films gave us unreal expectations of true love. 

Eh, some of these are arguable...

Also, I think this is actually reasonable

On the feminist pop-culture website, The Mary Sue (http://www.themarysue.com/), one can find numerous articles praising films that show or promote friendships or familiar relationships instead of romantic ones (especially female based ones) and other articles calling for more homosexual, asexual, and aromatic representation. To the perhaps one percent of humans that have no romantic feelings, everyone else’s obsession with love is grating, they say. Does marrying your “true love” have to be everyone’s ultimate goal and purpose? Aren’t there other things to life? Some American cultural critics have begun to ask. And what happens if you don’t find someone who loves you unconditionally, who wouldn’t climb every mountain, who wouldn’t give you the moon if they could, or who has no interest in bathing with you in the sea?

What happens when your lover isn’t a perfect fit for you? Do you make it work? Do you leave him for someone else, who is better for you? Do you do something dramatic just to see how your lover reacts? Do you chase the person who is good for you from a practical stand point, or do you always chase the person whom you dream about, even if he is an undead vampire?

Twilight: A teenage girl's choice between a walking corpse and a dog. (not my original joke, but relevant here :) )

I don’t know enough about Indonesian pop-culture to know if there is any kind of backlash at the obsession with true love here. However, my English club students told me that they wanted to make a movie in English titled “Blood Coffee”. The girl writing the script explained to me the story. There is a deadly psychopath killer who kills people when they drink coffee because his own parents were killed in front of him as they drank coffee. However, he falls in love with a beautiful, intelligent young college student. 

“It sounds a bit like Twilight,” I told her after she explained the first scene involves the killer driving by on a motorcycle, charming all the female students except the romantic lead, who is suspicious. 

“Just think about your story as you write it,” I advised my student. “If the lead guy is really a killer, and the woman is really good, do you really think she should stay with him? Even if he doesn’t kill her, he’s still not a good person.”

“Well that is the problem,” she told me. “At the end, they don’t end up together because he is a killer.”

“Yeah. I think that’s better,” I told her.

“Yeah,” she responded, the light freckles on her round cheeks crinkled as she began to smile, “but you know, there will be a sequel.”

In every society the purpose of marriage and of the nature and validity romantic love transforms and is constantly in flux. When I lived in South Korea, I found that many people cared a lot about having a boyfriend or girlfriend or getting married, but they were less interested in talking about the intense feelings of true love or that meeting a certain person might be destiny. Instead they were more interested in the rituals of courtship. At a certain point in a relationship men are expected to buy an expensive present for their girlfriends or future mothers-in-law (often an expensive purse). Christmas was marketed as a couple holiday, and it was important to be seen eating ice cream together, to be seen holding hands as a couple on a street, or seen wearing matching outfits. 

Er, can't say I ever was a big fan. of the matching..

Typically, weddings are short, efficient affairs in which it is important to take pictures of certain set acts (such as throwing the bouquet) but those acts don’t have to actually be done in earnest. From what I could see, Korean pop-culture liked to assure people that they all could become a couple, with the experience and the rituals associated with dating and marriage being more important than the actual specific person one falls in love with. I think general couple-style marketing is less popular for Indonesians because the belief is that everyone has an individual perfect match.

Perhaps to Ibu, who never had a chance to choose her husband, the fact that my female student has a boyfriend and that she can break up with him and find someone who is her perfect match, who really loves her, is beautifully empowering and progressive.

However, consider a perpetually single and aging office lady working at a company in Jakarta, who opens her Facebook and sees so many statuses and pictures. So many are about “true love,” such as one with two Anime-style characters with big eyes staring lovingly at each other in front of the stars including affirmations that everyone is destined to love and marry someone special. She is suffocated by this concept.

My friend who cannot marry his Javanese girlfriend is stuck somewhere between old and new cultural norms and has been given no clear answer.

Furthermore there is definitely a potentially dangerous heterosexual and monogamous bias to the pop-culture concept of true love in Indonesia. In the Pre-Islamic and Pre-Christian traditions of many ethnic groups in Indonesia, gender was viewed very differently, and far more fluid. Even after conversion to Islam, Indonesia has had communities of people for hundreds of years known as waria that challenge binary gender norms (interesting articles and more information here and here). While there have been some cases of violence and prejudice affects the opportunities of people with different sexualities and non-binary genders, Indonesia has been fairly tolerant. However in the past few months, many Indonesians politicians and psychologists have called non-heterosexuals sick and in need of psychological care (more info here).

The somewhat sudden emergence of very vitriol anti-LGBT rhetoric is complicated and has many sources and explanations, but I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t influenced by obsession many Indonesians have with “true love.” Everyone has an opposite sex partner, says the thousands of memes on Facebook. How could someone not want beautiful, star crossed love?

Some politicians say that homosexual rights and acknowledgement and tolerance are a Western concept and undermining Indonesian sovereignty. But considering how old the waria community is in Indonesia and that many ethnic groups had non-binary concepts of genders, and that many Indonesian tribes historically practice polygamy, is tolerance for non-heterosexuals or diverse forms of marriage really a foreign, invading, and disruptive concept? Instead, on some level, isn’t the idea that everyone has a jodoh, a destined opposite sex partner chosen for you by God that he or she will love unconditionally and that will marry them and make them happy, relatively new and disruptive?

However, I don’t mean to say that the obsession with true love is completely modern or foreign. Pre-Islamic myths in Indonesia are filled with love stories and even though gender was perhaps more fluid, men and women were seen as complementary and each gender had power and magic and connection to the universe (or destiny). Certainly, too, you can see the roots of “true love” in Islam. Islam has very strict gender roles, and it is considered necessary for all Islamic people to marry. Also Islam encourages egalitarianism across different classes and races. As Indonesians become wealthier and more educated, marrying no longer becomes necessary to survive as an individual or to improve your family’s power or standing.

True love implies that someone’s background is not important. What is important is that they are a good match from you, a gift from God, just as Islam insists that all races and classes of people are equal under God. Furthermore, the Indonesian state battles against the divisions between different tribes by promoting a shared language, moving people around, and having a national slogan of “Unity in Diversity”. That the country can be unified despite its differences is already encouraged, so why can’t romantic love also be powerful enough to overcome other factors that in the past limited marriage prospects?

Although Islam and Christianity are both male-biased, Indonesia’s traditions of female goddesses, matrilineal inheritance (for some tribes), and comparably (to many other parts of Asia) liberal acceptance of woman in positions of power, has contributed to the idea that men and women can be partners and need each other, a definite influence on true love. Dutch colonialism and the Christian example of monogamy too probably has factored into the idea that polygamy is not exactly proper or ideal even though it is allowed by some sects of Islam.

"Praise God, God has finally had me find my true love"

I think it also must be noted that pre-marital sex, is pretty taboo here. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen. It does and there are of course cases of pregnancy out of wedlock, pregnant couples being forced to marry, and a booming prostitution business. If I were to guess, I would guess that the rates pre-marital sex are still, however, much lower than you would find in Western countries for most Muslim Indonesians, especially those who live outside of urban areas, if simply because it's hard to ever be alone in a village, especially with a member of the opposite sex. Even in large cities, the police sometimes raid hotels or apartment buildings, looking for unmarried couples (even if this practice isn't legal by Indonesian law). Usually this is done to make a point; such as in around Valentine's Day (which is denounced by many Indonesian Muslim groups). Also many hotels in conservative areas require guests (even foreign tourists) traveling as couples to show a marriage certificate if they want to sleep in the same room. Women used to be subject to virginity tests if they wanted to join the police force and virginity has a lot of meaning for both young women and men. Even if a couple manages to have sex a few times outside of marriage, the fact that they will be heavily monitored by their community means that it probably can't happen regularly. Even couples who are not interested in having sex but simply may want to spend time alone with each other will often have a difficult time doing so because there is always the suspicion that they might have sex.

Of course in the West, teenagers are not supposed to be having sex either, but, of course this taboo more or less disappears for young men and women (for most communities). The fact that this taboo continues through adulthood for many Indonesians can perhaps intensify relationships and feelings. Young men and women may rush into marriage or may become more emotionally serious and invested in new partners and push for marriage earlier simply to get a chance to have sex or extended privacy with their partner. Because people are only expected to have sex with their jodoh, the need to find that person becomes more intense. If a person does have sex with someone, it can lead to greater feelings of guilt and responsibility.

Most Muslim Indonesians do not have the luxury of experimenting with multiple partners extensively before they marry, even emotionally because there is a fear that if you get too close to a lover you will end up being physical with them. To reference Twilight again, it's no wonder the film is popular here. If critics praised anything about the films it was their ability to capture intense sexual tension and the pain of longing for someone close to you physically but with whom you are not allowed to be intimate.

Divorce is allowed by Islam, and many people who marry young do divorce here. However, there is a stigma attached to the practice. Divorced people are more gossiped about (especially women), and are more judged in positions of power. While divorcing is an option, it isn't ideal. In many ways, it seems to have become even less acceptable for younger generations than older ones.

The social situation then for young people is that they want very much to fall totally and completely in love, but they must be extremely careful with whom they do that. Every relationship or romantic action they take is weighted by more consequences, which can add drama to even the slightest of romantic or sexual attractions.

Finally, no doubt there is the influence of modern Western pop-culture. Superhero movies, action movies, Star Wars, and other fantasy films and books are hugely popular here. Nearly every American blockbuster film features some kind of romantic subplot.

However, I am no expert on Indonesian history or anthropology. And Indonesia is too big and too diverse of a place to make blanket statements about love and marriage, which vary hugely historically and between the many cultures and tribes that live on these 17,000+ islands. But in my little village in West Java, it is hard not to see true love an as obsession. It is hard not to see true love battle with old ideas about marriage, society, and norms, and intelligent life plans. I am glad that most of my students do not have to marry someone they do not want marry. But I worry about the toxic disappointment of not finding a jodoh, of overlooking abusive behavior out of fear of being alone, of obsessing over relationships that may not be practical or accepted by their families or societies. True love had a revolution, but now it’s begun building its own brand of fascism bent on turning everyone into a hopeless heterosexual romantic who will marry just one person, no matter what they actually may want or what may be good for them.

"Your true love is not about who you get quickly, but it is something that God already has chosen and you will definitely receive"

“I made a promise to my mother not to marry until I have a house,” a single male teacher at my school told me. “But I had a dream about my jodoh. I saw her in my dream. I haven’t met her, but I know she is waiting for me. I know the place I will meet her. She is small and wears a hijab, but I couldn’t quite see her face.” He loves to sing the song “Truly Madly Deeply” by Savage Garden.

A few weeks later he admits that he likes a tall American friend of mine, with long, uncovered hair. “I never thought of dating a foreigner before,” he tells me with a shy smile.

Love. She is a fickle and cruel mistress.