Marriage: An Over-rated Institution?

A friend of mine shared an article called 'Marriage: An over-rated institution?' which was published on women's web. You can find the link here. The author Rs Mom basically wrote about an office washroom conversation of three married women. What I find interesting is the comments which were posted in response to this article. Some women were pro-marriage while others insisted that it is a highly over-rated institution and marriage and motherhood does not suit or fulfill every woman. Also some of my husband's school friends are having a discussion on romance in married life and most seem to think  that after 5 years or more of marriage you should be given a Nobel prize if you do not strangle your husband!


Not that I am an expert of any sort on this, being married a measly one and a half years. But so much discussion on marriage got my idle brain thinking and I realize that just by observing married people around me since childhood I have picked up a lot about human beings and this institution. Without going into the complicated observations, some of the lighter ones:

Each marriage is as unique as our finger prints--Hold on, I am not asking you to appear for a biometric test for a perfect marriage (urghhh my brain is running wild). All I am saying is not only are no two marriages same, even an individual has varying perceptions of marriage depending upon the partner and the circumstances. So if a marriage ends in heartbreaks or tears, does not in any way mean that person cannot have a happy and fulfilling marriage with another partner in another time. Generalizations do not really work in case of marriages. Each one of us approaches it differently and behaves in it differently. So if your marriage is not going the way you feel it should and your smugly married friends or busybody female relatives tell you how perfect their marriages are, do not be disheartened. Work at it the way you feel best. They do not live with your husband, you do dahling.

Marriages are not made in heaven-- Come on whom are we kidding or passing the praise buck too? Why bring in heaven in this very earthly endevour?  Max I can do is thank my guardian angels for introducing me to my husband err through a mutual friend, so she should also be thanked, right? And all the work, effort, adjustments, compromises that go into making a marriage work is ours, just ours-- ours and our partners. So pat each other backs. That might bring in some romance in life as well.

Marriage is unfortunately a 24/7/30/365/all your life thing-y--wish it was like our jobs, wish we could switch off after 8 hours. But the sad news is once we marry it permeates our whole life, a bit like the sand particles creeping into all those tiny, almost nonexistent nooks and crannies of your self and filling up them tightly. The freaking truth is that marriage is a combination of rocks, pebbles and sand. So if you are not careful, marriage will creep into your being and totally take over your identity and before you realize you have no other identity except for your married self. This is how most women approached marriage for centuries. Sadly some girls still do it like that. Be careful, do not let this happen, stop the sand particles from seeping into those nooks. Whoa those  are yours and yours only, guard them zealously.

Marriage is about the good and the bad-- okay first the good bits
*You have a permanent date for life-- for all the weekends, movie nights, Val Day etc-- gone are the days when you had to frantically search for someone to go watch a movie with you
* You do not have to do dutch every time you go out (complicated calculations of dividing 77 rupees among three people and some such-- all those laborious ticking on the mobile calculator)

*You can force your husband to listen to your girl-y woes, involve him in the excitement of reading a chick lit or watch a rom com and/or bitch about people (though be careful he will give you solutions to your problems much to your frustration, will get bored with the chick lit and point out the illogical bits in the movie just when it got really mushy or ask for the thousand-th time why girls think/behave like that and discourage bitching or worse still ask you to go and clear the air with person about whom you were bitching  or more horrible call you an emotional fool...okay we were discussing the positives, lets be + guys)
*Sometimes he will be the perfect sweetheart and pay you compliments, get you gifts or flowers or both (happy days), give you surprises, take you out to dinner, organize superb holidays or basically do something really nice and kind and sweet [before you get too excited-- like all married women know these are really occasional (read far apart) incidents *sigh*]
* Hopefully you have found a best friend for life...but hey you still need your girl friends same as ever
Now for the negative ones--
* The snores (they can turn you deaf or mad or both), taking up way too much space in the bed [forget all those romantic cuddles, at that point all you want to do is push him off the bed]

* The mess in the house--however much you clean up the house, he goes around messing it right back...I know, I know some men are not like this, but sadly ladies most men are...continuing in the same vein every time he cooks, the mess he makes in the kitchen is simply unimaginable and the funniest thing is he thinks he is really neat...poor dear
*The tendency to skip baths, wearing the same tee shirt for seven days in a row[God has deprived them of half a sense-- smell of their own sweat], same jeans for a year[Conversation: Wife: You know you need to wash your jeans, you have been wearing them non stop for months without even washing  once! Husband: Really? But I just bought it last year. I wore my last jeans for three years and then it got really tattered (with a surprise in his voice) I had to throw it out and buy this one. So do not worry this will last me for two more years. We men do not need to shop like you women do (with a snigger). Also you know what washing is not good for jeans. Ha Ha Ha! Okay have your laugh. Just for records we women smell much better than you men, thank God and yes jeans can be washed too]
*We all know the manly characteristic of being glued to the television set for matches, news and other boring stuff and addiction to most juvenile video games (yawn) won't do an in-depth on those...

Some marriages come with expiry tags-- Yes sad but true...some partners choose to finish it formally/legally and some emotionally while continuing to coexist.  I know this goes against all the Yash Raj/Meg Ryan/ Julia Roberts movies you saw or the M&Bs you read. What makes it harder to accept this is that marriages come with 'in life and death, in sickness and health' tag and not 'going to expire by so and so year' tag. And looking at the smiles on the faces of brides and grooms in their wedding photos you would not guess that they want to end it in sometime, maybe except for Rani Mukherjee's teary expression in that extra-marital movie of Karan Johar's. Best thing to do is enter a marriage with an open mind and give it your best shot without tearing your heart into bits and pieces and get out in case it is not working.

Marriages is one big package of romance +friendship+ companionship-- Okay, okay do not throw stones at me. It is merely an idea worth thinking about. I know you all married men and women do not agree. Do not take me wrong ladies, but 'some' of you almost take a perverse kind of pride in telling the world how inane your marriage has become. To be fair to the men, they actually do not publicly bad mouth their wives. Come on lets lavish compliments where it is due. Tell you what ladies this view of marriage as some kind of boxing match is rather passe. Lets move from this clichéd perception and create this evergreen image of marriage where you enjoy spending time with your partner, even if not so much as your dating days, there is still some romance in your lives and you are happy being with him. And before you start thinking that 'let this novice spend 5 more years with her husband and then we shall hear her talk'...I am talking on the basis of some couples who have been together for more than thirty years. There something to ruminate over.

The list can go on and on, but time I stopped.

P.S. All the images are taken from the ever ready supply of google image search.
Disclaimer: Husband dear I love you very much, really I do!

House Cleaning...

I know it is spring time and all, but no I am not talking about spring cleaning. As far as I am concerned, that is an added chore that I am not interested indulging in at all.  I am talking about normal day to day cleaning of one's house.

We live in this small  ground floor flat which has an abnormal knack of attracting dirt and rubbish. |I wonder how all that dirt comes into the house? The windows are all double glazed and sealed up cos of the cold, the back door leading to the garden is kept open for an hour at the maximum every day and the front door for as long as it takes for us to pass through it, either way. It is almost like there are secret doors and windows which magically open up to let all the dirt and rubbish come in from outside while we are sleeping. I abhor to think of the dirt drifting in during the summer months when we will have to keep the windows open!

Phew. I never knew what a mammoth task it is to keep a house clean. To add to the agony, my husband is happily oblivious of it all, while I am ultra sensitive, so it has become my pet domestic chore( read pet peeve in life). Another part of growing up which I never bargained for and truly am not ready for. I love shiny and squeaky clean houses but I hate cleaning up the house--why cannot the rooms  just behave themselves and remain clean or better still clean up their own mess? But apparently not, like the rest of the world, they also like to be waited on hand and foot. So it has become part of my daily routine to clean some part of the house or the other.

To add a little routine to the madness I have decided to be organised and systematic about it. So for each room of the house, I have designated a cleaning day of the week. Like on Mondays I do the sitting room, on Tuesday the kitchen, so on and so forth. I must confess in this process the bedroom almost always misses out on a clean -up. By the time the turn for the bedroom comes I am tired and bored with all the cleaning up. And since guests rarely venture into the bedroom (they cannot with the bedroom door firmly closed, though I am sure it would not deter our relatives in India, definitely one of the perks of living abroad!) I keep deferring the bedroom cleaning. Poor room.

So thinks my husband!

My husband is no help. Whenever I grumble about the cleaning, he says he is fine living in a 'slightly' (please insert a man's definition of slightly here) messy house and so should I be, it would definitely make my life easier. And when I demand that he should clean up for a change he gives the example of 'that one day when he did clean up'. So done his duty and for the next six months no cleaning is needed in his opinion and no nagging or complaining will be tolerated. It was how he lived when he was single and mingling with me and he sees no need to change the routine. Irritated though I am, I cannot fault his logic. It is a life style choice, I choose to live stressing about cleanliness while he thinks it is a waste of time. For marital shanti, I have to respect his choice. So it is back to me with the cleaning duster. Honestly I would not mind it so much, if  after cleaning up a room, it remained so for at least a day or two. Much to my frustration, after I have laboured to put the house right, once we start living in it, it starts getting messed up right then and there. I know this may sound verging on the obsessive, if I had my way, after a through cleaning, I would quietly stand on one corner of the house, so as not to disturb the cleanliness. Another idea my husband dismisses so firmly that I have to but helplessly watch him mess up the very kitchen which I have slaved to put right.

Another thing which irritates me is after returning from office, when he fails to notice how clean a certain room is looking. I mean come on when he left in the morning, it was not that clean but now it is almost sparkling. So any sensible human being would stop right there, take in all the cleanliness and shower the cleaner with compliments, right? Whenever I go to a clean house I always compliment it. In fact my estimation for the people living in the house positively goes up. But no, this man is oblivious, he just marches in, fails to notice the subtle changes, and continues to be so till I point it out to him! Okay truth to be told compliments about a clean house is as vital to me as compliments on good looks are to some women. There, I have confessed it!

Had I not inherited my cleaning obsession genes from my father I could have at least blamed it on gender. But alas cannot even do that. But I firmly continue to believe that with a little bit of practice each of us can fit in cleanliness into our regular routine.

Disclaimer: All the images are taken from Google's image search.