We need to get married, it’s required, it’s unavoidable and it’s expected once you cross 25. I was raised to believe it, it’s what my parents wanted, it’s what society expected, failure to do so would be calling upon the wrath of all those aunties and uncles who have lived their entire lives “trying to make it work”. I did get married at 29 and have been married since but not because I needed it, it was because I wanted it but after 12 years of being married, I have been thinking to myself, “did I really want it?”

Getting married is an extremely complicated business, it involves mastering the complex dating and courting game (unless you are forced into arranged marriage), the never ending planning for the D-Day and rituals which need to be done and finally making it work as a husband and wife amidst the banality of domestic life.

I’m particularly not against marriage, I think committing to one person for the rest of your life is one of the boldest things that humans can ever do and to find a mate who you would be willing to commit yourself to is nothing short of a miracle. I’m against the institution of marriage that has been created by the society which spells the end of voluntary affection two people give to each other and gives way to forceful presentation of oneself that has no room for imperfection.  The biggest peril of marriage is that it takes away the freedom to give and take love freely and replaces it with a form of affection that feels contractual. 

I often hear from the older generation that they knew what it meant to make a marriage work, they somehow got hold of the magic potion that was made for a happier marriage and apparently have used it all. They blame the newer generation for demanding too much, compromising too little, which results in a high failure rate of marriages. I don’t agree with it though, I think marriages were not working before as well, it’s just that they didn’t have the courage to say so. 

Whenever I see a modern couple, at the cost of being called nosy, I still ask them, are you happy or are you trying to make it workout like the rest of us. I’m yet to find a couple who have answered yes to the former, every single one of them have listed various reasons and most of them are blaming the outside elements. Stress over money. Lack of sex. Too much technology. Too much work. Too much Instagram. Too little time. Not a single one of these things addresses any internal issue or personal accountability. I think these are just frivolous issues that we try to find so that we have something to blame but they are not the reasons that are causing marriages to fail.

I personally feel that the main reason that the institution of marriage seems to be failing so hard is because it’s an outdated dinosaur of a concept that can’t survive in the new paradigm? 

Marriage was created centuries ago as a system for men to take control over women and for women to have a male benefactor who could provide food and money. There was a need for men and women to live together as they complimented each other. Fast forward to the 2000s, women don’t need men for financial support and men don’t need women for cooking and raising babies (maybe this one still exists). 

The whole institute of marriage which involved two basic components, need and control. Take both of these components out and nothing is left from the old testaments of a marriage. People who say that they are in a marriage of love are just fooling themselves into believing that their marriage is beyond the rules of the society.  

Love is far too big to fit in the box called marriage that we’ve attempted to shove it into. Love is an emotion that transcends the flimsy borders of marriage. We live in a culture that tells us that our love should be reserved for one person and one person only, and when we choose that person, we own them, until you realize that your capacity for loving another human being is much bigger than society tells you.

Love is not a limited emotion. You don’t fall in love with one person today and then stop loving them. Love is always there, it’s just that sometimes you stop enjoying the companionship which causes frustration. Even if you find someone else to love, you don’t stop loving the person before. There’s plenty of room to love more, because your heart is a bottomless abyss. Problem with us is that we keep trying to shove love in the marriage box, we put love in borders but love is something you cannot restrain. Love works best when you stop constraining it, stop building shackles and chains to bind it, just let it flow freely. 

This is why the institution of marriage is failing on a grand scale. And this is why it will keep failing, until we change our ideas about love to match what love really is. Infinite. Whole. Unyielding.