Love and Marriage: Part I

Almost everyone’s on WhatsApp nowadays, and whether we like it or not, we're in some group, usually added to without being asked. And like me, you too must be on the receiving end of overly enthusiastic senders of funnies and videos. You know what I'm talking about! You've muted the groups too, haven't you? Don't worry, I won't tell.

Now, while I did enjoy the bombardment at the beginning, I lost my humour for it very quickly, but not before I noticed a particular kind of joke doing the rounds. 

These were jokes were on wives. The senders were what I presumed to be happily married husbands. At least, I hope they were... or are. But this got me thinking about marriage and about my friends and colleagues and their marriages.

As someone who's single and never married, I can't say I know much about marriage, but as someone who’s always been welcome into the homes and lives of many couples, I have had the opportunity to see, and hear on occasion, what makes a workable, if not a successful, marriage. Here are some of my observations. 

Marriage, I've come to realise in some cases, seems to be the price of the wedding. A lot of people want to "marry” not realising that the actual marrying itself happens just once. What they usually aren't prepared for or even warned about is the rest that follows, which happens day after day, year on year. Yes, yes, they are in love and by that virtue they will survive through anything, come hell or high water, yada, yada. But loving a person and living with that person is not the same.

Many dating couples, at least here in India, don’t live together before they marry. The distance does make the heart fonder, and the gonads, the fondest. They may date for a few years even, and as long as they’re apart, they’re virtually inseparable. But once they’re under the same roof, that's when the real test of love begins.

Initial attraction to anyone is almost always physical (it has to do with pheromones, I'm told). Couples I've observed seem 'stuck at the hip' all the time at this stage. This chemistry however seems to begins to run out really fast when couples begin to live together, a year or two in fact. That's when we see sparks of another kind fly.  

A person's living space is perfectly customised to one's habits and routines. Add a whole new person, whose habits and living preferences we only know vaguely about to this sanctuary, and something is bound to erupt.

Living with someone is all about setting the rules and following those set for you. It’s about tolerance and compromise. Unfortunately, not everyone has the patience.

To simplify further, it’s like living with your parents. Too many questions, too little time, and one too many unsaid restrictions. If you're thinking that these already existed in the first few years of a marriage, you're right, but the physical comfort of each other and the wanting to accept everything about the other usually blind sides people to these little triggers. After a few years, when all the love juices have run out, these little things can quickly turn into really big issues.

Most times though calling it quits isn't the option. What with familial and social obligations, many people won't even consider it. That is a good thing in a way since it takes effort to make a marriage work, and it also prevents couples from giving up too soon. Sadly in some cases, the ego, impatience and simple pigheadedness become the conversation of the day, creating a whole lot of frustration for the couple. This may explain the passive–aggressive behaviour of those husbands sending out those jokes. While wives it seems take it on the chin, the husbands form wife-bashing clubs. 

Having children doesn't help at this stage. In some cases, it even delays the redressing of all these emotional issues. It takes the attention away from the real matter at hand and builds up as the years of no conversation go by. By then, it's usually too late. Some couples split and some just exist through the relationship until the kids are out of the house.    

But let's be optimistic and talk about those who made it. I have had the fortune to have met some elderly couples with long and beautiful marriages, whose relationship is the stuff of all those put-your-hand-on-your-heart and wipe-the-happy-tear-from-your-eye feelings. I have asked a few of the open-minded ones about their secret, and they have almost always said this: we've never run of things to talk about.

Which brings me to my conclusion. While it seems that everyone thinks of love and marriage as aspects of the heart, it seems to me they are all about the mind. Finding the mental commonality with your future spouse seems to be the key to staying tied up in knots for a lifetime. Opposites attract they say, but we’re not talking about magnets are we. Perhaps the word I'm looking for is understanding, both of the emotional and mental kind. It’s about accepting and being accepted, about sharing common interests when things run out and just simply getting each other when words are no more necessary. That I call a marriage, whether there’s a big, fat, wedding or not.