Love, Freedom and Delusion

Or the perils of exercising freedom in a half-changed world

Or the perils of exercising freedom in a half-changed world

In 1940 and the midst of widespread hand-wringing over rising divorce rates, French social critic Denis de Rougemont published Love in the Western World, laying the blame for this modern disease on the concept of the love marriage. To make ‘marriage’ synonymous with ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ is sheer folly, he argued, and more so when the decision to get and remain married relies on individual choice than economic or religious “compulsion.” “Romance feeds on obstacles, short excitations, and partings; marriage, on the contrary, is made up of wont, daily propinquity, growing accustomed to one another,” De Rougemont wrote. Eros requires absence, and marriage, our abiding presence. The futile effort to fulfill the antithetical impulse for stability and passion dooms us instead to a continual state of discontentment.

It is tempting in our middle age to embrace De Rougemont’s thesis, to attribute the many unhappy love marriages of our generation to the romantic delusions of youth, and our present-day dissatisfaction to its lingering effects. Yet a closer look at some of the tales of love gone awry reveals not the pitfalls of infatuation but the perils of exercising freedom in a half-changed world. In a number of cases, premarital sex—still fraught with middle-class disapproval in the early nineties for women—often served as a cattle prod pushing ambivalent lovers down the aisle, societal and parental pressure adding to the sense of inevitability.

At first glance, Ragini’s story is the stuff of Bollywood melodrama: a young girl from a deeply religious, wealthy Hindu family falls in love with a self-made Muslim orphan. “I’d always assumed I’d have an arranged marriage,” she says. Despite the party-hopping with numerous male friends, she was careful not to cross any line that would violate her traditional upbringing—until she met Bashir. They met at work and drifted into a friendship that would eventually turn sexual, but with little discussion of the future.

When her parents inevitably began to look around for a suitable boy, 23-year-old Ragini baulked, unwilling to sacrifice her liberated lifestyle to the demands of a traditional marriage. Marrying Bashir became the only tolerable option, but for reasons far from romantic. “I was still not sure if I was in love,” she says, “ But he was really passionate and took great care of me. Two, I could be me with him. I wouldn’t have to change. And most important, he had no parents. A lot of my friends were going through in-law problems.” Besides, now that she’d slept with him, her marital prospects seemed a whole lot murkier. Her seemingly prosaic decision—based on a-year-long courtship—would soon seem naïve and deluded, disproved by the reality of marital life.

A number of love marriages in our generation were less a blow against tradition than an acknowledgment of its power. Dilip proposed to Shruti when their three-month relationship resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. “She was pretty, very smart, and now pregnant,” he says. “I had to get married sometime, so why not to her?” Malik loved his traditional TamBram girlfriend, but had not contemplated marriage until her parents started bringing boys home to see her. “She asked me what I was going to do about it. So I said, ‘Fine, let’s get married,’” he says. “And we had the wedding two months later because her parents insisted. I still feel like it would have turned out differently if I had time to think about what I was doing.” Seema lost her virginity at 17, married at 18, and is now getting divorced at 40. “I tell my mother it’s her fault and the values she raised me with. I felt I’d committed a crime and had to do the right thing,” she says.

Conventional wisdom today holds that the sole difference between a love and arranged marriage is the method of selection. However you come to choose your spouse, the trials and tribulations of matrimony remain the same. Yet when we marry for love, we don’t merely choose but are also chosen. Whatever the real-life exigencies that pushed us down the altar, we cling to the idea that our spouse chooses to be with us for who we are, rather than our ability to play good husband or wife. When things go sour, the sense of betrayal in a love marriage is more urgent and personal.
“She loved me as long as I was the hotshot earning this big salary. Everything went bad the moment I got laid off,” Dilip says, his disillusionment compounded by his parents’ tacit lack of support. “My father basically said, ‘Why should she care about you when you earn less money than her?’” Others felt displaced by their own children as they became the sole focus of their spouse’s affections. “I had to fight with the girls for his attention,” says Ragini of the once-devoted Bashir. Rejection is the Damoclean sword of a love marriage, looming large over the best of relationships. “I don’t care if my husband doesn’t do the traditional male things, like taking care of the finances,” says a friend. “But when he says, ‘oh, this is your feminist crap’ because I expect him to put away the dishes, I feel very hurt. This is who you wanted to marry. How can you not know me?”

The complaints of unhappy spouses of either variety are, however, remarkably similar: the emotional disconnect, lack of communication, and an enduring sense of disappointment. For better or worse, we were idealists who believed—in our various muddled ways—that ‘marriage’ would nurture ‘love’ and offer a sustaining ‘happiness.’ Whether or not we knew it, we were the first generation of true individualists. Our inner self gained significance, as did our subjective assessment of its wellbeing. Self-awareness, self-fulfillment, self-esteem, or lack thereof, became the source of our greatest joys and sorrows. The chequered marital history of my generation traces our embrace of personal happiness as a meaningful life goal, and the effort to seek it in our closest relationships.

Logic suggests that the new generation of twenty-somethings face an easier road; the iGeneration coming of age in the Me decade. Yet this now untrammelled focus on the self has led not a greater idealism but a market-inspired pragmatism. Touting the return of the arranged marriage, an article in Femina urges young women to “outsource” the search for Mr Right to their family. Vijay Nagaswami’s bestselling book The 24×7 Marriage warns against settling for a “sub-optimal relationship,” claiming that young couples “need to understand that, just as in corporate life, smart work yields better results than hard work, so too is the case in married life.” ‘Efficiency’, ‘results,’ ‘productivity,’ ‘criteria’ are the new buzzwords of matrimony-speak. But is the made-to-order marriage made for happiness? Or is this 21st century brand of realism merely a recipe for a new kind of marital disaster?

About The Author

Lakshmi Chaudhry

Lakshmi Chaudhry has worked at or written for almost every liberal rag in the United States, from the Village Voice to Salon.com to the Nation. She currently lives in Bangalore where she's working on getting a life.