Marriage is a beautiful event in your life that is magical. There’s going to be the wedding just as you imagined it would be, it’s so beautiful with the people dancing and enjoying the food and people telling you you look beautiful or handsome. You have finally found your prince charming or your beautiful princess and now you’re all set to live your life happily ever after. That’s what is seen by other people because you are smiling the whole time.
Of course, it’s your day, even if it hurts, you will still love the wedding day the most. In India, mostly everything about the wedding and marriage later on is “other” people’s wishes and expectations. Basically if you are getting married, it is an honor to give all the rights of decision making about your wedding in your elders hands, as it is their only dream. Just like when you get older, you will get the honor of making all the decision and have wishes and expectations from the wedding of your children like you did when you got married! So the cycle keeps going on and on and on.
It’s not about ‘My Dream Wedding’ is more of ‘Their Dream Wedding’. So if you going for a Love Marriage; which is when the bride and groom fall in love and then tell their parents that they want to get married. The parents accept the offer made by the children but even so now it’s their part to take in their lives.
If you have not yet decided whom to marry or do not currently have a person for who you’re madly in love with and want to marry, then you’re parents have a role in finding you the perfect girl or a guy. And Perfect means, good looks, good income, good house, good family, family’s income, good vehicle, eats what we eat, sleeps like we sleep, walks like we walk, talks like we talk, reviews from mutual friends and much more.
So I’ve given you a gist of what it looks like now more of it comes.
- Engagement
Both families, be it a love marriage or arrange marriage want the bride and groom to get engaged you know so that, “The children can go out and enjoy without having people talk wrong things about them”. Yes, even if you have gone out like a million times already, but now your lives are in the hands of your elders. Also going out and enjoying with each other is just a myth. It’s more of be each others family all day and get to know all the aunties and uncles and the traditions of the family! Haha. That was a trap.
2. Wedding discussions
Now that you are engaged, everybody will only be discussing about the Wedding Day. You obviously feel good that everybody is so happy and excited about your wedding. But if you try to give a suggestion about how to want things to be done; boy are you in trouble! Even though you are getting married, you have become that old, that you’re getting married, you DON’T get to take decisions. Basically it’s more like we should keep this food, because all our guests like that kind of food, or we should hire this photographer because Aunt X said she knows the guy and she’ll be disappointed if we don’t hire him, or we have to give so many gifts to all our relatives, because they’ll be disappointed. Basically a wedding’s entire script is written by elders and the main reason is because the not so important people will either be disappointed or will talk bad about the wedding and dude we have to look good at any cost!
3. The First Year of Marriage
The first year of marriage is not always a golden one, like you see people writing statuses on Facebook. It’s so much about understanding and compromise. You fight and you make up and in the end you change. You change and you like the change because you love the person. You don’t always get to do the things you used to do before. Even if you’ve known this person for a long time before and you thought you knew everything about them; but after marriage when you’re living under one roof you know much more and then you think to yourself, you were so stupid when you thought you knew everything about him or her. Everybody has certain habits and routines and its hard at first to adjust to each others lives.
Also marriage is not just about you two. It’s about everyone involved with you. That’s your family and friends. You cannot go away and be isolated after you’re married because you want to be with that person all the time. You need to work out so many things in between.
At the end of the day, you realize all your false egos are gone and you feel proud to have worked out the relationship gracefully and all the wedding plans that your parents didn’t allow you to do were only for your benefit. Trust me you couldn’t handle everything. It’s only better to let go of things and enjoy whatever comes your way!
