Embracing 2024: Modern Indian Marriage

Hey there!

We’ve completed yet another year of Shapely Gal. It’s been a good year, with over 30 posts. We have discussed some pretty heavy topics this year - marital needs, fatigue, mental health, intimacy, conflict management, boundaries, infertility, mid-life crisis and more.

The best part of writing has been this community, which has grown by over 20% this year. Thank you for reading and sharing my posts. I especially enjoy the discussions on email or comments; reminds me of the good old days of the internet.

This is my last post for 2023.

As most of you already know, this year, I made the decision to write a book on modern Indian marriage, an attempt to find a home for some of my writing on this theme. So, the big writing project for 2024 will be this book. So, I wanted to end 2023 with a note on why I am writing this book, and how you as a reader can support my writing.

The backstory

I’ve been writing about relationships for as long as I can remember - may be 15-20 years? I don’t know. I started journaling about my own romantic (mis)endeavours, loudly pondering on my feelings. People joined in the discussions through comments on my blog, where we’d collectively ponder about the matters of heart, in general.

It was great fun.

Then, unexpectedly, I found myself in a rather serious long-term relationship - with my now husband. Our relationship escalated from a first date to a proposal very quickly, and before I could fully process any of it, we were married.

In the beginning, it felt like child’s play, then it got unfamiliar, it didn’t feel like “love” as I’d experienced before. Very often, I wondered if it was love at all?

There’s a certain degree of accepted freedom and callousness in casual non-marital relationships (at least the ones where you don’t live under the same roof), which you don’t find in marriages.

The fun parts are fun, just as much or even more. But the not so fun parts of a marriage are a lot less fun. On the one hand, the fact that both of you are committed to getting through hard times together is very reassuring, but at the same time, sometimes, it weighs you down.

There’s a certain sense of pressure and urgency to fix “issues” in a marriage, unlike in a non-marital relationship because you “live with the problem”. You can’t take a break from that aspect of your life, and get on with the rest of your life, just as easily.

Unlike with my past relationships, I could never sulk and process my feelings in solitude, or through writing. A lot of couples I’ve interviewed for this book have beamed with great pride as they told me “we try not to sleep angry”.

For a non-confrontational person like me (who loves sleeping in general), having to resolve anger on a deadline (at the cost of your sleep, that too!) felt like torture. At some point, marriage started feeling like a responsibility.

So I think I developed a pragmatic approach to relationships that focussed more on “fixing things” to be able to get on with the rest of my life (and sleep on time). This practical (sometimes analytical) approach to relationships kind of appealed to some people, who then started seeking my advice in matters of the heart.

Given that most of my friends were unmarried at this point, they found my advice useful while evaluating potential relationships and partners.

I was an auntie in the body of a 20-something year old. I was quite motivated to “warn” anyone who had unrealistic notions of what a marriage entails. I sounded exactly like their parents, except, people listened to what I had to say because they could relate to me, even if they couldn’t relate to what I said.

Nevertheless, my advice often stood in stark contrast to the relationships of their aspirations, which made for interesting conversations, and hence, writing fodder. As I started sharing insights from some of these conversations on my blog, I found more people relating to them, resulting in more such conversations.

What I realised through my advisory and writing on marriage is this - most people, including myself, get married with little to no understanding of what a marriage entails. Sometimes, people have misplaced expectations, and as a result find themselves crippled with doubt when things become challenging in their relationships. This often leads to sub-optimal (if not disastrous) romantic results.

We feel ashamed when things don’t go according to our imaginary template of a perfect marriage, which is some contorted version caught between tradition and modernity. We suffer in silence. We prefer to deal with our shame in isolation, because we perceive the state of our relationships as a personal failure.

If we stepped outside our bubbles and talked more openly about our experiences, we could collectively shape a more realistic view of marriages in our modern society.

So, I am writing this book in an attempt to invite you to step outside your own relationship, learn from others and hopefully discuss your own relationship more openly, allowing for healthier romantic outcomes in your life.

Those who are already married, can appreciate their own journeys a little better; those contemplating on entering this institution can do so with a better understanding of what they are getting into; and for those interested in anthropology, I hope this book can provide a sneak peak into what marriage looks like in this period of human history.

How you can support my writing

I am very thankful to everyone who’s been gracious with their time and shared their experiences with me on being married. Going forward, as I have an outline for my book, I will be continuing to interview people on specific topics.

I will be posting requests for interviews right here on this newsletter.

Please look out for themes that resonate with you, and if you'd like to discuss them with me, share your experience or ideas, do reach out to me by replying to this email or through the comment section on Substack.

Before I go, I want to leave you all with one thought …

Every single individual and couple who is married today is building this institution, in the direction that this is headed in the years to come. So all of us are collectively responsible for our own marriages, as well as what this institution could mean for the generations to come.

No pressure.

Lastly, I hope 2023 has been kind to you too. Wish you a wonderful 2024.