Is Marriage Dying?

Everywhere you see these days you hear of marriages breaking… Infidelity, incompatibility, selfishness are some prominent reasons that keep coming up whenever one tries to look for reasons. So then does it mean that people were made differently in the olden days? How else do you explain the marriages of our parents and elders that seem to have lasted years on end? That brings us to a crucial but uncomfortable question (which of course no one wants to answer)… Is it fair to label all those marriages as good just because they lasted? “Not everyday is a good day in a marriage and at times there are more bad days than good in a marriage… But the idea is to go on… My mom taught me that there was joy in sacrificing your happiness for others,” my grandmother told me when I asked her. And therein lies the secret! Our society till about 30 years ago instilled and believed strongly in the emotion of sacrifice… There was always a larger good that was more important than personal good… But today our society does not prescribe to this view… Everyone is inculcated with a strong drive to succeed at any cost. Anyone who does not win does not exist for the world. In such a scenario every individual has an enormous pressure to earn in abundance the only currency that works – commercial success. Is it fair then to expect humans to run a race to finish in twos? Obviously not… So self-gain becomes the most important goal. But is selfishness the only reason for breaking marriages? I don’t think so… Marriages are made in heaven, they keep saying, but I don’t agree… Marriage, according to me, was an arrangement made by human beings for a practical distribution of duties between the sexes. The duty of winning the bread went to the man owing to his physical capabilities and the role of the homemaker was the woman’s owing to her agile mind and reproductive duties… Unfortunately this tilted the scales in favor of the man because he provided the material benefits and he managed to dominate the woman for centuries. The changing times of course have changed everything. Today a woman can go out and earn money to run a house… So then why should she be saddled with the additional responsibility of making a home? The women who are magnanimous enough to play this dual role must be applauded and appreciated but is it fair to criticize a woman who is not willing to be generous? If we are going to empower women and encourage them to be independent then obviously we are going to demolish old systems to make way for new ones… And one such system that needs serious overhauling is the system of marriage. When the equations between the sexes are not what they were hundred years ago how can the yardstick of a good marriage remain the same? Everything in our society today is in transit… Sexual orientation, moral values, economic reforms… To give a simple parallel I always say, the generation before us was happy traveling on mud roads and the generation after us will see concretized, state-of-the-art roads… Ours is the cursed generation that has to trudge dangerously on dug up roads!!!