Is choice on who to marry an important issue for those who are seeking marriage?
             This question has a variety of different answers as they can differ immensely from culture to culture. Two opposing views of marriage, and the steps leading to it, are related about in Gary Soto's "Finding a Wife" and Ved Mehta's "Pom's Engagement". "Finding a Wife" describes the notion of western love and the idea of free choice. Contrasting with this theory is "Pom's Engagement," which proposes the idea of arranged marriages in the Indian culture. Although these stories contradict in many aspects of how to come about marriage, they both have their share of strengths, along with weaknesses.
             Shouldn't marriage be as easy as saying "I want to marry you" (Soto, 75)? Mr. Soto certainly believes so, as he depicts his story of the virtues of happiness through love at first sight. As Mr. Soto is walking down the sidewalk to his apartment, he sees a "Japanese woman . . . cracking walnuts on her front porch" (Soto, 75). After he passes by the young woman, Mr. Soto realizes that "what [he] needs [is] a woman" (Soto, 76). Soon after this incident, Mr. Soto walks past her porch so often that they begin to have daily conversations, eventually leading to snacking on "sandwiches that were thick as Bibles" (Soto, 76). After weeks and weeks of talking and eating and spending precious moments with each other, Mr. Soto realizes that he has fallen in love and has butterflies in his stomach not "[knowing] where to go from there" (Soto, 76). It is this feeling that Gary Soto is trying to portray to his readers; that life should be taken day by day, moment by moment, expecting !
             something new around the corner, and being able to make daily decisions on one's own, especially the decision to marry.
             Western love has the strengths of choice and individual thought. Mr. Soto can walk down the street, and enjoy the "walnuts, milk, cold cuts, chocolate ice cream"...