Marriage

While I’m approaching thirty, I’ve started thinking that getting married is definitely not a bad idea. Though I’ve always made fun of marriage and of my married friends, I’ll not miss the crazy ride – as I’d like to call it. Since I completely missed (or may be messed) out on “finding a girl by myself” part, my parents and my relatives are doing the hard work now. I hope I don’t make it harder for them – see it’s not that easy to make a decision of such magnitude. I’m pretty sure you can understand, at least the married ones would know. As it is this arranged marriage works in an insane manner. To start with, they do match making based on the time and place of birth of the candidate who is suppose to get married – if you are born with some “issues” then you could potentially get screwed (read: rejects) and you may have to go for a big compromise, if you understand what I mean by that. It’s not just the birth ‘star’ matches and everything is done for you; you got to match the salaries, looks, status, life style, educational qualification, the families have to be compatible and several other things. I’d rather tell the young readers of this post to stop having that anomalous prejudice on their career shaping objectives, you have whole life to do that anyway; instead get a life – get a partner, If not hunt for one – look around, there are many success stories. You know what is stopping you, don’t you?

Well, let me get little serious about the topic, without denying that there is kernel of truth in the above paragraph, if selectively analyzed. The first question that should ideally come to a person’s mind before entering the marriage process is”why marriage? Why should he/she get married?” In fact when I agreed for the girl search, all my relatives were very glad and the very close ones felt relieved (Ref 1). Only one person in my family circle cared to ask me the question “why did I wish to get married?” though I must say such questions are not particularly encouraged, especially if the guy or girl is ready for an arranged marriage. At first I told him that getting married is an experience that I wouldn’t want to miss and then I went on to tell him that getting married means having a companion for life. After a short discussion about the topic he told me that my thoughts may not be good enough reason to get married and he asked me to go little deeper into the idea of getting married before actually stepping in.

Though I personally don’t think it is necessary to figure out the entire nuance associated to marriage before tying the knot, but as such doing some amount thinking wouldn’t harm. I did contemplate for quite some time and I did get some answers. I also went on to ask some of my close pals the same question:” why they got married? “And also asked them “what are their thoughts about getting married?” Some of these friends gave very enthusiastic responses. Although I know that these friends of mine are some kind of evangelist when it comes to marriage (at least to me it seems), but I still think those responses were genuine thoughts. Leaving the quite obvious reasons aside, if you know what I mean, I’ll share some quotes from their responses to the questions I raised in that email discussion:

“Something I realized when we were dating was that he made me want to be a better person than I was. Since he had different perspectives than mine, it was and is still a process of growth.”

“Wanting each other’s happiness; And most importantly, ability and desire to communicate freely and openly without any fear”

“I think it’s just different phases of life and one would probably miss out on more than one important phase by not getting married. Your experience of life will be incomplete Also I think all of these phases have their own age/time range in which they are more enjoyable so it’s good to start thinking about them when you think it’s the right time but also think when your loved ones tell you it’s the ‘right time’.”

“Kick off egos….I always had it, I never knew….”

“Talking all nonsense without the fear of getting misjudged…. A wife could always be your close friend…..”

“Be ready for anything new…..As you grow old together, you will always unfold new stuff…..This relationship will never be discovered completely… “

“Marriage also is an unsaid agreement to accept and complement each other in the journey of life… And setting expectations matter a lot… Some of that expectation setting is explicit but most of it implicit and gets formulated over a period of time… It’s like driving a car or playing a musical instrument… you first learn the rules and set to drive/play accordingly… as time goes you both keep getting better at it … that’s when you don’t need to remember the rules anymore and just enjoy the drive / music…”

Since some of these friends had a love-marriage and some arranged, one friend aptly pointed out this:

“Why marriage is a very different question in love and arranged marriages so you’ll get very different answers. In love marriage, it’s the last question and in arranged marriage it’s the first question”

These thoughts have made this post of mine worth reading and I’m glad that the discussion we had is not lost in that long mail chain. I must say that these friends have recently married and I can see the freshness in their approach towards marriage. I hope they stay happy, as loving couples, for a long long time.

Having said the good part let me come to the flip side of being in a marriage. While marriage is empowering my friends to become better people, I’ve also come across failed marriages or painful marriages. Another friend of mine quoted a famous diplomatic saying on marriage as ” It is that Laddo ( sweet), one who eats it will be disenchanted and the one who doesn’t eat will also feel disenchanted”. I remember to have seen an outburst of a friend when she expressed the fact that her husband and her in-laws doesn’t give her enough freedom and is highly non-cooperative when it is about her career related things. Another friend says that after getting married he has not been able to do things that he always wanted to do as the responsibility of running a family is taking all the time and he also mentioned that his wife’s needs are pretty endless, though he said that with a bit of unusual reluctance . He also warned me by saying that the choice I make would eventually change the way I’d deal with life – I did tell him that I’ll be very conscious when I make such decisions in life.

What is the most alarming thing about this generation is that the divorce rate is rapidly increasing and I can see the trend is picking up just like the way it did in the west a few decades back. My parents’ generation was lot less ambitious than what I think I’m in. I also see that they lived a much simpler life than what a person coming from average middle class family lives now. The idea of getting the best deal from life wasn’t in the minds of the previous generation as it is today – they lived a life with contentment. Back then arranged marriage was a norm and love marriage was a taboo. I love the sense of liberty in this generation, which is to do whatever the hell that we desire – you can be really ambitious and dream to achieve anything that you have in your mind, however I also see a lot of side effects that is erupting out in the form of unsuccessful relationships and failed marriages. We more often subscribe for individualistic based ideology, which is driven by an individual’s priorities over the traditional conservative mentality where ‘family first’ approach is prevalent, which perhaps our fathers and forefather used to subscribe. As such the smarter ones always knew to strike a balance between the two schools of thought.

Coming back to the topic, what are the causes for the disenchantment in marriages? I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples but you know, it’s harder to get true data for this compared to the happy stories of marriage. Some of my elders say that “ego problem” is the top contender for a failed marriage; while others say it could be mismatch of “maturity in thinking”. Some of my friends who got married a few years back say that people have imaginary expectations from a marriage and they find it very hard to digest the reality when they are actually in a marriage – some get used to it and some revolt; while there are some who sincerely work on the marriage and make it a success in spite of all the terrible imperfections in their spouse. In my opinion, marriage is just like any other relationship but we tend to become a lot greedier since it is a lifelong commitment. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve come across people having major problems in marriages and relationship in general, for that matter even I’ve had (not a marriage ofcourse). I’ve seen some of them blaming the idea of relationship itself at times. What I’ve realized is that relationship is a reflection of oneself. I mean, one gets treated somewhat similar to what he or she treats the other person in a relationship. I also know many successful relationships in my friends’ circles and my family circles, and one thing that is certainly common in all of these is “mutual respect”. I guess disrespectful people with double standards are more vulnerable to relationship crises, whether it is a marriage, a friendship or even a professional relationship.

I’m pretty confident that these thoughts that I’ve are good enough to approach the process but I never mentioned a thing about luck associated to marriage. Well, wish me luck. 😉

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(1) A blog post called “About getting married” that I wrote some time back when I was not ready to get married: http://isiganesh.blogspot.in/2012/10/about-getting-married.html