Marriage Coupon: FirstWeddingFree
It’s a cold night in Delhi. I step out to my balcony and light a smoke. I enjoy this solitude, the feeling of calm while smoking alone in this weather. It clears my headspace. Just one last cigarette and I’ll be off to sleep.
I am going out on a date tomorrow. The girl seems pretty interesting (apart from being pretty and interesting). I’m trying not to let my expectations run away with me. Raised on a steady diet of finding the one; be it pop culture or high literature; it is very difficult to resist fantasising about the future. However, my long experience of dating provides a healthy store of reality checks that I can draw upon to keep myself grounded. Go with the flow, I tell myself despite cringing inwardly at the cliche.
My phone rings. It’s Barry! Most unusual, because he rarely calls this late. And he’s calling on WhatsApp! Lol. This better be important because I am extremely sleepy.
“Hey bro! What’s up and why WhatsApp?” I greet him (never above a bit of cheap alliteration), trying not to let my surprise bleed into my tone.
“Forgot to recharge my phone. By the way, I have decided to get married”, he says in a dull monotone, as if both points were equally important.
“That’s great bro! Congratulations!”, I say. “But who agreed to marry you?”, I grin, never leaving a chance to pull his leg.
“I hope someone does. I am on all the usual websites — Jeevansathi.com, Shaadi.com, Fabweddings.in, Bharatmatrimony.com, IIT-IIMShaadi.com, okay, not on the last one”, Barry says, almost losing his breath.
“So you’re in the market now you mean. But weren’t you going to find love first and then settle?”, I ask puzzled.
“I don’t know man. I want to settle. I guess I should be open to everything. My parents never put much pressure really. Mom is excited though. The other day, she’s like: “Beta, select someone quickly!” and I’m like why to which she says, “Because if you don’t, we’ll have to get paid subscriptions of these websites. Select someone while it’s still free!” he says wryly.
I smile. “Dude! That’s an Indian mom for you, get your child married for a discount: try the coupon code FIRSTWEDDINGFREE”
We both burst out laughing and the tension is broken.
“You sound like a changed man bro. How’s it going so far?”, I ask.
“Going okay. Not the best maybe. It can really test your patience”, says Barry, trying to sound patient. “People are more interested in the deal which they’re getting rather than the person. The expectations are sky high. I guess this is the case with both the genders.”
“Of course, it’s not a so called ‘love marriage’ after all. Is this is like an arranged setup?”, I ask.
“Sort of. More like a sanskaari Tinder. You match with someone. You exchange numbers. You talk on the phone. You meet a few times. If you like each other, you say yes. Then you get married.”
“Seems pretty straightforward to me.”, I say. If anything, this gives people more choice and exposure than the traditional process allowed.
“Just that it’s not. People I’m matching with seem more interested in my salary, MBA (or lack thereof) and stuff like that rather than who I really am as a person. This is really beginning to give me second thoughts. I mean I do earn well and I do understand these things are very important but you get my point. Also, it’s just like browsing on Amazon or Flipkart. You can put all sorts of filters. And there’s just too much choice. You end up confused.”
“What about the one you were briefly seeing? She seemed pretty chill and smart, no?”
“She wanted to travel the world, solo. She’s not really thinking of settling down.”
The irony was quite hilarious. Because in his own travels around the world, Barry had always expressed admiration for solo traveling women.
However, I didn’t think it the right time to point that out to Barry. But he was a stand-up comedian, maybe he’d see the funny side.
“Hahahaha the irony is quite hilarious isn’t it?” I asked, finally unable to restrain my laughter.
“You know what gets me thinking Sayan? That most of our lives, we just did what we were supposed to do, without really questioning why we are doing it and what we really want to do with our lives. Everyone around us is doing the same — getting into bachelors, doing masters or MBA, a job and marriage. Boom! It seems as if their entire lives, they were just prepping themselves up to get married. That’s so stupid.
I wish I had known about other important things as well. Could’ve started writing earlier. Could’ve started learning music earlier. But I was driven too much by peer pressure.
Subconsciously, we’ve just been seeking validation from our peer group, opposite gender, parents and society. We are so unaware that we won’t accept it. Honestly, is it even worth it?
Most of our friends are what everyone would consider well settled — they have high income jobs, are married, buying property, own SUVs, etc. Yet they’re fucked up. They work 16 hour work days for 5 days, then drink themselves into oblivion on the weekends. I am not sure if that’s what I want. Sometimes, they even sound regretful, not for marriage but for becoming who they are.
What do we do? How do we escape this mindless cycle? I feel I want to settle, I want a family of my own, a wife and kids. But what do I do when the people looking to get married are looking for such different things?”, Barry stopped, slightly out of breath after this impassioned outburst.
“Well, you could change your approach for one. The marriage market is just that. A marketplace. A zone where people are looking for the best possible option, at the lowest possible expense. In this case the expense is deviation from accepted norms of society.
As for the irony, it was hilarious because the one girl that you found who’ll probably share your tastes and likings, is literally off the market.
Maybe you need to go off the market. Meet more people that way instead of the marketplace. Maybe that’s where you’ll meet the one if indeed such a being exists.
Barry, everyone is in a hurry all the time. People are rushing to get into buses, trains, rushing to drive their cars into gaps. They rush into office. They rush to get out of office. Why they’re all hurrying, is beyond me. The same guy who manoeuvres his car swankily into every gap in traffic ends up swearing right next to my car in the very next red light.
“If you’ve to jump through hoops, even a tiger becomes a Pomeranian.” — Sayan Mukherjee
The five most important people in our country are — 4 log and Sharmaji ka ladka. The former dictate what our parents think, and the latter what they hold as an example for us.
According to them, everyone has to go through the major stages in life —
The problem is that our worldview is built by our upbringing. By our parents. However, our parents are children of a very different world. They were raised in an era of scarcity where security was a need.
We’re the middle children: we the kids of the late 80’s and early 2000’s. Caught between people who had a very limited straight-line path to fixed, conservative goals, and today’s #wanderers who dream of camping under the Northern Lights and vacationing in Vietnam.
We’re the in-betweeners Barry, stuck with the values of the previous generation and the sudden, explosive choices of the next. And we’ve to decide our own path in life. And that scares the shit out of us.
There’s no right answer, we can just choose to pick our own path and follow it. Be grateful for what we have, and just try to be better people today than we were yesterday.
I don’t think I’m ready to get married yet, I need to spend time with a person before I can promise that kind of commitment. The day I realised that I didn’t need to follow this, it was incredibly liberating.
It didn’t happen in a day of course. It took months. There are still times that this understanding crashes, and I feel really scared that maybe it’s too late for me. Maybe I’ve picked the wrong path, the wrong time. But I try and power on. And it gets easier. Better be alone than in a toxic relationship and lonely.
I think you’re taking marriage as a time-limited target. Just imagine: you’re going to spend 70% of your life with that person. So it is without question among the most important decisions that you’ll ever make. Better to make it right than to make it fast.
It’s not just you Barry, my friends are under a lot of pressure to get married as well. I tell them the same thing. They spend days trying on and testing pairs of shoes, or cars. These are all ultimately material and replaceable things. You can buy a new pair of shoes, or a new car for that matter.
Can you buy back your youth? The best years of your life?”
Barry agrees. I sense his mood improving. We say our goodnights. The guy takes too much stress sometimes. I think of smoking another one, but decide against it. After all, I can’t buy back the best years of my life. Maybe I should reduce my smoking.
