When I was a child, I was asked which caste I belonged to. I
was clueless. When I was asked what my Army officer father’s first name was, I said
“Captain” because for as long as I’d known, everyone called him Captain XYZ. When
I was later quizzed about his rank, I was confused and said, “I don’t know…
must be first or second… he’s quite intelligent.” I was 5 or 6 years old, and
that was just the start of an upbringing that didn’t strictly enforce adherence
to social convention.
When I was growing up, I didn’t dream of a perfect wedding
or of a Prince Charming who would meet, fall helplessly in love and ride off
with me into a sunset. I certainly didn’t think about having kids or raising a
family. I was in fact too busy dreaming of being a truckdriver or a rockstar.
Even as I hit adolescence, and fell in and out of ‘love’ at an alarming
frequency with boys in my immediate friend circles, I knew that it was just a
phase my brain and my hormones were going through (I was a precocious brat). At
some point in my early 20s, when I finally hit my stride as a sexual being, I
finally noticed the boy-men around me who wanted to get married and settle down
to the job of starting their real lives and were completely thrown when I said
No.
The truth is, while I understood that the marriage proposal
was a very big thing, all I could think was – I don’t know who I am or what I
want… how can I possibly promise myself to another person? (very ‘Runaway Bride’,
as another friend keeps reminding me). And then I spent the next decade trying
to figure those things out.
The thing is, even when I was really young, I knew that
marriage couldn’t possibly just be what two people did when they got to a
certain age, or to have kids. It seemed like too much trouble to go through to maintain
a pre-determined schedule or for something that could technically be achieved
without a signed piece of paper. But watching my parents laugh over grown-up
jokes that I never understood, or cooking a meal together, or arguing about the
merits of a fixed deposit over a bond, I knew it was definitely a special bond
that two people forged because they decided to have fun together forever.
Forever. That is important. Because families aren’t created or
destroyed on paper with signatures, families (and this includes friends and
soulmates – and the right person will understand that) are created with trust
that you always have their back and that nothing will change that. The fulfillment
of this promise doesn’t need a perfect person, just your kind of person. And finding that person takes a serious amount
of looking. As a result, marriage wasn’t that high on the agenda as finding
that very special kind of person whom you can laugh and cook and have fun with
forever. In other words, Marriage was about being with someone with whom the
quantum of joy created for everyone is way higher than the amount of misery
tolerated.
My
last post inspired a lot of disbelief – from friends and
strangers alike. Mostly, the outrage was directed at the vague notion of me ‘giving
up’ Plan A - as they understood it – a monogamous, marital relationship
governed by established standards of fidelity and security. Often, the solution offered was to just suck
it up, find ‘someone suitable’ and ‘take the plunge’, and not set unrealistic
standards or be a coward about ‘losing control’.
The truth is, I don’t want just anyone ‘suitable’ with whom
I ‘take the plunge’ and hope for the best. Over the last decade, after having worked
through the yo-yo of crushing heartbreak and soaring ecstasy, I’ve come to
terms with the fact that I don’t ‘need’ a relationship, that I don’t ‘need’
someone to look after me, and I definitely don’t need to be needed.
But I do ‘want’ a relationship with someone I’m convinced I
can be joyous with for as much of forever as possible. In today’s day and age
of easy procreation options, the de-stigmatization of singlehood or alternate
relationship paradigms, I think that that joy is the only reason to attempt the
long haul with that special someone.
(Maybe it'll all still go to shit, but at least the start point was conviction, not a "why not?" moment of apathy.)
In the absence of that conviction, there’s Plan B.
