Here’s a song you can listen to while you read this - Comment de dire adieu.
Hello there!
Writing a topical weekly newsletter is not easy. Ideas don’t come through in a consistent manner. I can go several days or weeks without any thoughts or ideas about anything related to marriage.
Since the birth of our second child, I’ve been obsessed with crafting this pristine stability in our lives - taming the chaos and perfecting a routine. Everyday looks like every other day, and you can’t tell one from another, unless you pricked it with a pin because this curated certainty is rather fragile.
Yesterday was supposed to be my writing day, but all I did was sit at my desk and stare at a blank screen, for hours. I couldn’t get a word out. This hyper-optimisation mode has possibly depleted my creativity?
Having fully blanked out of “adult” ideas, I stepped out for a walk in the hope that something might emerge. I walked through crowded areas in the hope that I could eavesdrop on some interesting ideas. I walked past parks. I lingered around panipuri carts. I surveyed coffee shops. But no, nothing happened.
I started walking back home, and that’s when it hit me.
Marriage is exactly like this - there are periods of quiet (or stability?). Sometimes you can go days, weeks, months or even years without any big spikes, negative or positive. While it’s all you would’ve craved for while navigating transitions, the quiet can be unsettling.
You start wondering if it’s okay for marriage to be this quiet.
A woman, married with a 10 year old, once told me that she and her husband don’t have shared interests anymore. They have lots of individual interests they pursue independently, while raising a family and running a house effectively, but they do little else together. At least not like they did early on in their marriage.
They have gotten comfortable being together in their independent bubbles, and the quiet sometimes scares her. Although she assured me that they’ve never been more aligned, yet sometimes, she wonders if they’re onto anything exciting at all.
Having written for over 4 years, on a wide variety of topics, I have never felt more one with my writing here, yet I have no clue what any of this writing is supposed to lead to.
I don’t know if the quiet in a marriage is a good or a bad thing, but it’s increasingly becoming a feature in urban nuclear stable marriages. In fact, the quiet enables you to focus on yourself as an individual in a marriage, which is what people these days strive for in relationships.
When I wrote about Marriage Licenses, I genuinely wondered if marriage was ever designed to last this long and if couples could endure multiple periods of stability, and for how long.
Think about it, when we invented marriage, life expectancy was around 35-40 on an average. So, even if you got married as a child at 10-15, you are at best married for not more than 25 years (which is why silver jubilee celebration is a big thing).
During this period, you end up having a handful of children, a few deaths and enough drama to keep you from wondering if your life is missing any excitement. But now, people are alive well into their 80s, being married for 50 years.
As long as you are busy with careers or raising a family or whatever it is that occupies people until their 60s, you remain rather oblivious to the length of your marriage. Once the storm has passed, you have to start making stuff up.
Why do you think people took on an arduous journey to Kashi on foot, or wandered around snakes? In the hope of dying before their spouse. That’s right. Okay, I am only half kidding (because I am not entirely sure).
But now, people go on group packaged tours to Europe instead.
The entire packaged tour industry thrives on these couples, who have spent the entirety of their marriage running on a hamster wheel, amassing wealth for children who they hope will never have to depend on it (and they don’t).
Unable to handle the long periods of awkward(?) togetherness, these couples go on group tours with other similarly awkward couples in the hope that they’ll feel less awkward. But do they?
It’s hard to tell from pictures - uncle will be coyly putting kai on his own wife’s shoulder (that too one he’s been married to for 35 years) while wearing a weird german costume and holding beer for the first time in another hand.
13-14 years in, I am fully aware that we’re not far from that.
Sometimes, when the husband and I are out on a date, just the two of us, and we are beyond exhausted (both physically and mentally), we just sit there staring at nothing, may be daydreaming or eavesdropping on other couples in the restaurant, only to discuss about them on the drive/ walk back home.
It makes us feel alive. lol.
The point I am trying to make is this - life is boring and uneventful sometimes, and we just find joy in the little things. I am a restless person as it is, so I don’t have to try too hard to find excitement. So, for someone like me, life being uneventful is a state worth aspiring for.
So, may be it’s okay that I don’t have ground breaking ideas all the time and I don’t have to pretend like I do. Such are life, and I’ll try and relay that as is, as best as I can.
On that note, I’d like to do an edition on aging gracefully in a marriage. If you’re reading this, and you are over 50 and wouldn’t mind sharing your experience of how your marriage has evolved as you’ve grown older, I’d love to learn, educate myself and also share this with my readers.
You can write me an email, or we can chat on whatsapp or we can get on a zoom call, and you can be totally anonymous, if you prefer. It’s your choice.