There is one great place where we wish, we all would
like to be, but nobody can really be at that place in whole life time. That
place is none other than our parent’s
marriage! Right today, 13th of March, 27 years back, my parents were
getting married and today is their anniversary. So I have complete right to
finally talk today about marriages.
Earlier whenever I use to talk with my friends, the
topic usually use to be about movies, studies, software, downloads etc but
now-a-days, trend has got changed. Now any time, when I talk with old friend,
the topic is none other than ‘marriage’. List of questions would go like this,
who got married?, who is going to get married?, whom are they marrying?, where
is the marriage?, who attended?, love marriage or arranged marriage? Brilliant
question!
So the question stuck to my mind, which is better,
love marriage or arranged marriage? Personally, I would encourage arranged
marriage is the best. The reason/conclusion is very hard to summarize and very
much personal, but I’ll try my level best to convince with my thoughts, which
may be completely wrong. These are purely my own personal thoughts and won’t
criticize anybody or meant to hurt anybody. This is a clear disclaimer before I
begin further.
Marriage is something which will freak out everybody
out of their mind. Probable reason might be that, the one whom you are choosing
and getting married will be the person with whom you have to survive and spend
rest of your WHOLE LIFE. OMG. To write this sentence, I’m freaking out, how
would generally people chose suitable person and get married!!! Ufff…. Hats off
to those who crossed this freaking thought and are married and leading a
wonderful happy life.
According to me, love marriage is something where SHE
believes that HE will change after marriage and HE believes SHE will never
change after marriage and get married. After so called love marriage ultimately
both get disappointed. No offense to anybody please :)
I may not have experience about life after marriage,
but I believe and am 100% sure (trust me, because the whole blog is based on
this point) that you’ll have to face hard or unbearable habits, secrets,
attitude towards several things, attachment towards several things etc etc of
your life partner that will be intolerable for you and might have never
imagined or observed before marriage. These are the things which if not taken
care appropriately at appropriate time, might lead to serious issue like
Divorce! The key point over here is that the above point is true irrespective
of whether it is love marriage or arranged marriage.
Ultimately you have to try to modify them or should
get adjusted to it. Few cannot even get adjusted nor they succeed in modifying
and finally fail in marriage. I personally conclude the reason why they cannot
adjust or fail to modify depends on whether it is a love marriage or arranged
marriage! In this context when I mean love marriage, it is the one where two
people decide for themselves without parents wish and get married. Arrange
marriage is the one where parent’s wishes are involved. That’s all. Don’t take
too much meaning of what I mean here by love and arrange marriage.
Have you seen Anniyan(Aparachit) movie or
AaptaMitra(beautiful kannada movie). These two movies teach several things and
one among them which I want to share here is, “To understand a person
completely, you need to know person’s background perfectly”. Without knowing
ambi’s background or nagavalli’s background, it would have been impossible to
change/cure them. The most essential part is to understand the person’s
background, i.e., why he is like that, rather than knowing he is like that!
This is the key difference in love and arranged
marriage. In love marriage, you’ll be attracted towards the person knowing how
the person is. You’ll just know the person and will like them. Here you’ll
mostly not bother about, why the person is like how he is, which is the key
ingredient to understand and deal with person after marriage. You may argue
with me that, even in love, we’ll try to understand with unlimited talks over
telephone or in infinite smses about person’s background knowing why the person
is like how he is. But according to me, that’s not completely enough to know
the person fully so as to deal with him after marriage.
When you start growing up from kid-to-boy-to-man (not
making any partiality here, you can even consider the statement as
kid-to-girl-to-woman), you start growing in the surrounding by keep on
understanding the ways of life, the nature, who is god, the society, the
relationships, the interests and make out your own definitions and draw a line
of what is good and what is bad and what is grey. Your habits, your nature,
your character, your attitude etc starts developing or starts cultivating out
of this. During this interesting and fascinating journey of development, friends
& family will be around you. No matter if anybody is there or not, parents
will always be around you observing this development in you since childhood.
So it is very very important to consider parents point
of view on why the person is like how he is. In love, and if your understanding
is too strong, no matter, you might get to know the reason on why the person is
like how he is from HIS own point of view but that isn’t enough. You always
need the key factor, which is parent’s point of view also.
I don’t like those people who say, parents cannot
decide about whom I should get married. I really don’t understand why? Parents,
not at least equally, but play a role in guiding while choosing your better
half. If there is some misunderstanding, then try to convince them or try to
understand their point of view and discuss and finally come up to a decision
satisfying you as well as your parent. Respect your parents [To measure the
respect towards parent, read my blog on “Respectometer” ;)]. In the whole
history till today, nobody has come forward by dis-respecting their own
parents. Take any great person for example, I’m sure they have great respect
for their parents, that’s why they become great :)
In arranged marriage, elders will try to decide a
suitable better half for you, knowing how you are and how the other person is
and will come-up with few options. You choose one among them after knowing
complete background on how the person grew and in what situation person was brought
up from their parents, by which you can possibly guess up the nature of person
and why person behaves like how he/she behaves. By interacting more with them
in personal and understanding from person’s point of view too along with
parents, you can go ahead and make the decision to whether to tag or not with
the person for rest of your life.
I would say, why to suffer through all this cycle, 1st
making friendship, going out, feeling jealous, spending too much of time on
call, smsing, facebooking, proposing, roaming, movies, parks, hanging out, breaking
up, again re-uniting, again break-up, sleepless nights, useless infinite
thoughts and stupid discussions on imaginary thoughts etc. Waste of such a
useful precious time, money, energy and finally what may be the result of all
this? Getting married and not able to adjust and breaking-up again? Main reason
in love marriage is not knowing why the person is like the way he is. Just fall
for the person by knowing how he is! This is not in case of arranged marriage. If
you understood this point what I’m trying to convey, you can survive and sail
throughout of your marriage boat no matter what all you discover about your
life partner after marriage.
I’m certainly not telling that don’t fall for a
person/love a person because I believe it is not in our control. It happens and
then break-ups too. After this crucial period, your own definitions made up
about what is life, love, relationship, society etc almost everything gets
clear and updated! You’ll get a new way to look at life. Just thank the person
for helping in discovering and updating your definitions and move on instead of
piling-on and getting obsessed about the same person (thinking it is love).
Since from ancient times, we believed and continued
with the culture & tradition of arranged marriages and so many families and
life got settled without any issues. Since recent, when these love marriages were
discovered, we started to come up with a new phenomenon called Divorce. This
word didn’t have any meaning until love marriages were identified. These days
divorce has become very common. I’m not telling only love marriages may end up
in divorce. Now-a-days, even arranged marriage may end up in divorce. But a
survey states that, divorces are found 87% from love marriages only!
Finally before concluding, one more thought stroke my
mind. In case of love marriage, when you figure out some crazy behavior out of
the person, you’ll not tolerate and try to mention of avoiding it. But when the
same thing repeats, you will get disappoint and start thinking, earlier he
wasn’t like this, now after marriage, why is this person behaving crazy like
this? I didn’t marry this crazy person. I loved another person in him, not this
crazy person and decide to walk out of marriage. This will be the kind of
attitude in love marriage. Whereas in case of arranged marriage, the attitude
of ‘I didn’t marry this kind of behavior person’ will not come. Instead the whole
attitude will be different. Like, analyze why is person behaving like this and
if possible find root cause and fix it or get adjusted and move on. But as I said, in love marriage, you’ll not have move-on
attitude because before marriage, you thought you knew the person completely and
now he’s not the same.
After long and crazy thoughts of mine, trying to
convince what I believe, I would like to conclude that arranged marriages are
better than love marriages (please keep in mind of what I meant by these two
words in this context as mentioned earlier), but the ideal and the mind blowing
marriage according to me is, love-cum-arranged marriage, where first you
understand the person well and then convince parents and get their views and
wishing’s and blessings and finally BOOOOOM.
PS: As I already said, these are just my views and may
not be completely right. Please don’t take anything personal. Thank you for
reading till end.
