Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 26 February 2018 | Page 45

OX OF CHOCOLATES
enjoy some and barely tolerate others as you learn to become adults together.
youthful enthusiasm of fighting like equals and
start faking agreement with each other, just so that
the other will leave you alone to do things your own
way? Perhaps now being married can also mean
being free, like our parents had promised when
they asked us to postpone our right to basic human
liberties till we grew up and got married.
My aunt tells me that her marriage to her beloved
husband really found its home when their
daughters had got married and moved to other
countries and her in-laws had passed on. She glows
like a bride even as she talks about her knee
replacement surgery. “Your generation has no
patience,” she says. I save up the same sentence for
the generation after mine. I am prepared to be
judged, just as I judge my own aunt.
I have friends who are doing a great job of being
married to each other after they have been sepa-
rated and finally divorced. They share childcare
duties, go for family therapy together, and make
everyone else jealous of how supportive they are of
each other. Their children tell them that they have
too much in common.
Their relationship is fragile but their love is
unbreakable, I had thought about them at first. Or
is it the other way around? Their love broke, but
the relationship endures.
In the beginning, we all set too much store by
love. We don’t know how to recognise it. Popular
culture has deceived us. We betray our own expec-
tations. Nothing seems to work for too long.
Marriage was supposed to be about creating a
home, doing smart finances, travelling together,
looking good, creating Facebook albums and
tweeting secretly, right? Well, I won’t say wrong.
Its about all this and more. Often it is about less.
The first time I called my therapist for help, she
left me with words I struggled to understand. We
had moved homes, our children were very young, I
was struggling to keep things together at home and
work and I called her because I knew I needed help.
“You have to examine the structure of your mar-
riage,” she said to me.
“It’s not about my husband,” I said. “He is not
even here. It’s me, I am unable to cope. I feel so
confused.”
“Confusion is good,” she had said. “It’s like a fog,
stopping you from choosing a path that will lead
nowhere. Stop where you are. Perhaps you need to
change the design of your life.”
I hadn’t thought about the structure of a marriage
till then. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that there were
variations possible in its design. I was still a newbie.
It was a surprise to find out that there were various
routes that I could choose. I could pause. I didn’t have
to get stuck every day.
A decade later, if you give me two minutes to talk
about marriage and how we can make it work, I have
an answer ready. Put the women and the children in
the centre of the family circle, I will say. Their pres-
ence and their needs have been marginalised for too
long. This is the root cause of mental illness, of
childhood trauma, of loneliness and isolation within
our most intimate spaces. It locks us into the cycle of
domination and coercion, as men and women bec­
ome victims and perpetrators, turn by turn.
A
Put the
women and
children in
the centre.
Relegating
them to the
margins
locks us into
the cycle of
domination.
good marriage teaches us a new vocabulary. New
ways to behave. To learn to take what we need.
It makes activists out of us. Once we begin to see
how patriarchal structures and roles undermine
our individual growth, we learn to question it in soci-
ety and culture too. Our survival depends on this.
You know you are in a good marriage if everything
and everyone seems to be changing all the time.
Change is growth. It needs space. And security.
The timid one becomes ready to grow out into a tig­
ress. The outgoing one wants to reveal his most basic
insecurities. Traumas of the past return and demand
healing. Our childhood biases return like a security
blanket. We didn’t sign up for a string of surprises all
life long, and yet that’s what we find in the fine print
that’s part of this package deal called marriage.
Marriage isn’t just about being parents together. Or
about being our inner child together. It is also about
learning to become adults. It demands separateness.
Being able to go off on one’s own path without fear of
repercussions. That is part of the liberty we all need
from life. It’s the best part in this box of chocolates
called marriage. O
(The writer is an independent filmmaker and
columnist, and the author of My Daughters’ Mum)
26 February 2018 OUTLOOK 45