‘Indian Matchmaking’: Aparna Shewakramani’s book is about being vilified on the reality show

Someone asked me what my turning point was – the moment I knew I had to take matters into my own hands. Candidly, it was the death threat. It shook me in ways I can never fully explain. I’m relieved that 99.9999 percent of people in the world will never know the sickening feeling of that very moment. But here’s what I realised then.

While I would never have the reach of an international show to create my own public persona, I did have my voice and an ability to share my version of reality with the media and on my own social media platforms. Everyone had some advice to give. I spoke to a “crisis management” publicist referred to me through a friend of a friend. He was an older White man, deeply entrenched in the industry and hardly phased by my depiction on the show. In fact, after a quick Twitter trending hashtag review and an Instagram skim-over, he declared that he saw no crisis.

The press had already shown up on “my side” and here, at week two, I only had to ride it out. He advised I craft a delicate balance of not being defensive but also explaining my perspective to the media and on my social media platforms.

I should gently remind everyone that reality television is expertly edited with very little accuracy in general.

I knew he was right, but I felt so overwhelmed by this new industry that neither I nor my Houston close friends were familiar with. I started reaching out to friends in California, and they had more contacts for me. I spoke to publicists but eventually decided I didn’t need a traditional one.

First, they charged $15,000 or more for a three-month retainer, and second, I had more than enough press coverage opportunities coming to me organically. I didn’t need them to use their networks to get me additional outlets. I then connected with other female reality stars with strong personalities or vilified portrayals, including Jessica Batten of Love Is Blind and Olivia Caridi from The Bachelor.

These women are kind and compassionate, and truly understand my unique position. They also confirmed something I had never fully considered before: the vilification I was experiencing from the world had happened before on reality television – countless times. The way I saw it, I was ready to use all my resources and skills to tell our collective story.

I also knew I had to speak up for the women to come. The strong, determined, practical, and ambitious women who would be the next “villains” on the next show.

The ones the world would watch and think, “Oh, she deserves every poor outcome that comes her way in life (and love), because she is unlikeable.”

Let me make this very clear. In my opinion, it is no coincidence that Jessica Batten was vilified on television with untrue narratives and crafty editing of her personality. She was, if you’re taking note, the only woman on the show who had her own home, a sweet dog, and a six-figure income. She was beautiful and looking for her own partner in life, but according to the stereotypes that “sell” or have increased viewership, this honest portrayal of her just wouldn’t cut it.

We instead had to be presented with a story line far from the truth and editing that strung together her least favourable moments completely out of context. I saw memes when Indian Matchmaking came out that showed “Jessica, 34” next to “Aparna, 34” – begging the viewer to vote on who was worse. Who deserved love less? And who was more unlikeable?

“Neither” is the correct answer, but the keyboard warriors did not get it right. Both were women who loved their families, excelled in their careers, had healthy and loving friendships, had a pet they loved – and yes, wanted to find love.

Believe it or not, you as a viewer are constantly consuming stories on your television that oversimplify people into tropes and stereotypes.

Let’s see if Indian Matchmaking is an example of such over- simplification. I’ll give you my personal take on it – the Aparna breakdown, if you will. First, draw a T chart: label the first column Villains and the second column Victims. I believe every person on this show fits into one of these columns. I am in the Villains column. Every man I dated was thus a victim (of my villainous ways). Nadia was a victim. Every man she dated (except for the unfinished ending with Shekar) was thus a villain. Let’s summarise my take here.

Villains

• My mother Pradhyuman Akshay
• Guru Vinay Manisha Richa

Victims

• Nadia Vyasar
• Srini (the irony of all ironies) Shekar
• Dilip (aka, every man who went on a date with me)
•  Rupam

Let’s go a step further. Rupam, one of my absolute favourites, is an incredible woman. She is strong, fiercely loyal to her family, and happily in love with her own match from Bumble. In real life, she is a highly accomplished paediatric allergy doctor with advanced training in dermatology. She is a no-nonsense, pragmatic, and independent woman. She is by no means the victim the media made her out to be when the show aired. She is a woman who is thriving in a life that is fully aligned with her values and solidly reflective of her own self worth.

So what is the show really about? It’s about seven singles with one unsuccessful matchmaker who all went on lacklustre dates with people who weren’t right for them.

Shekar and I went on a few dates. We were certain there was no chemistry, but we knew we got along well. To this day, we remain really good friends. We speak on the phone for hours at least a few times a week and text back and forth all the time. I go to him for dating advice, and he comes to me for the same.

The same goes for Dilip and me, and Jay and me. We are all friends. In fact, those three guys started a group text called Aparna’s Guys and are independently communicating without me being involved. And I love it. For me, that’s what the show was ultimately about. I met (mostly) nice South Asian men also looking for love and not finding it with me or anyone else on the show. But we respected each other enough to stay connected and even start long-lasting friendships with each other.

I had a moment of personal reckoning when I heard Vinay’s story on his social media platform. I went to my two best friends, who taped the living room “Fat Pants Friday” with me and the dinner scene where they met Jay, and asked them point-blank, “If I asked you to re-create a scene where Jay ghosted me, would you sit at a restaurant and pretend he was coming?” They answered quickly, “No. Never. And honestly, Aparna, we would pull you aside and tell you it’s unacceptable to do the same, even without us.”

They explained that they would have strongly advised me not to be a part of any such taping, should it have been presented to me. I also asked Shekar whether he and his two friends would have re-created such a scene. “Without a doubt, no,” he replied. “And if I did it without my friends, they would likely no longer call themselves my friends.” I had my answer. I needed to hear it from external sources. My own moral compass needed to be steadied on true north.

To this day, Vinay receives unjustifiable negative messages and is bad-mouthed on social media platforms. I believe one thing wholeheartedly – there are no bad people, only bad decisions. We all make our choices. I continue to receive hateful messages about my alleged treatment of Srini.

I still wish I could respond to every one of them that I was hurt by Srini and his demeaning behaviour. But I know it’s also futile. It’s my personal belief that the journey of looking for love is a tough one for everyone. It always comes with its share of heartache and soul-crushing moments. Even I, who was portrayed as strong and decisive, had a terrible date – one that left in me in tears and ready to walk away from the show altogether.

Ask yourself this: who curates and benefits from the story lines that are created on unscripted shows? Go a step further and ask, for all so-called reality television you consume: What information is missing? Who stands the most to gain from you not receiving that information?

I understand this is entertainment, and I fully support it for that one function. But am I upset that people believe Indian Matchmaking to be true? Yes. Do I blame these viewers? On a bad day, yes. I do blame them for their ignorance in the way they consume media. Is that fair? Probably not, but I’m being honest here.

The first week I moved to New York City, I met a nice guy at a dinner with mutual friends. He is educated, handsome, single...and very much slipped in some of his impressions of my castmates. That one was “sweet.” The other “a teddy bear.”

What he didn’t say was what he thought of me. He had enough manners to omit that impression. So here was a peer of mine, in a new social situation for me, and even he had ideas surrounding who we were as people based on our depiction on television.

I was blunt when I told him in a moment of weakness, “I’m honestly shocked that someone as intelligent as you would not realise there is little to no truth to what you watched on television and yet you processed it as some sort of truth.” He looked surprised but then shrugged and said, “Well honestly, I just didn’t think too hard about it. I watched it in two nights and didn’t process much after I turned it off.”

And that’s the crux of it. No one processes much. That’s the business model. The entertainment industry is doubling down on it. And we as a global community and as consumers of their product should say we will not stand for this anymore.

We, as a society, are better than this. In light of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, in an era where we push for equality and authenticity, let’s ask ourselves why we still consume enter- tainment as truth. I am not saying we do away with “unscripted” television. I am saying we speak more about its context and its purpose. I understand too that this is an uphill battle. That my one voice is just a whisper in a din of fast, frenzied streams of more and more shows being produced and aired each week with more rounds of villains and victims. Of heroes and antiheroes. Of princesses and ogres.

At the head of it all in Indian Matchmaking, there was Sima, who brought her own beliefs to the table. Steeped in her own cultural norms and her general disdain for a woman who was strong

enough to express what she wanted from her future partners, to many viewers, she reinforced the ugliness of South Asian patriarchal culture. South Asians around the world were triggered by her direct words and her underlying sentiments that it was a woman’s exclusive obligation to “adjust and compromise.”

But let’s be clear, her misogyny was not isolated. News outlets and social media platforms called it misogyny. I had to ask myself later, many months after the show aired, Were these comments and behaviours just sexist? Or were they straight-up misogyny? Until it was blatantly hurled at me on camera, I had never stopped to consider the distinction. I researched, I read. I strived to understand what had happened to me.

One article summed it up best. I won’t pretend to expound expert views on this vast topic but will instead share with you what resonated most with me. In a simple Q&A format interview in Vox, Sean Illing asks Kate Manne, a Cornell philosophy professor, about the difference between sexism and misogyny. She breaks it down into their easily digestible connection and functions. Manne says, “Misogyny is not about male hostility or hatred toward women – instead, it’s about controlling and punishing women who challenge male dominance. Misogyny rewards women who reinforce the status quo and punishes those who don’t.”

She goes on to clarify, “I think most misogynistic behavior is about hostility toward women who violate patriarchal norms and expectations, who aren’t serving male interests in the ways they’re expected to. So there’s this sense that women are doing something wrong: that they’re morally objectionable or have a bad attitude or they’re abrasive or shrill or too pushy. But women only appear that way because we expect them to be otherwise, to be passive.”

Sexism, according to Manne, is the “patriarchal social structures, [and] bastions of male privilege where a dominant man might feel entitled to (and often receive) feminine care and attention from women.” So in essence, “Sexism is the ideology that supports patriarchal social relations, but misogyny enforces it when there’s a threat of that system going away.”

I got it. It was my aha moment. My being unlikeable to Sima and to many viewers was because of their conscious and unconscious misogyny. By way of example, after my first two dates with Srini and a man named Raj – both forty-one years old and both years away (if ever) from wanting a committed relationship leading to marriage – I was asked by a producer what I wanted in my next matches.

I told her I wanted matches who were closer to my age. I was thirty-four at the time and was hoping to find someone who didn’t have a perennial desire to remain a bachelor. She scoffed. “Forty-one is your demographic. Men who are younger than that want women much younger than you.” I looked at her in disbelief.

Here was a lovely, strong female producer who, in my mind, was on “my team.” She wanted for me what I wanted for me – whatever that may be. I questioned her, “Why couldn’t I date someone a few years older than me, or even a couple of years younger than me?” She doubled down. “Because they don’t want a thirty-four-year-old. You want to get married and likely have kids soon. They don’t want to take that on. They’re men. They don’t want that pressure.”

I searched her face for a smile or an indication she was kidding. She was dead serious. Because in her world, I was being unrealistic as a thirty-four year old woman with a biological clock for wanting to be with someone close to my own age. I knew even then, and in hindsight it’s even clearer, this woman meant well. Her intentions were in the right place.

Her goal was the same as mine – to find me a partner who would be on the same page as me, someone who wanted a committed relationship. But wow, did it sting to hear those comments. For a moment, I was honestly shaken and fearful that there was truth to her statements, but then

I reminded myself that I deserved whatever I asked for – and that in fact, a man my age was not asking for “too much” for myself. It was merely my preference, and I had a right to express it.

But that’s what Manne was talking about in her Vox article.

Society’s cultural norms of a woman being sweet, kind, and paternalistic are sexist. The enforcement of those beliefs, in this case that I would be “flexible” and “adjust,” or be resigned to being matched with men in their forties, was the misogyny coming into play – the enforcement of sexist beliefs that this limited voice was all I deserved in matchmaking.

At the time, I didn’t even see it. I was pining too hard for a successful outcome and too hard to draw adequate boundaries for any defeating and overwhelming behaviour toward me. Now I ask myself about these broad topics and the way they flit in and out of every woman’s world, probably daily.

How many other women are coerced by those in power to accept ideas about a woman’s place in society that they do not inherently believe themselves? Ideas that diminish their existence and, yes, erase their voice?

More than I can count, I’m certain, and the idea of it makes me feel overwhelmed and defeated. But as we taped the show, I honestly didn’t consider any of these macro topics that are ingrained in our routines and spaces. I was lost in the first-time overstimulation of having fourteen people in my life (and home) taping me for ten hours a day.

It took the launch of the show and the endless streams of press in that summer of 2020 for me to assert my own voice. One day, my daily Google Alert for the show identifies an article in which Smriti is discussing how much she loves Aparna. When asked by the media outlet if “the show was not edited to fit a narrative as Aparna suggests [in other press],” Smriti responds, “for the most part, Aparna does stand behind everything that was said and done on the show.”

I am livid. I screenshot that portion of the article and send it to Smriti, telling her not to speak on my behalf to the press. Smriti apologises for being out of bounds, and while I accept the apology, I am not effusive in my tone. I remind Smriti to speak only for herself in the future.

I am at my wits’ end. I have had my voice erased enough in this narrative and will not have it anymore. I am setting strong boundaries about how my own story is heard, and I make it clear to myself – and others – that I will directly go after anyone who hinders my own storytelling. The painful lesson learned with empowerment as the final result? In a world where the voices of the privileged and dominant stamp out the voices of minorities, make yourself heard. Make them listen. And tell your own damn narrative.

Excerpted with permission from She’s Unlikeable: And Other Lies That Bring Women Down, Aparna Shewakramani, HarperColllins India.