Believe it or not, even today, over 80% of all marriages are arranged in India. They are built on the fundamental premise that love isn’t a pre-requisite for marriage, rather a happy consequence.
These alliances are optimised for sound marital operations. People used proxies such as caste, social class and family backgrounds or upbringing, in order to give couples a head start into smooth marital operations. Some still do.
I briefly alluded to the concept of marital operations in my earlier post on Hierarchy of Marital Needs. This entails building a functional collaboration to navigate the logistics of life while living together, which I believe forms the basis of healthy relationships.
This can be anything from meals, chores, work, social calendars, children and all the little everyday things that require an inordinate amount of coordination. In this edition, I’d like to dig a bit deeper into some of the aspects of marital operations because I don’t think we understand it enough until we are thrown at the deep end of it.
I will only be covering a few basic aspects here, but this list is by no means exhaustive. It can vary greatly depending on the nature of daily decisions you make both as an individual and a couple.
1. Meals
Dietary preference is an age old filter in the marriage market. However, most people seem to fixate on it at a very high level - vegetarian versus not. But this is a highly nuanced aspect of a relationship and requires further examination, especially because it features everyday, and multiple times at that.
I’ve witnessed many variants of this food debate - bread versus rice, protein versus carb, meat everyday versus not, two meals versus three, one vegetable versus the other and what not. Even if your eating habits were exactly similar, two different people may not want to eat the same thing at the same time.
These debates are not set in stone either - people change, their preferences change with age, time or location, health research changes (one day oil is bad and next, it’s sugar), etc. so, it’s quite pointless to make this debate about anything very specific.
I know couples who have evolved their own ways of accommodating different preferences. I’ve seen cases where dietary preferences change after marriage to find a middle ground, there are others who don’t change, make their own meals or eat out and there are also people who employ a cook to outsource the management.
But for any of these arrangements to work, what you fundamentally need is not an alignment of dietary preferences at any particular point in time. You need the willingness to work together on finding a sustainable solution for your differences.
Simply put, you need to talk, negotiate and arrive at a system together.
2. Chores
Today, most urban homes are double income homes, and so there’s no reason for any one person in a couple to take on all the unpaid labour at home.
However, most of these people have been raised in households where women singlehandedly managed households (with/ without help) whether they worked or not and hence, don’t have a great model for an equal marriage to look up to. So, you’ll find a whole spectrum of couples, evolving their own definition of an equal marriage.
There are couples who still live under a rock, where the woman handles all household chores despite having a full-time job. There are couples who share chores, there are couples where one works and the other stays home and there are those that have outsourced the problem to a third party.
However, despite all this sharing and outsourcing, most men still need instructions on what needs to be done around homes, so a gender mental-labour gap remains.
The husband will do the dishes if you ask him, he might find household help on the wife’s insistence or take the kids to the park if needed, but women still end up doing most of the mental heavy lifting of thinking, delegating, asking and reminding.
This is more exhausting than physical labour. But, I am confident that it will change.
3. Children
Previously, children were just born, no questions asked. But today, with growing population and increasing competition, procreation has become a conscious choice. Added to that, fertility issues are on the rise, making this an important discussion.
Whether you want to have children or not is your prerogative, but hopefully it is a view you have developed with careful consideration. As for raising them, it’s a lot more complicated today, and not just financially.
Given that there are fewer children today, parents are more invested in raising them.
Being more educated and privileged also means that children become an opportunity for us to heal our childhood trauma and make the world right.
So, unless you have two individuals strongly bonded by their respective childhood trauma, you’ll very likely have diametrically opposite views on parenting, and will disagree frequently on little and big things.
Ironically, parenting isn’t about the parents, or what they think is the right way to raise their child. It’s about what the child needs. In order to listen to the child and understand its needs, the couple needs to have the ability to listen, both independently and as a couple.
As for all the physical logistics of raising a child, hopefully you’ve practiced enough with household chores to effectively manage the burden of child rearing.
4. Work
When you’re single, you can work long hours without realising its impact on your personal life. But when you’re coupled, things get a little more complex. Your individual work-life balance (or the lack of it) has an impact on your collective work-life balance as a couple.
This gets further exasperated when you have pets and children thrown into the mix.
Where you work, when you work, how you work and how much work - all of them influence marital operations. Couples working in two different geographies have the additional complexity of coming together in ways that work for both.
I know couples who’ve been able to individually strike a healthy balance for themselves, and collectively it benefits both. There are couples where one person’s work is intense, erratic and spills all over the place with their partner having to pick up slack on everything else. I know couples where these roles alternate. I also know couples who work together and find this balance together.
Whatever the arrangement is, if not sufficiently discussed and effectively managed, this can lead to a lot of pent-up frustration in the marriage, an unnecessary drain on the couple’s energy. This also deeply affects children.
5. Lifestyle
Two individuals in a couple could have similar lifestyles or wildly different ones. One person may be a lavish spender, while the other might be frugal. One could be a compulsive “going out”er, and the other a home body. One could be a fitness junkie and the other, a baby seal.
People complain about differences in lifestyle within a marriage as if it were a bug. It could very well be a feature. Think about it - what are the chances that two people will always align on every single decision? Close to zero.
Some decisions are more complicated than others - which city or country you want to live in, whether you want to buy or rent a house and so on, for they tend to have a much larger influence on your collective lives.
A healthy marriage isn’t one where the partners are exactly alike, it’s one where you recognise and respect the differences and can still make it work.
If you have strong diametrically opposite views, it may take a lot more conversations to arrive at an amicable decision that works for all parties.
But if you find yourselves having elaborate discussions on almost everything and struggling to arrive at any sort of consensus consistently, you may give up and pack off too. It’s quite easy to do that today, and unfortunately, its become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which means some marriages end up dying even if they really don’t have to.
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As you can see, what any or all of this needs is communication and a willingness to work together, because it is impossible to always be naturally aligned on everything without discussion.
In order to run smooth marital operations, you need a few basic processes in place - ability to listen, recognise and acknowledge differences, ability to peacefully and effectively negotiate with one another about your preferences, and jointly arrive at mutually beneficial outcomes.
This may happen at an individual decision level or may level out over multiple decisions, and every couple evolves their own template for doing so.
However you do it, running sound marital operations is the foundation of a healthy relationship. It’s what helps couples develop better communication, in order to address juicier topics such as intimacy, boundaries, freedom and so on.
You can’t possibly be best friends with a flatmate who steals your food or leaves their mess around the flat. Developing a functional living relationship is basic.
Marriage and co-living with your partner, is no different.
What I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:
Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian: Given that I’ve just started documenting my own travels, I wanted to read this travelogue across the Indian coast. Being a recent fish eater myself, I'm enjoying learning more about fish.
Therapy: This is a nice piece on how therapy can be a tool in coming out of denial.
Travels in Tamil Nadu: Writing specific genres has been interesting so far, wrote about my recent temple trail across Madurai, Chettinad and Tanjore.
Cunk on Earth: This British mockumentary is absolutely hilarious. Diane Morgan is an absolute rockstar. I’ll file this in the same genre as Mindry.in.
Indian Matchmaking: Finally watched Season 3 of this show. It’s fair to say that this show might not get another season from Netflix. With such a small pool of participants, and the problem statements getting repetitive, the show isn’t as entertaining anymore. To be fair, the problem isn’t with the show, it’s with the market.
Made in Heaven: I don’t know if these OTT platforms encourage exaggeration of normal life, but it left me wondering who leads these types of lives in reality. While there may be people who lead such lives, I wondered if these shows pretend to mimic a much larger population than is real? Every aspect of the show seemed like such a caricature, but in a relatable way.
Shapely Gal song: Hope by The Chainsmokers and Winona Oak.