It was like any other night.
I was at a friend’s place for dinner and the conversations were following their
usual course: Shah Rukh’s affair with Priyanka, Salman’s stronghold in
Bollywood, Dhoni and Team India. Nothing spectacularly different, nothing out
of the ordinary. And just when we thought we’d exhausted all the usual topics,
the conversation turned to everyone’s all-time favourite: matrimony and me. Who
was getting married to who, who was getting a divorce, who was living in sin.
Nobody’s private life is safe at a dinner table with old friends. As usual, I
was called upon to give my left-of-centre view on the subject of holy
matrimony. I rose to the occasion and the evening ended with some people hotly
defending the institution of marriage, trying to convince the other half who
believe that marriage isn’t a dying institution, it’s a dead institution.
On the drive back home, I
thought about the reasons why I think marriage as we know it, is a thing of the
past. Everywhere I look, I find that the reality of marriages today are almost
diametrically opposite to the rules that make a supposedly successful marriage.
And that’s when this blog was born. The 6 reasons why I think that if the
concept of marriage is to live to see another day, year or decade, the rules
need to change. Here’s why:
LOVE WAS NEVER THE
DETERMINING FACTOR IN A MARRIAGE
Love may have single-handedly
sponsored Kenny G’s world tours, but in the times of our parents and their
parents, it had little to do with marriage. Stripped of its romanticism,
marriage was simply meant to be a social contract--a functional piece of paper
that gave two unconnected individuals a right over each other’s wealth and
assets, and a legal license to procreate .Very often these people were
strangers right up to the day of their marriage. There was little or no
physical or emotional proximity until their license to sex was signed and
sealed. Most of our parents or maybe grandparents hadn’t known what a sexual
touch was until the night of their wedding. The romance started only after the
marriage, when the boy and girl finally got the chance to explore and discover
the person they were married to.
Cut to our times. All of us started playing the dating game
well before we decided to get married. Couples date for months, years and
sometimes even decades before they finally take the plunge. But someone tell
me, what plunge is actually left to take when you’ve been with a person for
years before you sign a document proclaiming marriage? We know everything there
is to know about a person--physically as well as emotionally--before we get
married. Very few of us have firsts to look forward to after a marriage. We’ve
gone on vacations, lived together, had screaming matches, wild sex and shared
pets much before the act of marriage. What’s left to look forward to? Is the
signing of a legal piece of paper really worth making such an event out of? I
don’t think so. How is the first day of marriage any different from the last
day of dating ???
OUR WORLD WAS MUCH SMALLER
For the people who walked,
life extended upto their neighbouhoods. When there were horses the world was as
big as the next village. Then came the wheel and people travelled across cities
and kilometers. Then came the train and the plane and our world grew and grew
till it almost exploded. 100 years ago, a dude from Colaba would think he’s
found a bride from a faraway land if she
came from Virar. He’d probably live and die within a radius of 100 square
kilometers and he could only know women from within that radius. There was
lesser temptation, lesser chances of slipping up. Today we live in a world
where we can literally have breakfast, lunch and dinner in three different
cities within the same day. Imagine meeting a beautiful Spanish woman in Delhi
for breakfast, a Swedish lady in Mumbai
for lunch and an Italian bombshell in
Goa for dinner. The law of temptation very clearly states ….the more the
choices …the more chances are that what you possess will look and feel stale
and outdated…Which marriage can survive the onslaught of the constant threat of
temptation?
WOMEN ARE MORE EQUAL TO MEN
When marriage as a social
contract came about, men and women had very clearly defined roles and
responsibilities in structured society. Men were the providers and women were
the nurturers. Today, there are no rules. Women are far more financially
independent than ever before and with that independence comes the confidence to
say no--to bullshit from men and to relationships that are toxic. There’s a
reason why divorce rates are peaking with every passing decade. The bra burning of the women’s liberation
movement might have given women more rights ,but they have increased the strain
on marriages …Women are no longer that tolerant to the vagaries of men
THE JOINT FAMILY
Most of us have been brought
up in or at least start our married lives in a nuclear setup. There’s the
husband, the wife and the domestic help. Presently, a child is added to the
numbers in most cases. Since our private
lives are shielded from the extended family, when we fight, there’s no one to
knock on the door, forcing us to lower our volumes while screaming. There’s no
one to calm turbulent waters or act as a sandpaper to smoothen the friction.
Since there are no buffers, problems can simmer until one day they implode and
the marriage falls apart. The joint family acted both as a diversion and as a
sponge for a married couple and their issues …with no diversion or sponge the
chances of friction increase multifold ..which ultimately show on a marriage
WORK PLACE ROMANCE
Most of us spend longer hours
at work than at home. If we were to clock the hours, the time spent with our
colleagues beats the time spent with our significant others hands down. With
more and more women joining the workforce, it’s impossible to go through life
without being attracted to the people you work with. There is a very strong
chance that a woman working in the work place will understand you better than
maybe your wife waiting at home for you … So there’s opportunity, proximity and
time--the three most important ingredients in an affair….
SOCIAL MEDIA
The Internet is the final
nail in the marriage coffin… Nothing gives and everything is allowed in the
virtual world. It’s a world where we can no longer define clearly the
boundaries that separate harmless flirting and infidelity. There used to be a time when giving a girl a
hug or a kiss used to be a milestone in a relationship, a momentous occasion in
the two participants’ life. These days, we hug and kiss half a dozen people
simultaneously--on BBM, Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. The voyeur hidden
inside each of us dances in glee at the increasing number of platforms that
gives it the opportunity to play out its fantasy of polygamy. There are few
rules and fewer boundaries in this world.
So these are my reasons… This
blog isn’t a comment on the change in the social landscape. It’s just me
wondering that since the seasons of our lives have changed and the landscape
has changed, why do we insist on
dressing up for climates that no longer exist? I think that marriage is
outdated not because people don’t want to be with each other, but because the
way we practice it has become outdated… We need to approach it from the point
of view of the lives we live and the changes in our social life, not based on
the needs it was supposed to fulfill decades and centuries ago. All I’m saying
is, we need a new form of social contract… That the rules of marriage need to
be rewritten… Because otherwise, it’s just like a dinosaur stuck in a traffic
jam on a busy street in New York--helpless and confused.
