I don’t know if it amuses me or annoys me more, but every time I write an article or an essay mentioning the word “marriage,” I get an average of twenty e-mails from wise Indian women telling me that I’m missing out, and that maybe I should reconsider my single and radical ways.

Because, you know, it’s way better to be in a crappy abusive marriage than it is to be single.

What the fuck, people?

And then there are those that send me 1,000-word e-mails explaining to me, in detail, how compromise isn’t such a bad thing and that Western women have to compromise too, you know.

Right. Because someone who’s being pressured into agreeing to marry someone she doesn’t know is making the same kind of compromise as someone choosing to take certain decisions for the one she loves. And you can totally tell me that women have the same rights in India as they do in America without sounding like an idiot. I won’t even laugh. Promise. (When was the last time religious fundamentalists could freely walk into an American pub and beat up the women?)

Of course, I’m too Western in my ways (said to me before I’d stepped foot in the West), and too influenced by my “foreign friends.” (Read: You don’t have a brain.)

“I have many American friends, and they all have to face challenges in their marriages, too,” one woman wrote to me. Jeez, you think?

But people, let’s get one thing clear. If you think the way America is currently treating its women is acceptable, then we are so so fucked.

However, when an American woman walks out of a marriage, she doesn’t immediately become “used goods.” She has the opportunity to exist in society without being ridiculed every step of the way. She can get married a second time, a third time, adopt children, or continue to remain single by choice. An Indian woman, in contrast, will be ostracized, blamed, judged, and thought of as an easy target by male predators. She will have trouble adopting a child, she will have trouble dating, she will have trouble simply existing.

To set the record straight, I don’t have anything against marriage. I’d actually quite like the idea of making an honest man out of the boyfriend person and having a family of three kids, four dogs, and seven goldfish. But there is also absolutely no doubt in my mind that if the marriage were to become anything but a union of equality and love, I would have no second thoughts about packing up my bags and my goldfish and leaving.

When the women sending me e-mails give me advice about settling for someone who “may not be perfect,” I always want to ask them how many times they’ve given the same advice to men.

Women go to such extreme lengths to look beautiful, to impress men, to be smart, to take care of them, to make themselves perfect for these men. Yet, why do we not ask for the same standards from our men? And why do we allow ourselves to become what others want us to become?

Some feminists like to blame men for all our problems. Men are not the problem. Most of the men in my life are less judgmental than the women in my life. The problem is not with all men. The problem is with us and what we allow ourselves to become out of fear.

So scared are we of being single that we not only “settle” for men who “may not be perfect,” but we let them beat us, abuse us, cheat on us, and take advantage of us, only to forgive them and let them disrespect us all over again.

What’s the big deal about being single anyway? Why NOT ask for perfection from your man? Why not ask for equality and genuine love, respect and understanding? Why not create that space in your life for someone who truly deserves your love, and have fun with your life regardless of whether or not you ever find him?

I did. And you know what? When the idea of finding a man became irrelevant, when I no longer cared about being in a relationship, when I was out finding my happiness– traveling, having fun, and enjoying my life for all it was–I found him.

And if I hadn’t? I’d be happy anyway.