{"id":1435276,"date":"2026-01-22T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1435276"},"modified":"2026-01-22T05:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T02:00:00","slug":"what-reading-wuthering-heights-taught-me-about-my-parents-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1435276","title":{"rendered":"What Reading \u2018Wuthering Heights\u2019 Taught Me About My Parents\u2019 Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Books<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What Reading Wuthering Heights<\/em> Taught Me About My Parents\u2019 Marriage<\/h1>\n
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By <\/span>Upasna Barath <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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My parents were practical strangers on their wedding day. They had been introduced to each other by their families and had only met three or four times before, never alone. Their parents hovered over the courting, passively negotiating the terms of their potential union. A marriage between acquaintances\u2014unheard of in the US, but the usual setup in India, where they emigrated from.<\/p>\n

My mother was a ballet dancer, and my father was a working Indian immigrant with no college degree. The stars\u2014meaning a Vedic synastry reading using their birth dates and times\u2014said they were a match. Of course, astrology was simply due diligence, a way to seal the deal before any arranged Hindu marriage. Their families had already decided for them. They had no other choice but to marry each other; it was in their best interests. If they worked hard, they could maybe one day love each other. They were taught that love was earned.<\/p>\n

When I look at my parents\u2019 wedding photos, I see fear in their eyes. It\u2019s the fear of the unknown\u2014a deeply human, all-encompassing, universal feeling.<\/p>\n

Despite being a first-gen Indian American, I never felt like I had something to prove. I thought about love and relationships differently than my family did and never felt that marriage was an indicator of success. I did not feel I had to find the love of my life to break metaphorical generational shackles, nor to carry a metaphorical torch toward a Western ideal of progress.<\/p>\n

Instead, I grew up wanting out of the whole thing. I didn\u2019t want to prioritize romance, love, or relationships. I viewed relationships as frivolous, wasteful pastimes that Americans aspired to and an economic institution that, at the very least, Indians were not in the business of sugarcoating. Love was always a choice, and it seemed hard. Romance in the dreamy, escapist sense was meant for television, film, music, and books. I avoided a broken heart at all costs.<\/p>\n

I read about broken hearts instead. The first romance I ever read was Wuthering Heights.<\/em> I was assigned the book in high school and annotated it diligently. We were told to focus on Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s diction and syntax, but slowly I became interested in the characters\u2019 actions and inner worlds. The tumultuousness of Catherine and Heathcliff\u2019s story felt so different from any tumult I experienced in my own life. Eventually, I wrote a 12-page paper: \u201cReading Wuthering Heights<\/em> gives its reader an experience of emotional cruelty\u201d was the thesis. The cruelty I was referring to is, of course, Heathcliff\u2019s campaign of vengeance\u2014bred by childhood abuse at the hands of Catherine Earnshaw\u2019s brother and compounded by Catherine\u2019s decision to marry Edgar Linton.<\/p>\n

But despite the many ways this book bore no resemblance to my life or conception of romance, something was surprisingly familiar at its core: a marriage rooted in convenience and material concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe will be rich,\u201d says Catherine, explaining why she is thinking favorably of a marriage with Edgar Linton, \u201cand I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband.\u201d Just like my mother, Catherine did not marry for love. She chose social mobility over her truth. She chose the illusion of safety, a falsified sense of certainty. Heathcliff\u2019s heart was collateral damage.<\/p>\n

Choosing Heathcliff would have come with a price as well. Loving him wasn\u2019t without cost; love isn\u2019t always as free as we think. Often it\u2019s something we have to fight hard to protect.<\/p>\n

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The author\u2019s mother, on her wedding day<\/p>\n

<\/span>photo courtesy of Upasna Barath<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The two worlds Bront\u00eb presented in her two houses\u2014the unruly Wuthering Heights and the decorum-bound Thrushcross Grange\u2014came to symbolize how I think about the spectrum of love. The Grange represents refinement and restraint, and the Heights wildness and darkness. The kind of unwieldy love we read and watch about\u2014the kind of love Catherine sacrificed\u2014stands opposed to the restrained kind of love that brought my parents together, a love devoid of romance but full of promises of social status, economic security, and comfort.<\/p>\n

An arranged marriage or a marriage of convenience aren\u2019t the only forms of restrained love, of course. Love is restrained through the confines of modern dating: desire driven by algorithms, checklists instead of intention. Love can be restrained by heteronormativity, by institutional violence, by class, by religion. The expectations of the societies we live in, along with our own levels of cowardice, constrain love. Catherine\u2019s choice is an example of this.<\/p>\n

Fear drove Catherine to sacrifice her love for Heathcliff for a safe life with Edgar Linton. It\u2019s the same kind of fear that brought my parents together, because their<\/em> parents wanted them to have a life of safety and comfort. Marriage, not love, was the vehicle for security.<\/p>\n

My parents divorced shortly after I was born. It was an act of love of its own kind. I still grew up listening to them spend hours on the phone together, talking as best friends. Divorce was, and is, still taboo in the Indian diaspora. But it was what my parents needed, even if others didn\u2019t accept it.<\/p>\n

I believe they made a brave choice to part ways. They were able to know each other on their own terms and have something together that was just theirs: me.<\/p>\n

This is why, to me, a clear reflection of love will always be courage.<\/p>\n

Upasna Barath is a writer and performer who grew up in India and the US. She lives in Brooklyn and is the author of<\/em> Comedic Timing (831 Stories).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/what-reading-wuthering-heights-taught-me-about-my-parents-marriage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books What Reading Wuthering Heights Taught Me About My Parents\u2019 Marriage By Upasna Barath January 22, 2026 My parents were practical strangers on their wedding day. They had been introduced to each other by their families and had only met three or four times before, never alone. Their parents hovered over the courting, passively negotiating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-1435276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1435276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1435276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1435276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1435276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}