To Marry Or Not To Marry

There are no more annoying things than waiting endlessly for a spouse on a shopping mission, and nobody knows that better than a husband waiting for his wife to finish shopping at the mall. Imagine a grown woman has entered a shopping mall with the sole purpose of buying just a baby lotion on the way home and returning after two hours with an upcoming friends’ birthday gift, party wear and matching handbag along with trending entire makeup kit and nothing for her bitter half but his blank credit card.

Why suddenly am I writing about his personal experience in the first place? Today something strange happened, which I had never imagined would happen soon. A friend who used to taunt me for being single made a panic call from a shopping mall’s parking lot and praised me for my decision. He has been married for the last five years and has two kids. His son is four years old, and his daughter is two years old now.

It’s hard to believe that anyone would want to spend hours upon hours in a store, but after hearing his reasoning, it seems factual. In his own words, when a wife goes on purpose to sabotage her husband’s planned dining out with his friends, the poor husband usually has no alternative but to wait outside the shopping mall, praying it ends on time and peacefully. He knows risks very well if he enters the mall, this would only end as doubling the credit card bill.

It is possible he exaggerates the incident, and it was always like this. Or maybe he is right in his remarks, and they regressed to a personality that takes each other for granted just because they have been together for so long. The truth is that relationships are never easy, and even the strongest marriages can result in unhappiness and boredom.

Have you ever noticed that some people are dying to get married while others (including some married couples) find happiness in staying single? The good news is that there’s no law saying that you have to be in a relationship (though regulatory authorities are trying hard to impose one). On the contrary, there is a law against the forced marriage of women, namely “the Prevention of Anti-Women practices (criminal law amendment) act 2011”, according to which anyone imposing a forced marriage on a woman would face imprisonment, which may extend to ten years and shall also be liable to fine of 500,000 rupees (a luxury unavailable for opposite gender).

Whether to marry or remain single is a personal question as it is a social one and should not be decided entirely based on others’ judgement. If you’ve made your mind not to get married, you’re not alone. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of the world population chooses marriage less and less each day. Marriage is a big deal. It’s a big commitment, and it can have some enormous consequences when things go wrong. If you’re not sure that marriage is for you, you should make sure that you don’t end up in a situation where you realise too late that it wasn’t the right decision for you.

In our society, the presumption is that marriage makes us happy and never getting married or living single is a fundamental failure of belonging and results in loneliness. But that could not be entirely true. A single person’s life is not something worthy for people to envy. It’s rich, full of freedom and self-fulfilment. When you control your own life, there are no limitations to what you can do.

However, if you have taken any decision reading this, hold your horses. Before choosing any option, bear in mind that according to the tech billionaire and futuristic Elon Musk, “low and rapidly declining birth rates are one of the biggest risks to civilisation”.  Indirectly making single people and other related factors liable for possible world destruction. In other words, the ball is in your court; What would you want to save? Yourself or this world? The choice is all yours!