Can you believe it- a girl from our colony came back to her parental home just a week after her marriage. Her justification- ‘The boy and his family have no class and they had cleverly hidden this aspect before the marriage. I can’t spend my whole life with such losers.’ Marriages and even live-in relationships are falling apart as routinely as governments in banana republics. Some couples continue to lead loveless lives with each other because of family and societal pressures or if one of the partners is ‘turn the other cheek’ types.
At the silver jubilee anniversary, the wife is often heard saying in private, ‘I am a superwoman because I have carried on with him for so long. Any other woman would have divorced him long ago!’ The much-maligned saas bahu conflict (overt or covert), depiction of which made Ekta Kapoor laugh all the way to the bank, can’t be implicated in all marital discords because nowadays many couples are staying away from the parents. But the ‘me, my’ attitude has become so prevalent that even a disagreement over the temperature setting of the AC can lead to tu tu main main. In the schools, kids learn who fought whom in the battle of Plassey but they are not coached about how to win friends, retain friends or to cool down someone boiling with rage. Mothers often pamper the boys to the extent that they are incapable of doing any chore except making Maggi noodles. Many daughters are brought up as ‘papa ki pari’ and they start behaving like a celestial creature. A newly married girl was told by her mother-in-law, ‘Just think of me as a substitute for the mother you have left.’ Pat came the reply, ‘That would be a disaster! I was taking lot of liberties with my mom!’ In the super hit comedy serial, ‘The Big Bang Theory’, Sheldon, the nerdy scientist, has a written ‘relationship agreement’ with all his close friends. This seems laughable but the concept can be applied in a modified form for marriages. We have a multiple page agreement for opening a bank account or even downloading an app but while finalizing our life partner, we leave too much to assumptions and kismet. Some even label marriage as a lottery. Instead of discussing whether doing French kissing in the pre-wedding shoot would violate our sanskaar, the couple should be focusing on the potential sources of conflicts and the ways to pre-empt them. They could even rope in a marriage counsellor and then stick with him or her till they celebrate their golden jubilee anniversary. ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is still possible- but it will not happen solely on the basis of Ishq wala love!