Seems like yesterday, but it's been nearly two years since two of my best friends got married, within a few days. So are they happier? Marriage has its pros and cons, they say, and assure me that the pros have so far outweighed the cons: marriage gave them a sense of direction, they became more responsible, they matured as human beings—yada, yada, yada.
Interesting, this whole shebang. Back in 1970, a bunch of ultra-feminists got together and declared war against marriage. "We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage," they declared In Sisterhood is Powerful, in what was perhaps the first institutional anti-marriage manifesto. Though far form an avowed feminist, that is exactly how I felt for a long time: marriage, I thought, was basically a tool to subjugate women. I had no shortage of live examples in the society I grew up in.
Since the days of Pushpa Lal, this has also been a society suffused with communism. Marxist-feminists have traditionally seen marriage as an arrangement that supports the exchange of women by men. Marriage, as such, only strengthens male dominion. This was the type of argument that the Nepali Maoist party excelled in when underground. Short of able-bodied men, they found it convenient to appeal to the suppressed aspirations of women.
But the Maoist party was far from the succor of the 'oppressed gender'. Although most women who joined the party were single, they were soon forced to marry since unmarried women, in the enlightened thinking of Maoist eggheads, would be 'distractions' for their testosterone-fuelled foot-soldiers. Perhaps thousands of women were forced to marry against their wishes. Many of these women were under 20, the national marriageable age.
To give the party its due, there is no doubt that by enlisting women as frontline soldiers in the war against the state the Maoists forever changed our mindset of what women could and could not do. Thanks in large part to the Maoists, the number of women serving in our security forces has seen a precipitous rise after the end of the conflict.
But women's empowerment is not always good for marriage as an institution. Better-educated and career-oriented women no longer have to tolerate abuse of their worse halves. The cases of women voluntarily breaking wedlock to marry someone else (or choosing to remain single) are increasing by the day. Divorce has become common. In the period between 2009 and 2013, the number of divorce in Nepal doubled from 1,000 a year to 2,000 a year.
Labor migration has also wreaked havoc with heterosexual relationships. As Republica reported last year, in Arghakhanchi district, 25 percent of all cases lodged at the District Court these days are divorce-related; most deal with one spouse (usually male) going abroad for work and the spouse who remains behind being 'unfaithful'. In Mugu district, most divorces are result of child marriage which is still widely practiced in its villages. But it's also a generational shift.
These days many men and women of marriageable age choose to remain single because they just can't imagine spending the rest of their life with a single person. As Susan Sontag would put it, after a while it just gets so-damn-boring. "Quarrels eventually become pointless, unless one is always prepared to act on them—that is, to end the marriage," she writes in her journal entry dated August 12, 1956. "So, after the first year, one stops 'making up' after quarrels—one just relapses into angry silence, which passes into ordinary silence, and then one resumes again."
As you might have guessed, I am someone who is way too much in his head, someone who tries to dig for answers to life's pressing problems in books rather than out in the actual world. It's thanks to all those useless books I have read over the years that I have become so cynical of the institution of marriage. Two strangers coming together and in the process building a bond that is stronger than even the relationships with their parents—what could be more precious?
As my less well-read but far wiser friends like to say, marriages are most certainly not made in heaven, but nor do they have to be forged in hell. If you can find someone you can tolerate for the rest of your life, and together have some fun while you are at it, I don't see the harm.
Or let me get back to you after a year.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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