This is probably the first time when I have started hating facebook. Every one in 5 friends from my friend list are either married or are getting married and my wall is filled with status updates like “Engaged, in a relationship, married”.
Not so long ago I had written a post about Love Marriage where my entire clan wanted know whether I had a girl friend here in Bangalore and whether in future I will be going for a love marriage or an arranged marriage. That was the time when going by the experiences of my friends I had started believing that one should never fall into the trap of this so called “Love” because once you are in a relationship it will suck the blood out of you and your entire life will revolve around your girl and all you will think about is making her happy and doing things that makes her happy and in the process your own happiness will be lost somewhere in between these nonsensical things. Moreover such relation always comes in between friends and have the tendency to spoil the friendship. Once you are in a relationship, you will have no time left for friends, not even your very good friends. This has happened with so many people that I know and has happened recently with a very close friend of mine and in such cases it's always the friendship that goes for a toss. So basically I believe that Love Marriage sucks.
So this leaves me to the concept of an “Arranged Marriage”. I have never tried to explore this territory until now when certain factors led me to think about it in a great detail and that analysis told me that this concept of Arranged Marriage sucks in a bigger way than the Love Marriage.
To understand that last sentence we need to see how arranged marriages work in India. As we all are well aware of the 1000s of year’s of old tradition where the guys parents will select the girl and when they are satisfied with the girl, her family and her educational background etc, the guy will be shown the picture of the girl and one fine day in the presence of 100s of relatives he will get a chance to see the girl (Read - only see, not talk) and that time he will have to tell whether he is ready to marry the girl and within 2 hours he will get engaged to the girl. How silly could the process be? How can one decide to marry a girl in such a short duration?
Exactly the same had happened with a very close friend of mine. His parents’ chose a girl, showed him the picture of the girl and he got ready for the marriage. He said this is how it works and if parents are happy with the girl, why should I have an issue!! Are you kidding me !!
Now my point is how one can decide to spend his entire life with a stranger with who he has just met and not even spoken even a single word!! What if after engagement he finds out that his frequency doesn’t matches with that of the girl!! The idea of spending life with some stranger is scarier than the scariest of the movie ever made till date.
Again there are some stats present which demonstrates that out of all the arranged marriages ever done, less than 5% ends in divorce where as the number is much more in case of love marriages, but again how much can one trust the stats when we all know that stats are made on the spot in order to suite the situation.
Until now I have never thought about all this at all but now after giving it a thought I have started hating Arranged Marriage and I am not a big fan of Love Marriage either, so where does this leave me? Now one may wonder that why am I discussing such a thing now. So this is because in another year or two I would have to go through the same process that I have mentioned above and the very thought of it scares the shit out of me. Well I guess some things are best left unsaid.