The fact is that when I left India I felt as if I’d escaped the constant marriage questions and you can go abroad if you want to but promise us you will get married at 24 comments…..( I’m 25 now), so you can imagine that when I came to this new country I had a reasonable amount of cultural baggage with me, so imagine my shock when my non-indian gal pal said that in her home country getting married was terribly old fashioned ,many of her cousins and friends were not married, in fact she was in a serious, committed relationship with her boyfriend for the past 8 years , they lived together but were not married and were not aspiring to either, what shocked me at the time was the statement “ marriage has become old fashioned”. I mean how can marriage become old fashioned; it’s something you have to do right? Like you have to get up in the morning, have to breathe, have to drink water, have to brush your teeth, have to get married!!!!
Anyway I thought it was a cultural thing, my friend’s German .A few days later, in my hostel the topic of conversation veered towards marriage “So you’re going to let your parents find a guy for you??” ,my Vietnamese friend asked, “Well yea, all my friends have done the same thing, so have my parents ,and yeah seems like a good idea!!” ,I replied.
“Yea , maybe my parents or grandparents had arranged marriages , but now a days lots of girls in China prefer to stay single, or put off marriage” ,a Chinese guy volunteered , “Happily??” I asked , “ Yes , Happily!!!” he said .
So you have the seemingly anti –soulmatistic concept of arranged marriage, maybe it isn’t anti-soulmatistic( I made up the word btw!!!) but the concept that arranged marriage is the only way the universe would get your other half to meet you is stretching it a bit too far.. I mean your other half that you’ve been searching from the beginning of time for and your parents like him???… before you???…. And he’s part of the narrow pool your parents are searching in doesn’t quite gel ..but maybe the universe is smart enough to want it to happen for sure; that it makes sure your soulmate is precisely the one your folks like first.
Anyway so I started feeling marriage was overrated, not romantic at all, just a legal contract, so that society acknowledges two people as a couple …no wonder we have people going against it , my convictions were validated further when I read an article two weeks back in the Times of India about couples who lived together who were having custody battles over their kids when they split up. Again I was shocked.. people not married to each other and having children.... in India???. I know maybe it’s not the mainstream, and might be prevalent only amongst the elite, but still it was different….
Then I read this article via one of Sharath’s posts it was about people who were married but planned on staying in different homes, in this case the couple found it just too inconvenient to stay together, so in one hand you have live-in relationships (where people move in together )on the other you hand you have married people who choose not to live together…. Oh well!!!
I’d pretty much lost faith in the whole process when this article bought back some hope. …..So what if us straight people had screwed it up ,didn’t value marriage and most of us bring it down to a contract of convenience of the first one that clicks….. Gay folks certainly are fighting for their right to marry, not something I see us hetro’s doing, we may want to get married , but not passionately, not so much for love it seems …
It wasn’t a legal wedding. Even so, it made me think the Right is correct in fearing same-sex unions. There is such power in this kind of brave and naked love that it may make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down.
So I thought Yes!!! there is hope for the world. A section of society does fight oppression and get married to the love of their life, and for a while I was alright, then I found this out…
Lance Bass from N’Sync was Gay, OK fine ,always kind off.. could guess that, so who was his love ??the partial reason for which he outed himself ???Reichen Lehmkuhl!!!OMG!!!
I knew Reichen , he and his then “husband” Chip came first in the only Amazing Race season I watched completely, back home in India , what struck me about the guys was that they were really intelligent ,sensitive, good looking and also looked very committed to each other ,and yes the couple won the race beating the other straight teams, I now found out that soon after the show they split up, and Reichen became a minor celebrity and started dating Lance Bass…..it isn’t my place to say this. .but Chip was better!! They;i.e. Chip and Reichen remain friends however it seems.
Any way so straight or not …everyone’s pretty much messed up the love concept!!
Found this blog on American Marriage …check out the latest entry…I bet you didn’t know what Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna was about !!!
6 comments:
Marriage is a tax saver in US ;-)
i like saving on tax ;)
natasha, your sayin u want to save on tax and then calling yourself a left-liberal ( supporting a big strong govt that provides more than basic services ( welfare for. eg) ) is a contradiction in terms... :) ...or worse it means you want (the government ) to spend others' money ... LOL !
You must read this one from jane on AI : http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html
Am quoting from up there :
Marriage matters. It is better for the kids; it is better for the adults raising those kids; and it is better for the childless people in the communities where those kids and adults live. Marriage reduces poverty, improves kids outcomes in all measurable ways, makes men live longer and both spouses happier. Marriage, it turns out, is an incredibly important institution.
She quotes Chesterson :
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
And returns to say :
Divorce, in the nineteenth century, was unbelievably hard to get. It took years, was expensive, and required proving that your spouse had abandonned you for an extended period with no financial support; was (if male) not merely discreetly dallying but flagrantly carrying on; or was not just belting you one now and again when you got mouthy, but routinely pummeling you within an inch of your life. After you got divorced, you were a pariah in all but the largest cities. If you were a desperately wronged woman you might change your name, taking your maiden name as your first name and continuing to use your husband's last name to indicate that you expected to continue living as if you were married (i.e. chastely) and expect to have some limited intercourse with your neighbours, though of course you would not be invited to events held in a church, or evening affairs. Financially secure women generally (I am not making this up) moved to Europe; Edith Wharton, who moved to Paris when she got divorced, wrote moving stories about the way divorced women were shunned at home. Men, meanwhile (who were usually the respondants) could expect to see more than half their assets and income settled on their spouse and children.
There were, critics observed, a number of unhappy marriages in which people stuck together. Young people, who shouldn't have gotten married; older people, whose spouses were not physically abusive nor absent, nor flagrantly adulterous, but whose spouse was, for reasons of financial irresponsibility, mental viciousness, or some other major flaw, destroying their life. Why not make divorce easier to get? Rather than requiring people to show that there was an unforgiveable, physically visible, cause that the marriage should be dissolved, why not let people who wanted to get divorced agree to do so?
Because if you make divorce easier, said the critics, you will get much more of it, and divorce is bad for society.
LOL ..Sharath u got me there, it's a big contradiction, i should have said i like it when i save on taxes or get my tax refund :) , but no not at the cost of less welfare ,basic education etc etc....i kind off see the point of taxes now, after a year here ...
thanks for the marriage link....
Thank you again Sharath that was a really good essay by Jane Galt!!
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