Love and Marriage

All that I talk about love and marriage are from my personal experience in this month. I read somewhere on the internet that experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. It's absolutely true to me in this case. Absolutely. I began to ponder over the concept of marriage for the first time when this hit me in December 2007. As far as I understand, marriage is a necessity. The little bit of philosophy I read a while ago tells me marriage is a necessity and a duty, whether it's social, personal, emotional, or spiritual. It is a step towards higher realizations of life. Given this hypothesis, I will discuss my thoughts on this. I have seen two cultures in my life: Indian and American. The more time I spend on it thinking and hence the deeper I go, the more similarities I see, differences are only apparent superficial and shallow - they only divide people and cause disharmony among people who are not so broad-minded to see the similarities within.

Similarities are in the answers to questions like "Who?", "Why?", "When?": How do you choose whom to marry? Why should you marry that particular person? When do you decide whether or not to marry? When do you actually marry? These are the thoughts that seem to have similar answers across cultures and borders.

I will start with saying that you can marry anybody. ANYBODY. (Start the thinking process with disbelief, and build up on it.) That's true only when both the partners realize it's true. Since no two persons are alike and nobody is perfect, it means that marriage is aimed at bringing two people, who are most similar, together. But, is that necessary? Can differences be eliminated with time and harmony be achieved? Apparently not, because life is short. It will need sacrifices from both sides to make it work, because love means giving and not expecting to receive. What can bind them together? Is love a prerequisite for marriage? Millions of people who have never even known each other got married and lived together for all their lives. Love cropped up in their married lives either as a necessity or by itself. I am pretty sure they are happy with their married lives. You can't measure happiness, but you can tell it works, because happiness doesn't come from outside, but it's inside yourself - only the external world drives you away from discovering it within yourself.

When do you decide when to marry? My opinion is this: You think about getting married when you start feeling alone, because everybody else is getting married: Your friends, your relatives, your siblings, etc. Since they have their own personal lives now and they can't afford to hang out with you and spend time with you; you are left alone, and you start thinking about company for yourself because everybody else you know has company in their lives. I think this is where same sex marriages come in, since that company need not always come from the opposite sex, unless you are heterosexual, and feel the need to satisfy your physical desires. Since nobody I know is not after satisfaction of those desires, marriage is not essential in that respect: personal necessity. I think this is why some cultures have very early marriages, since people achieve puberty at very early ages, ages at which they don't even know what to think and don't even have the knowledge to understand what is happening to them.

My posts might be disjointed because I write as I think, and I can't write as fast as I think, and if I think about how to write while writing, it blocks the process of thinking itself, and it doesn't serve the purpose of writing. So, I ask you to bear with me and be patient as I learn that art of writing and thinking at the same time.

Now comes the emotional part: Is marriage a necessity for satisfaction of emotional desires? For most people it is, since they are emotional. But what exactly do I mean by emotional desires? It's the need to share your opinions, feelings: both happy and sad. This brings together people who think along similar lines: they must have the same tastes, the same culture, come from the same place, speak the same language - in short, have the same superficial attributes of life. But what I think they must have in common is the thought process. If they think the same way about life, that is enough to bring them together. All differences can be eliminated in due course of time. Of course, they can never be truly eliminated, but only reduced. Differences keep occurring in life not only in marriage, but everywhere: in your job, in your own mind, in your family, with your friends. What needs to be common to the two is the way they try to overcome these differences. That is what I call similarity in thought. But if, given a problem, there are always multiple ways to solve it. Do the differences lie in the problem statement? Or do the differences lie in the paths they take to achieve the same solution to the problem they both agreed on?

Coming to the spiritual need of marriage, I don't know if it's a necessity or not, because spirituality is in the mind and not in what you do. Can you be spiritual even if your partner is not? Should I be talking about this in the first place, since most people don't find it entertaining enough? Should I care for what other people think about spirituality? Should I write about it whether or not there are people to read this? I write because I want to share it with somebody nonexistent, when nobody I know is willing to listen to all this crap about my thought process. Maybe that is why I don't talk much and think too much. It's getting worse by the day, which I don't want to happen. Maybe I should post this stuff on some dating website when I need someone. :)

I have to read my book now, so see you later.