Indian marriages
When a girl who has worked hard through her boards, her pre-entrance exams, her collage is ready to pursue higher education, her parents raise their hands and surrender. We don’t have money to educate you further, they tell her.
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For us, longevity and prosperity are the only parameters that define the success of a marriage. It doesn’t matter how a marriage lasted for thirty years, or fifty.
My parents’ dissatisfaction with each other slowly unraveled into fights and adultery. Yes, I knew my father was cheating on my mother with someone who was also close to me.
A “good Indian girl” appeases everyone in her line of sight, no matter what the cost. And not saying “no” is a big part of it.
Your friend is being pressurised to get married. How do you support her? By encouraging her to accept her fate? Or by motivating her to speak her mind and take a firm stand?
It is not enough to raise feminist daughters if we still expect women to shed that cloak of progressiveness at the altar of marriage and turn into demure submissive wives.
Are we afraid of baring the faultlines of our own relationships to them?
We still equate companionship solely with matrimony and sex outside of marriage remains a taboo. So a lot of people assume these elements to be missing from a single woman’s life.
When their wives begin earning well, it gives husbands a sort of existential crisis. Does my family even need me, if they can do well without me? What is my standing in a marriage, if not as a breadwinner?
Why must a woman change herself to fit in after marriage? Why is something as spontaneous and ordinary as laughter prone to stigmatisation for women in our country?
The gendering of duties which sends women picking after their husbands or put their needs first was never about love. It was always about establishing a hierarchy, in our society, in our homes and in our bedrooms.
