BOOK EXTRACTS
Made in heaven or on earth?
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Psychiatrist Dr. Vijay Nagaswami answers some often asked questions on the age-old institution of marriage in his new book The 24x7 Marriage: Smart Strategies For Good Beginnings. Here are exclusive extracts.
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Excerpted from Chapters 3,4,7,8 of
The 24x7 Marriage: Smart Strategies
For Good Beginnings; Vijay Nagaswami, Westland, Rs. 250.
The fact that divorce rates are on the increase doesn’t worry me too much. As said earlier, people are still getting re-married. But the way I see it is that increasing divorce rates are just a part of the early reactions to the phenomenon of liberalisation of the new Indian thought process. After years of suppression, we, as a nation, are suddenly discovering that we have the power of choice. So we make our choices more consciously today. However, some of us, intoxicated by this sense of personal empowerment, tend to go over the top a little. Add to this the fact that our levels of tolerance have decreased over the years, and you find more people taking impulsive decisions that they are hard pressed to reverse.
Uma and Satish were married for one miserable year before they decided, by mutual consent, to seek dissolution of their marriage in the Family Court. The reason for their unhappiness was Satish’s discomfort with Uma’s obsessive pursuit of her career. He had expected that after they got married, she would scale down her career aspirations and pay more attention to their home, which in recent times served pretty much as a hostel to both of them. He could not get his long-suffering mother to live with them, since they were hardly at home, both busy in the pursuit of their respective careers in the IT industry. Their sex life was virtually non-existent, even from the first month of their marriage. Both were simply too exhausted during the week to even contemplate intimacy. And weekends were usually spent recovering from massive hangovers.
Out of the blue Uma was offered an opportunity to go to Ireland for nine months on work. This would mean a huge jump in earnings as well as a promotion. She accepted immediately, without consulting Satish. He was furious, both at being a non-party to the decision-making process, as well as at the fact that she was going away for such a long period. They fought every day on the phone, e-mail and sms. Many nasty things were said. Her boss, a recent divorcee, planted the idea of separation in Uma’s head. Uma liked the idea and proposed to Satish that they take a nine-month break from each other and see if this improved their marriage. ‘What marriage?’ Satish demanded and suggested they call it quits once and for all. She agreed. The very next day a lawyer was sourced from the Internet, and within a week they submitted a petition for divorce by mutual consent.
Fortunately, getting a divorce by mutual consent in Indian law is not all that simple. You first have to establish that you have been living separately for at least six months, after which you have to wait a further period of six months just in case you change your mind. Little more than a year later, nine months of which Uma spent alone in Ireland and had an opportunity to reflect on her life and aspirations, for she was not as overworked in Ireland as she had been at home, they met at the Family Court. Uma had half a mind to withdraw the petition, but pride prevented her from doing so. Satish too, in the past year, had missed her terribly. He too had half a mind to persuade her to change hers. But since he heard her speak with a faint Irish accent, he concluded there would be no point in attempting a reconciliation with someone who had grown so alien, and held his tongue. The divorce was granted. They met again when they picked up their respective copies of the divorce decree and decided to be civil and have a cup of coffee together. Six months and several litres of coffee later, they decided to get married again. Four years on, they remain married.
Low tolerance
This is what I mean when I say the new Indian has low tolerance when it comes to dealing with frustration. Admittedly, Uma and Satish were having a very hard time and their respective personal goals appeared to be discordant. However, if they had gone a little deeper, they may have been able to handle things a little differently. On the flip side, if they had not gone through the process of divorce, they may never have discovered that they really did care for each other. Were they then correct in doing what they did? I don’t think there is an answer to that, but the way I see it, the fact that they had a choice (divorce), which had perhaps not been available to their parents, did serve to subtly empower them to exercise their right to choose.
There are thousands of young girls and boys in middle-class India who are forced into marriage simply because their parents feel they must be married off between the ages of 21 and 23. ‘Study hard, get a good job, get married’ seems to be the popular mantra. ‘Why not? Didn’t we get married at that age? And aren’t we doing okay now?’ seems to be the predominant defence when parents are questioned on this. What they do not appreciate is that youngsters today do not see marriage the way their parents did — one more inevitable stage in life. We live in an age when, in some metros at least, single women are adopting children, rejecting the idea of marriage after several unhappy relationships, but giving full vent to their maternal instincts. For their part, men too are reluctant to even consider getting married until their careers are well established, since they’ve worked out how to be their own housekeepers and don’t feel ready to assume the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. In other words, marriage is no longer seen as an absolute necessity by a growing number of young urban adults. If they feel that they have not found the right partner, they are perfectly prepared to wait until they do, even if this means running the risk of staying single all their lives.
Question of space
Is marriage space necessary?
First off, both of you need to be convinced that your marriage needs space to grow into something more fulfilling. Leaving aside fulfilment for the time being, even to perform its basic functions, a marriage needs space. Only when you define your marriage space do you facilitate the process of bonding with your partner, and it is the strength of this bond that is going see both of you through the rest of your lives. I know that in our country, space is not considered such a big deal. We tend to get by in overcrowded environments. And when I talk about space, many people tend to say that they have a bedroom of their own. Needless to say, that’s not the kind of space I am talking about. Not surprisingly, men tend to ask more often whether space is really necessary. Women seem to have an intuitive understanding, regardless of their social background, that marriage space is important. Of course, they may not refer to is as ‘space’. They use a variety of terms to describe the marriage space: closeness, spending time, privacy and so forth.
Marriage space is all of these, but it is also much more. To my mind, marriage space exists inside your head and is hardly defined by the geographical space you have at your disposal. It is not what you do but the comfort with which you do it that determines how much space you have allocated to marriage in your life. In the final analysis, marriage space gets defined by how much you value your marriage and your partner, how much priority you are willing to accord to your marriage and your partner, how much time you are willing to allocate to nurture your partner, how much you permit your partner to nurture you, how much you own your marriage and how much of yourself you are willing to share with your partner. All these create and strengthen the bond between both partners. So, you see, marriage space is all about the attitude you have towards your marriage, your partner and the bond between both of you. And surely you’d agree with me that both of you need to have similar attitudes and approach to the marriage?
A marriage template is nothing but the way you think a marriage should be conducted: the way you will behave with your partner, the way you expect your partner to behave with you. In other words, how each of you defines a good wife and a good husband. Typically, the marriage that we have viewed closely is that of our parents, or older relatives, or friends, whoever we were closest to. Even if we don’t realise it, each of us has a role model marriage imprinted in our subconscious minds. Nine times out of ten, this turns out to be our parents’ marriage.
The template we have acquired before we get married is called the primary marriage template and if both partners have similar primary marriage templates, which does occasionally happen, this makes things extraordinarily easy indeed. (In fact, this is why arranged marriages of yesteryears were based on finding alliances from similar backgrounds, resulting in more or less similar primary marriage templates that required the least adjustment from both partners). So, we have to get on with the task of defining our final marriage templates more consciously than our forefathers had to. To define the final marriage template, each partner has to explore and share with the other, how they have understood their respective parents’ marriage. There is no need to discuss this with the parents to get their clarifications on the finer details (they are hardly likely to share intimate details with you, anyway), because accuracy is not the issue here. It is your perception of your parents’ marriage that determines how you have internalised your primary marriage template.
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