NO SHADI KE 6 PHERE

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.