Thursday 28 Mar 2024

A race to the altar

-Charlene Farrell | JANUARY 18, 2016, 12:00 AM IST

Photo Credits: pg 2 column

Weddings are such a fabulous experience. All the romance in the air, the music, the traditions, the dancing and the scrumptious food. The fun and frolic that comes with the whole process of two individuals, and thus their families uniting to form one are memorable moments to keep and capture for life. Yes, we all love those weddings and absolutely everything that comes with it. What we tend to let slip sadly, is that, what really matters comes after the so called ‘big day’. A happy marriage is the ultimate goal and not finding the perfect dress, the perfect hall, the perfect food and other such perfections that cloud the way to the finale.

At a certain age, girls and boys suddenly find themselves bang in the middle of the crossfires of all the ‘experienced’ wives and husbands in the vicinity. People crawl out of the woodworks from all directions the moment the poor soul reaches ‘marriageable age’. One day you are enjoying the questioning that revolves around career and goals and suddenly, as if an apocalypse has taken place between the previous sleeping and waking time and suddenly you have metamorphosed into a bride/groom in the making. It creeps up on you so suddenly that you haven’t even had the time to imagine yourself as a spouse. If you are among the lucky few to have already met the girl/boy of your dreams then the journey is slightly easier. If like me you haven’t, my oh my, are you in for a treat. The early twenties are not such a nightmare. There is still time or so it seems. You meet a few prospective mates, maybe try to gel a bit, chat, talk, go out, if it works great!! If it doesn’t… we start the process again.

As you progress in age however, things start heating up!! Suddenly you are racing against some imaginary clock which is ticking at an alarmingly fast rate and with every moment that passes, for some reason you become less desirable! Imagine losing your desirability by the day!! As you advance in age, another warning you get is, all the good guys will be gone if you wait any longer. With that realisation a lot of hope also gets lost. Clearly if you aren’t married by the time you hit your thirties there is definitely something horribly wrong with you!!! Or so they say. Here my dear friends is where reality turns from amusing to the downright unfair. We live in a society where pure hard work and excellence plays second fiddle to marriage. As a woman, here are a few questions I get asked quite frequently… What good is a great career without a husband? How long will you go on ‘like this’? When are you going to ‘settle’ down? Now that you have done what you wanted don’t you plan on taking it to the next level?

Firstly, I have absolutely nothing against marriage…In fact, I think it would be great!! The issue I have however, is that our ‘well-wishers’ only see our careers and how hard we have worked as something transient, something we are occupying our time with before we find our Mr/Ms. Right and actually start living. The mentality that exists needs a modification. Times have changed drastically. With the times, so have the opportunities. Parents, this is directly for you. You do not spend your time and energy educating your daughters and watching them grow, so that by a certain age you can bundle them up and send them all new and shiny to another home. Marriage is a beautiful union between two hearts that will grow in love as the years go by, that could lead to bigger families that will grow on the basis of mutual love and respect.

We ought to stop making the whole process painful and awkward. Let things work at their pace and trust that your offspring have been brought up well enough to make the best decisions for themselves. Yes, we all need a helping hand sometimes. Not all of us have the ability to go out and mingle freely. Setting things up is great, but going the obsessed rout is going to make for a rocky journey up ahead. What is really important is the fact that the bonds you try to create are lasting and complete. Just putting two people together for convenience sake and because they have a few unrelated things in common doesn’t really guarantee lifelong happiness. Lifelong happiness comes from trust, understanding, respect, openness and plenty of those core features that come when decisions are made with a clear heart and mind and not when you are running at the speed of light in a pointless race down the aisle to the alter.

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