We live in an era of abundant options.
Making a single choice on thing simple or complex has never been more difficult.
One of the toughest choices you and I will ever have to make is the person you and I are going to fart with.
India is still a country of arranged marriages which finds itself split between its traditions and the advent of divorces in her metropolitan cities a traditionally western way of resolving things.
Kerala for example, one of the smallest states in India registered a massive growth of divorces in 2014 - 47,525 total. (source)
Why the number of divorces has been steeply increasing in India for the past few years?
Didn’t arrange marriage and its shortcomings exist now and decades ago too?
Before, when India was sociologically and geographically enveloped with its own traditions, there was not much need for divorces because one was simply not aware about the options.
Things were more rustic on the shore of Ganges, there was no globalization during those days, no Internet, no travel. One rarely knew what’s there, beyond the village and you had no choice but to develop feelings for the arranged person you start spending most of your monsoon days with.
But today we are super connected, we can easily escape the monsoons, and the same sweaty armpits that we’ve grown sick and tired of.
We can now see things never assumed before and we want to have taste of them. Our options have increased, including options for our life partners and the kind of life we want to live.
No wonder divorces are growing in numbers, here in India and everywhere.
The forces of tradition which forces young Indian to marry without getting to know each other well confronts the forces of choice imposed by the new hyper connected world from which we cannot shield ourselves from and neither should we.
And there is something more to it.. More education, more travel, more technology might not be the only reason why Indians divorce.
Our awareness about the possibilities of the wide open world is not the only contributor to why people who ended up in marriage prematurely, divorce.
It is the very definition of love and society that the Indian mainstream and perhaps the whole world should thoroughly examine.
The old Indian tales are beautiful and majestic with story of love between two people reaching divine proportions. Sita-Ram, Radha-Krishna, the two most eminent of them.
But do these stories truly match our genuine nature? Are they real depiction of what love is?
Can we truly confine love as a phenomenon occurring between two human beings? Is love related to sticking someone or somewhere?
At this moment in time, when our civilization is being challenged at its roots, a new vision of relationship is arising out of the dire needs of our planet. This new kind of relationship is based on partnerships united by a vision of loving service out in the world. The old paradigm saw partners retreating into one another, which led to a catastrophe in relationship building. Relationships cannot be enclosed into themselves.
We may reach out to a point of understanding that love is not a mathematical phenomenon involving exactly two people the way our societies are programmed today.
We cannot love and shut ourselves into our small love fortitude made of two people while the world is struggling. We are interconnected, we can’t escape the pain and the joy of others.
Doing so, forces us to act against our true tendencies which results in havoc inside ourselves.
Divorce as a social malady much frowned upon is just one way to manifest that havoc.
Chris Saade wasn’t the first one to speak how love is independent and beyond what two people may impose upon themselves as a social contract.
Another person, the second most dangerous person in the world after Jesus Christ as The Guardian puts it, Osho puts it very directly, as usual:
The biggest love (or Love with a capital “L”) is the love for the world, the love for creation, the love for something greater than ourselves.
The love for which we talk about when two people are getting married is a consequence of that great love if we can ever put the two as different.
We may be polygamist or may not be, we may love the whole world or have a dire need to surrender to one person, so called our second half. We may be okay to let our children have tons of parents and take care of children that are not our own.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that we need to give ourselves enough time to know whether we are one type or the other and to know the same about our partner as well.
Once can’t get that chance that necessity in an arranged marriage and in this world full of noise it is fucking different to know anything about ourselves for sure.
As said above it used to be easier to develop love for someone after marriage. However we no longer live in isolation, options are everywhere around us for better or for worse and that makes us restless.
We are not here to comment how bad or good that is but to help people confront these circumstances with an unconventional solution.
In the midst of all the buzz and mess in our lives it gets harder and harder to truly get to know someone and having a chance to spend private moments with someone is essential.
That is the legacy StayUncle a provider for private spaces for unmarried couples and one of the Top 50 Things that has happened to India in 2016.
Man is a transitory being
…said Sri Aurobindo, a great thinker and philosopher, ironically, originating in India.
Therefore we have to learn to let go of everything that defines ourselves and our current context including our understanding of love and social contracts because it is not the end. There are still more steps to walk further. We have to allow our next degree of evolution to happen.
The monkey had no idea what is to become out of it and the same force of drastic evolution is taking shape again.
Probably neither will we.
- Image credit: Law Resource India
