Marriage: A Millenial’s take
At the outset, let me surface my overt intention not to disgrace any person of any faith, custom, or trend all through my text. This is rather a precept to my personal experiences clustered together, not any generalized contextual evidence or observation.”
Well, being an Indian draws you to many corners of conservatism that you define as your principles or “parampara” and some that you fail to analyze have a tremendous scientific connotation. In such a context, the constant exposure to chatters of marriage is a probability that has definitely gnawed a certain part of your significant youth and to some, has gravely shaped their sexual lives and careers. But marriage definitely is viewed as a cultural cross-point of one’s sexual definition and familial subjugation. In most Indian families, it is prevalent that the decision of marriage does not even fall into the hands of the ones getting married. It is rather a decision of the “cultural forbearers” of the family to decide the marriageable criteria of their young and set the knot.
I would like to present my analysis on what a marriage generally espouses or factors in. This might add more gravity to the unreasoned abruptness of such elderly decisions that in many cases distort the natural development of premarital maturity in the married ones. And my analysis is totally self-made which has no relevance to one’s character or personification, so I would give liberty to judgments to flow in from all directions, in all dimensions.
Marriage, according to me, is a long-enduring process of psychological transformations. To become eligible for marriage is totally a personal feeling, and has nothing to do with one's sexual, social, or cultural obligation. As an individual, we have clearly or vaguely outlined our personal space both in physique and in mind, which we are innately possessive of. We don’t even allow our parents to consume that space.
That is a space that creates our individualism. I don’t think that space should ever be dragged into moral judgments or scrutiny. The choice to share that space with some stranger definitely requires that emotional maturity that comes with experience and acquaintance, self-effort, and choice more than others' recommendations or pressurization.
I have seen people having problems sharing their bed, bathroom, or even their room. And, I never categorize those people as misogamists, because this is quite natural. To be overwhelmed by one’s privacy is quite natural. It stems from the satisfaction one gets when one is with oneself. Now, with the passage of time, one gets to understand the nuances of expanding the horizons of one’s private space to accommodate another like-minded individual in close physical proximity. That is when the idea of getting married dawns upon an individual. This is a naturally driven process, and to my opinion, should not be externally moderated or forcibly culminated.
The requirement of a life partner is never a social responsibility, but an individual choice. What does society have to benefit from one’s marriage? To be grand, how does it even bother if you choose to remain unmarried? The only repercussion such a thing can bring is the discontinuity of a bloodline. However, that is even eliminated with the prevalence of Surrogacy. Let me not step into this part, as it would consume even more of my textual space. But in totality, a marriage does not have to really bear any influence upon the family’s future or its social frontiers. However, the institution of marriage in our society is so craftily engineered that any deviation from its realization is viewed as a deviation from a decent social life which is distasteful.
I have found that marriages that happen between two young couples, who were too amateurish to understand their marital requirement, have demanded incessant adjustments in each other’s private lives. This has not only led to the suppression of individual freedom but snowballed into major marital crimes and violence. Marital violence attributes majorly to this disbalance in co-habitation. Marital rapes, physical violence, domestic unrest, extra-marital affairs, alcoholism, depression, and finally divorce, are just the progenies of such fundamental insincerities. We have records that such atrocities could have been avoidable, had the marriage not happened against their accountable age and time.
As we know, as society is modernizing, it is pushing up its own backwardness to get more complicated. In near future, when on one part there is open-mindedness to marital decisions, on the other part marriage remains a yoke under which youths succumb. It binds them into turbulent familial responsibility sacrificing their own peace and stability. At this juncture, it is important that the conservatism on marriage need to take a social rear seat, and the dreams of youths need to be at the frontline. And every family has to strive to arrive at that. I assume no young man or woman dreams of marrying though!!
