Recently, a young (female) friend of mine, who looked up to me as a mentor, asked me for some marriage advise.
What shall I do? How do I go about this marriage thing? I am not ready yet. How do I talk to my parents about this?
Honestly, I gave a vague and probably unsettling answer to her. But now that I think about it, I feel I should have given her a better answer.
Let me take you through what went in my mind. I made a list of the first 30 (heterosexual- middle class) married couples I knew. I then eliminated all those cases where I did not know either member of the couple fairly well. For example, either the guy/girl should be my good friend (where in I may be aware of their personal lives). I then categorized them as “love and arranged marriages”. After having eliminated all those whom I felt I did not know well enough, I settled for a list of 26 married couples, half of whom had love marriages and half of whom had arranged marriages.
Since I knew atleast one member of the couple fairly well, I then categorized them as “happy” and “unhappy” based on their stories and conversations with me. Here are the results of that:
It so happened, that in each case, the number of happy and unhappy couples were the same.
I then took a closer look at all the “happy couples”, the ones who had an arranged marriage and the ones who had love marriage. This is what came to light:
In most of the happy couples, be it arranged or love marriage, happiness was largely attributed to the compromise made by the woman. Note that in all these cases, I know explicit details of the woman’s role in comprising, to keep the marriage “happy”. Though in most cases, she is doing this out of her own free will, one cannot help but feel that the situation is unfair for her. Examples of this include where the couple have a child, so the woman has found happiness in her child and chooses to look beyond “husband troubles”.
Then I took a closer look at all the “unhappy couples”, the ones who had an arranged marriage and the ones who had love marriage, and this is what came up:
Here you find that the unhappy couples are either separated, or the marriage is on the rocks, and at times staying afloat due to the compromise made by the male partner. Interestingly, none of the “unhappy” couples had women compromising.
Having being backed up by this (personal) evidence sourced from data that I engage with on an every day basis, I would liked to tell my friend this:
Firstly, marriage is over-rated. At the end, it comes down to the two individuals who want to be together and how they want things to work out between them. The consensus or clarity of this, should be there preferably before marriage. More so in the case of love-marriages, else it can result in depressing disappointments post marriage.
In arranged marriages, a lot of strength comes from the fact that you have already taken the plunge in the ocean (marriage) and now you have to learn to swim (compromise/learn) to keep afloat (save your marriage). There is a lot of hard work that needs to come from both sides, and social situations tend to put more pressure on women to keep the state of the marriage afloat.
Secondly, love is also over-rated. Being “blindly” in love can result in a lot of trouble for you later in life (see this story). Be objective even when in love. If your chosen partner does something that is completely unacceptable to you at any point during your relationship, pre or post marriage, find the strength to leave him. It is easy to say this, but is very difficult to do so. But making your mind up in this matter helps.
And lastly, if you decide that you do not want to get married, then also it is fine. I would only advise you to think about the decision deeply, rationally, coldly, selfishly… think about how you would feel about this decision several years from now… would you be ok being “alone” or “single”, knowing the repercussions of a being a single woman in Indian society. Would you be able to handle the mental, psychological arrows people will aim at you for your decision? Would you able to handle the so-called vulnerable position you put yourself in? Whether your answer is yes or no, if you are willing to face it, and you are confident about yourself- go ahead and take any decision. It’s your life.
On a side note, having financial stability and independence gives you a fair bit of strength to make your own decisions, particularly in this marriage matter. So make sure you have that as well !
P. S: This is a middle class perspective of things.
lessonsfromlife123 