The Couples Aren’t Superior to the Singles
This is a slightly edited version of a Facebook post I wrote in 2016.
What is the crazy obsession with marriage and couple-dom that almost everyone in India seem to suffer from? And why, why do the married and the coupled feel superior to the ones who are not?
What, aren’t there already like a million articles on the internet that say single people do exist? What are we, the kind that don’t know what it means to engage and collaborate and partner? You think we don’t have fun when we are by ourselves? Or with friends? Or with strangers?
Why, why do you constantly insinuate that we don’t know what true love is or what it means to sacrifice? What is driving you to say some of the meanest things — “but you’re incomplete!”; “a relationship makes you a better person”; “nothing in your life matters till you have someone to share it with”; “all this travel is nice only, but when are you getting married?”
Seriously, are you living our lives?
No offence meant, but to be honest, some of the coupled people that I have met, and especially the ones that are married, have behaved in embarrassingly selfish and terribly self-destructive ways.
“My children, my partner, my car, and my house. My bank loan needs to be approved right now; my wifi has to be repaired right now because my son needs to submit his project; my wife has a demanding career and so kaamvaali bhai (house help) has to absolutely be on time every single day; give way you old frail coolie, my children are coming; it’s my husband’s birthday, so really, should the workers protest for fair wages on this day only?”
“He is short tempered and beats me sometimes, but what to do, I love him; she nags me and micromanages every little thing I do and think, but that’s what a marriage is; I cry most nights and he is sexually abusive, but God blessed this union and I can’t even think of getting out of it; yes, we are not compatible at all and we shout at each other every other day, but she’s pregnant and once the kids come, it will all change.”
Really?
Come to our homes please. You will get some hot food and fresh towels. You will find a TV remote/something equivalent that is yours alone. You may find friends that are mostly laughing. You will be left alone if you want to be. Your children, if you bring them, can play and paint and go crazy. You will find a messy house or a clean house or something in between, and usually, no one cares how it changes. You may even find wine. You may find healing. But most of all, and I promise you this, you will find a bed that gives you a good night’s sleep.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stereotyping. I’m not saying that we single folks are living better lives. I’m only saying that both the single, and the coupled/married, can be living happy, sad, or so-so lives.
A relationship by itself is fun, for sure, but so are friendships, so are adventures, so are experiences, so are life’s greatest missions. The very existence of a romantic relationship doesn’t guarantee happiness – it becomes happy and healthy only when you communicate, set boundaries, love yourself rightly, and love the other rightly. Regardless of our relationship statuses, we should know this.
Just because someone is sleeping next to you every night, it doesn’t mean you can go about making the solo sleepers feel something is terribly wrong with them.
Also, in India, marriage, partnership, and couple-hood are functional of caste, class, gender, and religion. Except in a few cases, by definition and practise, it is still very much a casteist, classist, hetero-normative, patriarchal institution that seeks to primarily serve the needs of a straight man.
Families that come out of these marriages; continue to give the Indian male, a stable solid ground to come back home to, while not stopping him from living his life, which may include a rockstar career, a travelling adventure, a political journey, a secret affair or whatever it is that he may choose. He is not bound by any written or unwritten vows of equal contribution to housework or childcare. His life and his ego are to be kept intact, safe, and free.
Now unless your marriage/partnership is none of the above, and is awesome, and is oh-so-perfect; and you have somehow become Mother Teresa in the course of it, don’t harbour the need to feel superior to the unattached.
None of us have any reason to feel superior to another, leave alone because of the existence or the absence of a romantic relationship, which, let’s face it, all of us have trouble navigating.
We are living our lives and you’re living yours. A relationship is not something one needs to do by default. It’s an option. An option we can choose when we want to, or not choose at all.
Rant done. Over and out.