Marriage and its many perplexities
By: Maria Sohail
Tags: Southeast Asia, Reflections, Marriage, Weddings, Society And Culture

If you are of South Asian heritage, I bet you have spent a considerable amount of time at weddings. Despite weddings being a one-day phenomenon in most Western countries, in South Asian culture, the wedding is the culmination of months of pre-festivities. From the Dholkis, Mayoun, Mehndi, Barat, Walima, the events simply never end. Despite my appalling familiarity with weddings, I have to admit that they have always made me uncomfortable and been the source of much anxiety. I recently figured out why.

I truly believe that marriage is the union of two human souls, however, I often find weddings to become ridiculous shows of ego. From having the highest attendance of people at your wedding to having the most extravagant venues, I have seen one-too-many-times a wedding become a method of showing off wealth and competing with others for social status. If a wedding was a true representation of what I believe a marriage to be, then impressing attendees with materialistic-superficialities under the pseudo-narrative of love would be something of a rare occurrence. Do I really need your validation? Marriage makes it easier for society to categorize you where you are in your journey to love. However, if marriage is truly about the love shared between two souls, I have trouble seeing why it even needs to be legitimized by religious and legal institutions. I truly do believe that my love only needs to be validated by my significant other and no one else. I would rather work towards a life companionship rather than feed into the façade of a marriage. Too often we are exposed to a glamorized version of marriage where you spend your most beautiful moments with your significant other. However, this image fails to account for the many obstacles that come in the lifelong journey of getting to know your partner. Often when our expectations of marriage do not align with our reality, it can result in a heavy cognitive dissonance that may ultimately lead to unhappiness. This is why I prefer the term “life companionship”. This term better accounts for the evolutionary nature of a relationship and does not assume our wedding day to be the pinnacle of our love story. The failure to prescribe by the emboldened image of marriage has historically led to the marginalization of those couples. Society often prescribes a picture of what it means to be married. This often includes a woman and a man dating, becoming engaged, getting married, and then having children. However, the unique nature of many relationships do not fit into such a mold. Lets take the example of same-sex and polyamorous couples… Both have historically been denied the sanctity of marriage by religious and legal institutions. For some couples, this lack of marital status has resulted in their relationship being invalidated by society. Often it has more grave consequences such as being denied legal rights that would otherwise be provided to traditional couples. Some of these rights can include not being allowed joint adoption or foster care, joint filling of taxes, spousal privileges in court cases such as the marital confidences privilege and the spousal testimonial privilege, and tax-free transfer of property between spouses. These are just some of the many ways where the divergence from the “traditional” image of marriage results in marginalization for some. The narrative of marriage is often used as a mechanism of social control for couples who diverge from the prescribed image of the institution. Marriage often pushes roles on its constituents. These include being a “wife”, who traditionally embodies a domestic role and is recognized for her reproductive capabilities, and a “husband” who is mostly known to be the primary breadwinner of the house. Aside from this perpetuating sexism, it does not account for the uniqueness that individuals bring into a relationships. Nowadays we are seeing more individuals diverge from this prescribed image. Some examples include couples choosing to not having children, having children out of wedlock, or husbands who choose to be stay-at-home dads. However, these couples who embody a more unorthodox meaning of marriage are often subject to criticism for not abiding by the traditional narrative of marriage. I have noticed often that there is little tolerance for people redefining what a marriage means to them, instead society often pushes their narrative of what it means to be married. Often times when a marriage fails, you are unfairly chastised by society (especially women)! Marriages end for many reasons, including valid ones (abuse, adultery, etc). However, despite the validity of ones’ claim, the label of “divorcee” seems to plague its constituents in all aspects of life. This is heightened in the experiences of some South-Asian women who often return to their paternal household post-divorce where her self-worth is perceived to have declined due to the loss of her virginity, household, and inability to maintain a marriage. This one-dimensional view of value often leads to women remaining in unhealthy marriages to avoid such stigmas, allowing themselves to be collateral in the process. The institution of marriage has historically perpetuated sexism. Aside from the roles marriage pushes on couples as previously discussed, it embodies sexist ideologies and practices. Starting from the wedding, practices such as the father handing off the bride to the groom, the women wearing white to signify purity, and even the women and her offspring taking the man’s last name create a sense of inequality. Aside from this, the institution of marriage has historically condoned domestic violence and rape within marriages as well. Despite there being progress and many individuals working to free the institution of its patriarchal history, its roots shine through. It makes me wonder: is partaking in marriage also being complacent with patriarchy?

These are just some of the many questions that linger in my head perplexing me about the deeper connotations of marriage, how deeply embedded it is within our society, and what it means to partake in it. This then leads me to wonder: do you work to redefine such a flawed institution, or should you abandon it altogether?