The thought of getting married should be something that should only come to you when you are ready for it, when you know it’s absolutely the right time for you to settle down and that you’re okay with sharing your thoughts, personal space and emotions with someone else. That someone else should be the one with whom you can connect with rather than them being poles apart from your personality.
Getting married just because ‘you should’ and that ‘no one will desire you just because you’ve crossed 25’ shouldn’t be the reasons of tying the knot and walking down that lane. Marriage is synonymous with compromising and it should be done by both the parties that are in question and not just with one, however in most parts (actually in all parts of our country) it is only expected by a woman to do all the compromises, which at that point becomes ‘sacrifice’ instead of the latter.
Now coming to the aspect of just getting married, here in Pakistan the whole process of trying to find a suitable mate for yourself is a tiring and gruesome experience, where girls who are nowhere close to being mature enough to make decisions on their own, are expected to bear children and raise them into respectful adults.
The whole process of proposals flooding in and almost all of them rejecting you on the basis of how much melanin your skin produces, or how much adipose there is in your body or how stout you are, you are deemed imperfect for their son, it seems as if we had the opportunity to design ourselves before being born. But the most dreadful of them all is the part where these rishta aunties judge you as soon as you walk into the room, assessing you from head to toe as if you’ve somehow sustained physical injuries from an accident and she’s checking for signs of damage. She’ll check everything starting from what makeup you’re wearing to the length of your waist to the size of your feet.
Now the real struggle starts when a girl is approved by someone and she does not think it’s the right person for her or the right time for that matter, but according to our parents, ‘what does she know? We know what’s best for her’ which can be true in some cases or maybe completely wrong in others.
I remember when the same happened with my sister this is what I wrote in an email to my friend describing how things were going on at my place, a little excerpt from it is as follows,
“My sister is on the verge of tears these days as some ‘family’ liked her a lot and she cannot take it, she’s out of her mind and is devastated, I didn’t do much to help her and just indicated the obvious, ‘You need to pack your bags sweet sister’, for some reason she didn’t take that very well. Who is to blame her? If I was in her shoes I would’ve probably felt insecure and scared as well, so when I realized nothing could be done about the situation I had to sit down and talk to her ‘Woman to woman’ as to how it’s all in her head and all the other stuff that I have always debated on and would never settle for myself, explained to her like it wasn’t such a big deal; hypocrisy reaching the roof and beyond it.”
Disclaimer: She is now engaged and the people are very nice. She always was the luckiest in our family.
So all in all concluding, I just want parents to take a deep breath and maybe sign up for yoga classes and not think about getting their kids married every second of the day, it is not the only thing to think about, there are far greater things in life to look forward to, marriage sure is a part of life but it’s not all of it.
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