MARRIAGE ISN’T THE GOAL, LOVE IS – AND IT STARTS HERE

SAY ‘I DO’ TO LOVING THE PERSON IN THE MIRROR

I know I know I have been MIA since Feb this year but I have come back with yet another interesting topic that I think most of us can relate to. As soon I reached my 20s people around me have been increasingly curious as to when i was going to get married and they seemed to be least interested in what I had and was achieving in life. The question of marriage isn’t gender specific anymore and be it men or women we all have to face the loud music of the “When are you getting married?” question sometime in our lives once you reach 20. My mom and dad have been asked this question a lot lately even though they know I am suffering through endometriosis and I just went through a surgery. Because of our society and people’s narrow mentality regarding this whole idea of marriage women have less freedom to do anything of their own in their lives. I don’t know when will people get that more than getting married being financially independent and at the same time your own happiness matters more. In a society where people relate even happiness and mental well-being to whether you are married or not its important to talk of single unmarried people as well because marriage is a part of life and not your whole life. There are indeed multiple ways to being and staying happy other than getting married and our generation has been quite vocal about the concepts of freedom, independency, singlehood etc. I would say this is the start to something good and positive because why should married people have all the fun?

Today I am going to talk about a very important and sensitive topic which has many shades and angles to it. If you look at it the wrong way you will see it in the negative light. So it all depends on how you choose to look at it. I will let my readers decide how they want to see through this topic. There are two parts to my blog here – In the 1st part I am going to talk about the lives of single and married people especially single women and in the 2nd part I am going to talk about the idea of self love and marrying yourself.

I am in my late 20s and I know people expect me to get married because it’s the right age and time is running out. I keep getting reminded day in and day out. I even get unwanted marriage proposals as if I am going to say yes. These wedding planners spend months fussing over the flowers and the music and the invitations and every imaginable detail. On the day of the wedding, they are so excited. By putting up a wedding, they become our storytellers and they tell the same stories we all grew up hearing, get married and you will live happily ever after, and you will never be lonely again. As children, we hear those stories in fairy tales. As grown ups, we keep hearing them in all the novels and movies and TV Shows that build up to a wedding. The Supreme Court of the United States is telling those same stories - in the landmark ruling that legalised same sex marriage, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “ Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out and find no one there”. But here’s the thing. That’s not my story. I do want to get married someday but it’s not an absolute necessity for me. Everything about my life added up to a different story, that living the single life is my happily ever after for the time being. I am happy and content but people around me don’t seem to be. But for the longest time, It never did add up, I never heard of such a thing as living single and loving it. And it turns out, the same thing is still true of many people even today. They don’t realise that embracing single life is a thing, and so they tell themselves, “Sure, I am looking for the one. That’s what I want.” But then when you look at their actual behaviour, you see that doing what it would take to find that person seems to rank somewhere between deleting ancient emails from their inbox and cleaning out their drawer. Now other people do realise that this marriage issue is a question for them. They are talking to therapists. They are writing to advice columnists. J told the story of a conversation she had with her therapist. Her therapist said, “J, if you do decide to get married what kind of man would you look for?” And J said “ Someone with a challenging job, has lots of outside interests, does volunteer work, play sports, like that.” And her therapist said,” Oh, so you want someone well rounded and intellectually stimulating. And J said, “ No, I would want someone who’s never home.” Another example is a letter that K wrote to an advice columnist. K said that she was in a long term relationship with a wonderful amazing man.” When he kisses me, I still get goose bumps. When he walks into the door, I am mesmerized. So why is it that sometimes I just feel like I should be alone?” She offers the beginnings of an answer to her own question by saying, “I have always been kind of a free spirit, an independent kind of person.” And she signs her letter saying, “ Is love enough?” Positive affirming stories about single life would have resonated with J and K. But those stories have never been part of our lives the way fairy tales have.

I have made it my life’s work to find the true stories of single life, stories no one is ever telling us. At first, though, I wasn’t so sure I was going to like what I found. I had two main worries. The first one was as much as I loved my single life, I didn’t love everything about it. It hurt when my friends got married and went out to dinner with other couples, and I got demoted to lunch. Later, I realised that was just the small stuff, and that the special status of married people is far more sweeping. My second worry was that science was against me. Before I ever read any of the scientific journals for myself to see what they really did say, before I did any of my own studies. I believed what I was hearing in the media. I thought science had already shown what the fairy tales had promised - get married and you will live happily ever after. Not like those single people. That’s what college students think too. Asked to predict how happy they would be if they stayed single year after year, this is what they said. They think they would be miserable. Now look what they said when asked how happy they would be if they got married. They think they would be about as happy as they could possible be. What you see there is the fairy tale version of marriage and single life. Getting married didn’t make people happy after a while, they just got a little thrill around the time of the wedding. That’s what reality looks like as opposed to what the advertisements show you or the fairy tales make you believe. But wait, there’s something I didn’t tell you in the beginning, I am holding back here. That increase in happiness that people get when they first get married, only the people who get married and stay married experience that. What about the people who get married and then get divorced? When they get married, they get less happy. And then, there they are, going down, down, down until they end up less happy than they were when they were single. So if you want to say that getting married increases people’s happiness even for just a little while, you have to look only at the people who are currently married. There’s something really important about that. Whenever you hear the claim that married people are doing better than single people and you will hear that over and over again - beware!! They are telling you, “ Look over there, at those married people, and don’t look over there, nothing to see there.” But you should look over there because that’s where you will see all the people who got married, hated it, and refused to stay married. That’s a lot of people.

Now today, lots of people have serious romantic relationships without ever getting married. So maybe, what matters isn’t whether you are married or not, but how much of that good stuff are you getting the romantic relationship has to offer? How much caring are you getting? How much commitment? Researchers studying loneliness and depression and stress took that approach. They proposed a hierarchy. So they said, “Married people, they get the most caring and commitment, so they should do better than everyone else.” In the second place, people who are cohabiting. They get a lot of caring but you know maybe not the same amount of commitment that married people get. In third place, people who are single and dating. And at the very bottom, those single people that don’t even have a romantic partner, not even a date. The researchers were sure that they were going to have the very worst psychological health. But when they looked at the results for the women, what they found was, nothing! The women higher on the hierarchy were not any less lonely, they were not any less depressed, and they weren’t any less stressed than the other women. And the findings for the men weren’t that much better. How is this even possible? Single people aren’t getting any caring and commitment from a spouse. Their lives aren’t celebrated the way married people’s lives are. They aren’t getting any of those legal

benefits and protections. And single people in social science studies aren’t just people like me who love living single. They also include the single people who hate being single. So everything is stacked against the single people. Yet there they are, with their high levels of happiness and their low levels of loneliness and depression and stress. How can we understand that? I think the stories we are getting told over and over again by everyone, from five year olds to Supreme Court Justices, are distracting us from other more revealing stories - the stories no one has ever told us about people who are single. I will tell three of them to you. The first story we are told repeatedly is this - married people have someone. They have the one. Single people have no one. But when psychologists actually started studying the real lives of single people, they found something entirely different. It’s the single people who have more friends, it’s the single people who are doing more than married people to stay in touch with their siblings. It’s the single people who are more

often tending to their parents, exchanging help with their neighbour’s, contributing to the life of their towns and cities. In contrast, when couples move in together or when they get married, they tend to be more insular. And they tend to do that even if they don’t have kids. So they can blame it on the kids. So the story we are told is that married people have the one, the untold, more revealing story is that single people have the ones.

The second story we are told is “Get married and you will never be lonely again.” The

researchers who proposed the hierarchy were sure that married people were going to be the least lonely, they weren’t. But you know who really was protected from loneliness? The people who had friends and family members they could open up to and rely on if they had a problem. That’s what mattered, not whether they had a spouse or romantic partner. In the stories we are told, people who live alone are isolated and lonely. But as long as the people living alone have about the same income as people living with others, they are actually on the average less lonely. In the stories we are told, people who are home alone are crying in their beer, distraught that they are not with their special someone. But in fact, some people who live alone are like J, the woman who told her therapist that her ideal husband would be someone who’s never home. Many single people savour solitude, they don’t dread it. Remember that Supreme Court Justice who said marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out and find no one there. Well, my fear is that I will wake up in the middle of the night and find that someone else is there, hogging the blankets, snoring and farting! All of that adds up to a story very different from “Get married

and you will never be lonely again.”

The third story we are told is “All you need is love, love is all you need.” When K asked the advice columnist, “ Is love enough? “ she already had romantic love. She was mesmerised by her partner. Other single people value other kinds of love, like the love of close friends or family or spiritual figures, just as people so often have done over the course of history. But a happy life, a good life is not just about love, not even the most expansive kinds. We humans also crave autonomy and mastery and purpose and meaning. Single people have that autonomy. They are in charge of their own lives. Single people develop mastery, you know, that thing married people do where they split up all the tasks: you deal with the car and the money, I will handle the meals and the relatives. Well, single people figure out how to do all of it. Single people also have purpose and meaning. They can pursue what matters most to them, and often they do. For example, people who stay single value meaningful work more than married people do. Lifelong single people also experience more personal growth. They are more likely than married people to say that their lives have been a continuous process of learning, change and growth. So that third story we are told is all you need is love. The untold more revealing story is that we also yearn for autonomy, mastery, purpose and meaning. And single people have those things in spades. The untold stories of single life have never been more relevant than they are now. More people than ever before in many nations around the world are single. Living single is the norm even for people who get married.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. Ok, That’s it!! That’s how you do life. That’s how you do a relationship. Love, marriage, baby carriage. Ok, Got it! Then I grew up and this is what my life turned out to be. Slightly more complicated but I don’t regret anything that happened in my life. I realised recently that I am content with my life. We look at what’s in front of us and pass judgements. The journey, Do we care about it? Mostly no. There are multiple ways of looking at things and the way you look at it forms the basis of your initial thought process about the person or in general at how you look at things and life. Since we are talking today about women inventing, I am going to talk about inventing relationships. What I have realised through a lot of trial and obviously many, many errors is that, to be the thing that has transformed my life and love, and that is this idea of marrying yourself. So what does it mean to marry yourself? It’s a big idea. It is as big as marriage itself except, if I could just summarise it, it would be that you enter into a relationship with yourself and then you put a ring on it. In other words, you commit to yourself fully. And then you build a relationship with yourself to the point that you realise that you are whole right now, that there is no man, woman, job, circumstance that can happen to you that’s going to make you more whole because you already are. And this changes your life. I realised this more in the past one year and more so after my diagnosis. I think my health going downhill was the hardest and the most painful thing that happened to me but it has been the most beautiful thing as well. It opened up my mind and the way I saw life and the way my family saw me. It has made me more confident and strong and less fragile I guess. When this phase of my life ends up I think I will emerge as a different person who is ready to take risks and see life from a different perspective.

What I have learned from my experience is that the places where you have the biggest challenges in your life become the places where you have the most to give if you do your inner work. I kind of want to say that again. In order to really marry yourself you have to get sometimes very painfully honest with yourself about what it is that you have done. If you ask me if I want to do that then the answer is yes. Because here is the deal : The thing about marrying yourself is it’s not just like cohabitating. You are not just gonna date for a while and see how things turn out. You are going to do this till death do you part. You are going to take vows. So here are the vows :

1. You are going to marry yourself for richer or for poorer. This means that you are going to love yourself right where you are. You don’t say to yourself, “ When you get to the corner of

Hollywood and Vine, then I will marry you.” You don’t say, “ When you lose 10 kilos, then I

will love you.” When you marry yourself, you walk yourself down that aisle exactly where you are. And paradoxically, I found that loving myself exactly where I am is the only way to get where I am going.

2. You are going to marry yourself for better or for worse. What this means is that most of us are willing to love ourselves for better, I mean, sure, I am having a great hair day today. I love me. That’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about for worse, you know, the big life disappointments. Maybe you don’t own a home, you didn’t get the career you wanted. Maybe you didn’t graduate from college, or get the relationship you wanted, maybe you fight with your mom, maybe you watch too much reality TV, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter anymore. Because when you marry yourself, you agree to stay with you no matter what.

3. You marry yourself in sickness and in health. What this means is that you forgive yourself for your mistakes. A mistake isn’t actually a failure unless you don’t learn from it and unless you don’t grow. There is a saying, “ You ask for patience and what you get is a line at the bank.” What that means is that life doesn’t give you what you have asked for, it gives you the people, places and situations that allow you to develop what you ask for. And the thing is if you don’t get it right the 1st time, life will give it to you again. Because life is very generous that way. What I learned about “ in sickness and in health” is how to sit by my own bedside, and how to hold my own hand, and how to nurse myself, and how to comfort myself. What I learned is that I am a person I can count on.

4. Last but not the least is, you marry yourself. When you marry yourself, it’s to have and to hold yourself. What does it mean to have and to hold? Well, i think it means that you love yourself the way you want someone else to love you. I had always been going through life with this sense of lack. I felt like I was kind of half a person, and that I was missing something. I went into relationships hoping to solve this feeling that I had my entire life, that I wasn’t whole unless someone loved me. The truth was I wasn’t ever going to feel whole until I learned to love myself. So this business of marrying yourself transforms every area of your life, your business, family relationships, kids, social relationships, friends. Because when you marry yourself, this huge thing happens, you become able to love in this whole new way. You become able to love other people right where they are, for who they are, the same way you are already loving yourself. And of course, this is what the world needs more of.

So when I married myself, and I realized that I already had everything that I needed. I started seeing it as my job to basically just light up my little corner of the world. That’s my new job. Because I don’t need anything, I already have it. So, when I take meetings, it’s all about how can I help this person achieve his/her goal? When I am in my social communities, it’s like what can I bring to this that only I can bring? When I go on dates, it’s like how can I just discover another person maybe for just one hour which, of course, brings me a full circle. Because people always asked me about my love life and health in particular, they want to know. Because people somehow forget that I am more than my illness. They don’t see what I have achieved in my life or how far I have come but only what I have not achieved. You know, the answer is I am still working on it and taking each day at a time. Aren’t we all? So this is where I am right now. About a few months ago I went on a date without any expectations. About 30 minutes into the date, I found myself paying

attention not to whether he liked me, but how I felt in his presence. I noticed that I was light,

happy, joking. As I reflected on the date afterwards, I was like, “Wow, I got really excited! Look, this is how committed I am to myself.” I am not even on this date trying to get someone to like me. I am more interested in how I feel about me than how he feels about me, not because I am selfish, but because the only relationship I am ever going to have with another person is the one that I am already having with myself - just going to have it with them now. So it turned out he liked me, and we are still kind of meeting each other. I am here to enjoy the process and the journey. It actually feels good when you don’t pressurise yourself to seek some kind of security or acceptance from the other person and instead be with the person for who he is and not for what he is going to give us. Love is something that should come naturally to us and not something which is forced or manipulated. I am not dying to hear the words, “ Will you marry me? “. Someday I would like to and even though those words are very powerful I don’t need to hear it from him because I already heard it from myself. The way I see it is like I took myself to the top of a mountain, or maybe to the bottom of the ocean, and I got down on one knee and I said, “ I will never leave you. “ And now I am married to the one person I really wanted to be with all along, myself.

For way too long, we single people have been told that the only way we can be truly happy is to get married. Now we know that’s just not so, and everyone can benefit from that. So married people, now that you know the secrets of a successful single life, feel free to steal them and add new shades of bliss to your lives. And single people, you know what to do - go out and live your single lives fully, joyfully, and unapologetically.

There are two sides to the same coin. Society brags about married women but we never talk of single people and their lives. Single lives matter and its time we start talking of women who are not married or don’t want to even. It’s a choice that should be left on us and not on the society. We should be able to decide what we want to do with our lives. I wouldn’t have actually even written this article at the 1st place if my life hadn’t taken a U Turn. What inspired me to write this article is how my life turned out to be and there’s one more person who actually pushed me to write this and that’s my pataka kudi from Haryana. I really actually admire how she took control of her life and became that strong independent women who’s journey is actually so inspiring. A lot of stories are out there about single people that we really don’t pay attention to but we should because stories that are unconventional and different and not really something routine give you that zeal to look at your own life through a different perspective. Life is short so why do we humans complicate it unnecessarily with issues like these?