Editorial»
Post-marriage blues
JAN 06 - The grass is always greener on the other side. Absolutely! And when it comes to bachelor-hood and marriage, a slight variation is apt: The grass is green on the other side, and there is absolutely no grass on your side. If you don’t agree, you might just be about to go through a rare transformation.
Bachelors suffer from a tendency of idealizing marriage as a binding that blinds one to all the beauties of the world. I have seen many bachelors make that avowal during their most public moments. What is strange though is that no married person makes a statement as dangerous as that. On the other hand, bachelors, in their innocence, bask in warm, rosy thoughts envisioning marriage as a great event that can impart a sense of fulfillment and meaning on anyone’s life.
Heavy boozers think that their romance with booze will stop abruptly when a wife comes along. Those who get up late or are too lazy to take a bath or cut their nails or clean their ear and nose cavities justify their obnoxious disregard to all sense of decorum with the goody-goody thought that marriage will cure them of all their little vices.
All that is fine, with only one problem: These daydreams are good only as long as one is a bachelor. Not that you cease to have such thoughts after marriage. The fact is that, after marriage you realize how profoundly ridiculous an idealist you had been.
What rules your mind immediately after a few months of marriage is the nostalgia for a bachelor past that haunts you every now and then like a mischievous demon. It strikes married men in a terrible form: The sudden chilling out of relationship with unmarried female colleagues and acquaintances. That, combined with the realization that you have suddenly become a man bereft of ‘wild’ dreams, can be a shockingly mutilating experience.
Graduating to the camp of married men opens up for you the window ~ ~ ~ ~ into a whole new world of lethargic chitchats of married seniors, who exult in scaring new entrants with varied anecdotes of dictatorial wives, extravagant wives, cheating wives, scheming wives, ambitious wives, scolding wives and what not. The image of an ideal wife that you cherished as a bachelor disappears in the fog of these creepy, violent, frustrating stories. And you begin to wonder which of the aforementioned categories your wife belongs to.
A reasonably free man before marriage, you suddenly realize that despite your ingenuity in hiding some harmless vices from the whole world, you are bound to be caught by your wife, who evidently received top class spy training from none other than Scotland Yard. Hence, you lead a life in constant perusal from a formidable 007 in a sari. If you drink, she finds it. If you don’t, she thinks you drank in the afternoon to drive away the smell before you reached home. Either way, you are a drunkard.
Then, there are your in-laws, who constantly make sure that you are on the ‘right track’. They invite you every weekend for a delicious dinner that is sour only in one aspect: You are under a scanner throughout the dinner. They ask you clever questions, including whether you got a salary raise or a promotion. When they get the inevitable answer- NO- they tell you about a certain relative who gets promotions almost every month and earns like Bill Gates. No doubt, your wife believes every word that the in-laws say, and after you return home she complains that you are a lazy, misdirected, visionless, and purposeless animal, and that her getting married to you was a terrible mistake.
Going shopping with your wife is a scary venture. You never know how many businessmen end up silently thanking their lucks for you getting married. A wife is a voracious shopper. She spots every item in the market and can give you every reason why life cannot have any meaning without purchasing the item. With each purchase, your wallet lets out a piteous wail. But you put on a brave face in an attempt to show your wife how happy you are to throw away your hard-earned money for her.
Unfortunately, she takes your forced smile seriously and instantly doubles the shopping list. When, at the end of the tour, you are returning a thoroughly shaken man, she reminds you that she actually forgot to purchase the most necessary items, and immediately starts making plans for the next shopping tour.
The list of nightmares can go long. But my readers would require superhuman stamina to gulp all of them in one go. Let me stop then by letting you know a gem of a secret. There are two ways to be unhappy: Remaining a bachelor and getting married. It really does not matter which brand of unhappiness you go for. So, no use scratching your head over making a choice!
(The writer can be reached at <vikaspost@hotmail.com>)Posted on: 2004-01-06 02:42
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