By Uttama
Research by Karishma Shah
Marriage is a choice you make. Not just on your wedding day, but every day.
We often forget this simple fact, the most difficult of ones to endure. Anyone can fall in love and get hitched. But to stay married, to stay happily married, now that requires some serious skill.
Most of us make this choice at least once—this brave decision to choose ONE person, for the rest of our lives, over and over again.
“Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions–someone’s idiocies, even–is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table, in the daily acceptance of your partner’s most tiresome, irritating faults.”¹
It’s hard work to live with a person, the same person. And perhaps it is the harsh reality of this that makes parents so insistent to find the right ‘fit’ for their child—and the same reason children fight so hard to marry loved ones of their own choosing.
So who wins? Who is right? Who the heck are we supposed to marry?
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South Asian children growing up in Western countries often find they are caught between conflicting expectations.
“I think as second generation South Asian kids we have been brainwashed to think being unmarried is very wrong, or that we need to make our parents happy because they have given us so much,” says Narmin Anwar from Baltimore. “I think this perspective is the most interesting because most of us strive for marriage because of our parents, however we want to make sure it’s the ‘right guy’ from our Americanized perspective.”
But the desire to find ‘the one’ resonates across the continents. “I am against spending my life with someone I don’t like,” says Amisha, 24, from Mumbai, “and which is full of compromise. I see no compatibility with the boys they (my parents) have selected for me. They say it’s the right time for me to get married and I should not delay it. To which I think there is nothing called a RIGHT TIME. The time when you find the RIGHT GUY, that’s the right time.”
Why is this time, the ‘right time’ so important to parents?
“When you are young, you are flexible and more accepting of changes,” says Jyoti Patel, a parent in Oak Brook, Illinois. “As you get older, you become rigid in your thoughts. That’s why people say you should get married by a certain age.”
“Right age is important because you want to have children at the right age,” says Jayesh Shah from Mumbai. “You need sufficient time for your marriage to grow and your children need sufficient time to grow.”
“The main reason is generation gap,” says Shankar Amkar from Ratnagiri, India. “The longer you wait, the older you will be when you get children. Then it becomes difficult to relate to the new generation because they live very differently.”
Yes, they do live very differently. Should we not, then, begin to understand this difference and use it to alter our expectations of them?
“I would never pressure my kids on when to get married or who to get married to,” says Navin Patel from Illinois. “But mainly kids get pressurized because of the pressure of society. There are certain ways of living and if one follows it, all will. The moment you do something out of the ordinary you become an outcast. Parents don’t want for their children to be outcasts.”
“I think our parents don’t want us to be alone, or shunned,” Narmin says. “I think that’s the main reason they want us to get married.”
OK, so as parent and child, we seem to be able to understand each other’s perspective fairly well. We understand the ‘why, the when, the how’. But let’s ask again, Who are we supposed to marry?
“The first thing to ask is what makes you happy?” says Binita, a parent in Mumbai. “What are your priorities? For that, you need to know yourself and then your requirements, without any compromises. Without lowering your expectations, who’ll be the ideal person?”
“Nature, flexibility, personality, looks…all are important. Mainly your spouse has to match your personality so that you are more relatable to each other,” says Jayesh. “Religion is also important. Different religions have different lifestyles. One has to be able to adjust.”
“People say you should find someone similar to you,” says Navin. “But I believe you should get married to someone who compliments you. Someone unmatched would be ideal, someone who can fill the gaps and understand your individual interests.”
This all sounds fair. Personality should be good. Flexibility is important. Your priorities should be similar. On the surface, we’re done.
But any South Asian can attest that things usually go much deeper. He’s not of the same ‘status’, she’s not the same skin colour, he doesn’t have a ‘respectful’ job, her mother is a divorcee. We hand out our judgments just as easily as we deny them.
As for the children, they’re confused. If you tell her you think her future husband should have a good heart, she will literally go out and find someone with a good heart. Any caste, any colour.
As South Asian parents, we’re lucky. Fortunately our children have discovered this difference between the values we teach, and the actions we take. And they are finding their own happy medium. In many cases, we have something to learn from that.
“I feel that I don’t want to give them temporary happiness by marrying someone of their choice and then be unhappy all my life,” says Amisha. “I want to give them lifetime happiness by marrying someone I would love to live my life with.”
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Notes:
¹Gilbert, Elizabeth. Committed. Penguin Group, USA. 2010.
