I’ve been meaning to get around to writing this post for a while now. It’s something that’s been occupying my mind a lot, and that seeps into conversations with everyone I know. It seems we’re all at that particular time in our lives when the words “settle down” and “grow up” take on new meanings and we are expected to make important decisions without batting an eyelid; decisions that will determine the way our lives will run for many years to come, if not our whole lifetimes, right down to the smallest details.
Marriage.
In this country, marriage isn’t a choice, it’s an inevitability. Oh yes, there are lots of things that are inevitabilities in the lives of Indians, even today, but this is one of the big ones. One of those eventualities that you cannot shake off, whatever your ideas of feminism, and rebelling against enforced standards of monogamy and hegemony may be. You reach the ripe old age of 23, and you have everyone from distant aunts to the domestic help enquiring about your (obviously) impending nuptials. Any attempt at shaking these enquiries off with a declaration of everlasting independence is met with knowing amusement, a shake of the head at your youthful naivete in believing you can escape the noose of the socially-sanctioned sexual union with all its promise of progeny to come.
Admittedly, I’m exempt from these enquiries. I’ve never yet met anyone with a family like mine, a family that doesn’t see the point in enforcing arbitrary social injunctions to copulate and reproduce, that is more concerned with true happiness and intellectual satisfaction than in the maintenance of socially acceptable relations with other people. I’m not saying this has always worked for us – just because we don’t believe it necessary to saddle ourselves with the baggage of tradition and custom for no other reason than that is is traditional and customary to do so doesn’t mean we’ve perfected how to live. We’re as fucked up, dysfunctional and idiotic as the most conservative households around. But at the very least, I have the satisfaction of knowing my family will never expect me to sacrifice my own outlandish route to happiness for the sake of social appearances.
As a result, I’m also racked with guilt whenever I judge those around me whose choices are dictated by the superior claims of their parents’ or extended families’ happiness than theirs. I can’t help but wonder why they don’t simply articulate their desires, why they don’t give rational explanations for wanting to deviate from the Golden Path of school-college-employment-marriage-babies that seems to be drilled into the human race as the recipe for perfection, success, salvation, and whatever else you’re after. Isn’t there more to the world, to life than simply that?
But then, perhaps I’m prejudiced against all of the marriages I see around me because, far from being the cynic I think I am, I’m much, much further along on the scale of extreme romanticism. As Anne Brontë puts it, in the words of one of the characters in the heart-wrenching The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I may simply be sceptical about the institution of marriage “…because I imagine there must be only a very, very few men in the world that I should like to marry; and of those few, it is ten to one I may never be acquainted with one; or if I should, it is twenty to one he may not happen to be single, or to take a fancy to me.” I’ve come to realise that my expectations are high, and I’ve never yet met anyone who fulfils the requirements of being both free and willing to act on them in respect to myself.
I am terrified of the ordinary, of mediocrity, of becoming used to another human being’s presence simply because I’ve formed a habit for them. And as far as marriage is concerned, most people seem to me to simply enter into it for reasons other than an unwillingness to face life without that particular person beside them. That is something I’ve never been able to comprehend, simply because it seems akin to the decision to study a degree because it is the conventional or safe subject to study, to suffer the most mind-numbing employment because it is secure and provides the acceptable sum of money, to live every day with comfort and not joy being the goal.
But someone told me recently that most people don’t live on such an intense plane. Most people don’t pursue joy over contentment. Most people prefer the succession of the ordinary to the excruciating fear that intense emotion leaves in its wake. Most people don’t choose to question the status quo because the alternative – the unknown path, the untrodden way, the uncertain future – is too frightening to contemplate. Someone also told me that that is one of the most commonly cited reasons for people staying in dead-end relationships: the certainty of the body in the bed beside you is preferable to the uncertainty of perhaps never finding someone to lie beside you ever again. It’s also why people stay in mind-numbingly dull jobs: the certainty of having a regular income and something to do everyday is preferable to the stark state of the unemployed.
I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know if, in the end, the majority will be proved right and all my married friends will stand on the edge of the opposite shore, watching my wandering progress in silence. I don’t know whether settling for the here-and-now and letting things take their course is a more sustainable way to confront life than constantly striving for more, always searching for the particular happiness that comes from things that are dear to me is. Some days, I’m even tempted to throw in the towel and say I will make a concerted effort to be more ‘normal’, to make my desires and decisions more conformable to what is expected of me.
But every time I come close to making that decision – a decision precipitated by nothing except my own fears of loneliness, unhappiness and being outside the crowd – I know I can’t. I won’t. Only because the only thing I’m certain of, in all of my wandering, is that I could not be happy with conformity. I could not be happy with any man, or any job. I could not be happy knowing I had done something simply because it was the easier thing to do. It’s a double-bind: choose the easier path to happiness, knowing it will make you unhappy to have done so, or choose the path of uncertainty, of never knowing whether you will be happy or not.
The problem is there in a nutshell though: just like the Whig interpretation of history proposed that all nations were on a set trajectory towards that biggest of P’s, Progress, and that some nations were further along than others and had a duty to set the stragglers on on the right path, it seems there’s a certain trajectory our lives are expected to take in order to prove our fitness as useful and productive members of society. That excludes anyone who isn’t in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationship, it excludes those who aren’t in an acceptable economic class, it excludes those who do not work in an acceptable full-time profession.
But what if you don’t want to be that person? What if you simply want to do the things you want to do in order to be happy because you’ve got one lifetime to live and you can’t waste a minute of it on useless kow-towing to definitions of things you don’t believe in?
