This whole arranged marriage vs. "love marriage" business is doing my head in.

I talk to my Nepali female friends and it's a split. Half want a love marriage very badly but because they are graduate students and now 23-24-25ish, they have decided they are too old to try one and will most definitely have an arranged marriage.
The other half of the girls without a doubt want an arranged marriage. They have never dated before, are too afraid/shy to try (they tell me this- I am not inferring or passing judgment at all!), and are so relieved that they will have all of the trouble of getting a spouse worked out for them.

I look at married couples here and they seem (through my short short period of observation) to be very functional partnerships with appreciation and a general liking of one's partner. Arranged marriage is just how it's done- here is your spouse, make it works, voila it works because it has to.

I am of course only talking about all of this because I am thinking about my own life/future/etc. You can bring Camille to Nepal but you can't make her any less self-centered. That's how the saying goes, right?

I am thinking of my future. I can keep doing what I've been doing during my entire romantic adult life thus far and, every 2 years or so, keep finding a man 20 or 30 or 40 years older than me who I fall crazy nuts bonkers in love with, I can keep breaking my heart, I can actually find one with whom I can mutually commit. We can live with each other, get married, probably not have kids (but we'd have love which means a lot). We can have maybe a few decades of brilliant love, I can watch him die, and I can spend the remaining 30, 40, or 50 years of my life either alone or with some equally lonely and accommodating widower.

Or I could arrange myself a marriage with someone my age, with someone who I have similar goals to, with someone who I could form a strong partnership with. I could create the beautiful, strong family life I desire, creating the love that wouldn't present in my life in the form of romantic love. I could have a partner who I could grow old with, who I could depend on to be there, and I could be consistently very content.

Neither sound bad, neither sound great. You can't have everything, but what to choose what to choose?

My thoughts are too scattered. My energies are too scattered. I am too immature and irresponsible and unkind and uncertain for a good relationship. I don't think this is a phase.