I wouldn't want to be married ever again. I am happy where I am, who I am, and what I can do with my time, my feelings, my moods, my thoughts, my wishes, my desires for all this is up to me. Of course there are always constrains and limits, but within all the boundaries that society, my own self, my affiliations with others, my own expectations from myself I believe I am freer to do whatever it may be. They say Freedom is never free - very true. For this freedom to choose your own path, to make your owm mistakes, to have no significant other to blame and vent, to have to bear your own burden in every sense of the word - be it being sick and going from doctor to doctor, or having to make money to put food on the table and clothes on your back.
This lament of mine may sound funny to a western woman. If I or any woman have to engage in these acts of self-sustanance, where is the problem? what exactly do I or any other woman in my situation has to complain of? Haven't we been granted with a mind, and education (in my case) and health to take care of ourselves. So where does the tone of self pity come in, and hell, comes in it does! I assure you.
I love my independence. And I have reached a point in life where I think this is the way to be for me, yet deep down somewhere in the darkest most hidden corner of my heart I nurse a grudge. What grudge is that and against whom? and what injustice has been done to me is the question? I have a compaliant against a set of norms, a perspective with which I, and several other women like me grew up, and are still living; a society that instills in us that 'femininty' and 'desirability' in a woman is essential, a woman who is not wanted by men [even if the men are the worst of louts) is a woman shortchanged, a woman cheated by fate and destiny. "And by want I mean for marriage." We woman are taught from youth to measure our worth in terms of 'being wanted' or in crude terms our 'marketabilty' in a market of marital kind, instead of our credibilty as a separate intelligent human being. If we are clones of barbie doll - men will desire us. The fact that these desiring men are not to be desired back by any woman is altogether an irrelavant matter. A man, half a man, quarter of man, shadow of a man wanting a woman's hand in holy matrimony increases that woman's self-worth, confidence and acceptabilty.
How pathetic are we. And how fearful as women, that no matter how educated, successful and confident we may appear to be or want ourselves to be - there lurks a yearning, slowly burning desire in us to be wanted by a man, hell ANY man to be joined in marriage. Why so? Of course there are natural physical and biological reasons for that and very palusible ones as well. But beyond that also the more men want a woman, the better she feels about herself.
Then we come to the darkest of all bonds - that of matrimony. Not that I am embittered or perhaps because of it (who knows the ways of our hearts) every woman wants to be married. She needs the desire to be attached [be it in name only] to a man. Why is what preplexes me? the same man may give her grief, the same man she knows instinctively is a loser, yet she wants him to pop the question and take her to the alter. I am so amazed at this phenomenon, and am looking for answers which aren't forthcoming....
aye dil-e-nadan tujhe hooa kiya hai
akhir is dard ki dawa kiya hai?
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