Growing up marriage always felt like a super adult thing to do. I’m not sure if you get what I mean, but you know adult-adult, formal shirt-pant, moustache man, combed hair type adult. Seeing marriages around me and hearing all the jokes and stories on marriage, for me it was something I wanted to stay from as long as possible and get into only once I turn 40. Life, however, had other plans.
I’ll take some credit from “Life” and give it to my wife though, she made the decision a little easy for me. Why? Well, before getting married, I knew her from nearly a decade and we were dating from around 7 years then. Sounds simple now doesn’t it? I don’t think anything in life is that simple. Then why’d I decide to get married? We had it at the back of our heads but the timing was something we didn’t focus on a lot. I wanted to earn more, she wanted to as well, sort up our house and then ease the news to the family.
Again, life had other plans. And again, I’ll give some credit to my wife. So it was Covid times, where the second wave hit and it hit hard. Shortage of hospital beds, cases at it’s peak, total chaos and between of all this, 8 of my family members admitted in the hospital including me. We were separate from each other, all fighting our own battles at different paces, and the one fighting the hardest was my father. The stress and anxiety was so much, I didn’t think some of us would even make it out alive. I quit social media, stopped checking the news, I only spoke to my then girlfriend and gave her a set of instructions. You see, I don’t like living with regret and at that time I only regretted one thing, I spent around 7 years of my life dating this girl and we couldn’t be together at a time like this, I never had the chance to live with her. So the instructions were simple, we’ll not talk about Covid, anyones health, the news, deaths, etc the only one thing we’d do is plan our wedding.
So over ~8 days that I was admitted, we spoke on the phone daily and only discussed the wedding theme, the entourage, the venue, the kind of suit I’d wear, the dress she would wear and a lot more. It may sound absurd now, but I wanted one forward looking goal then and this was it. We thought of everything, how we’ll break the news, our stay situation, the month of the wedding and so on. I was discharged from the hospital but a couple of days later my father passed away.
I couldn’t think about the wedding for sometime after that but you see that’s the time I needed my partner the most and I couldn’t have that because we couldn’t stay together. The empty room at night was daunting, the thoughts of the loss was eating me, the stress and anxiety were peaking but I couldn’t break, no chance. I figured moving further anymore without my partner by my side was stupidity. No amount of money will be enough, no house will be big enough, that right time never comes, you create it, and create we did. We broke the news at home, it was well received, it gave everyone something new to look forward too in the chaos.
We’ve been married for nearly a year now, and maybe we’re still in the “honeymoon period” as they say, but I think so far so good, I may even go a step ahead and say that this year was one of the best years of my life. Why? I travelled a lot more, my dream of showing her Goa properly happened, we could be spontaneous without waiting for permissions: hungry at 3am? let’s go for misal pav or hakka noddles and lollipop, and not just this, we planned a road trip 900kms away from home in no time and had the best time there, overall, I think we could finally be us. Ofcourse initially stay together took some getting used too, but once you have expectations set, you tend to have different issues at least, which are more fun to overcome. So if you ask me for a review of married life so far, pretty good. That’s for now though, nazar matt lagao.
But you see for me, I don’t get the whole concept of marriage, signing official papers and promises at the altar etc. It was simple, I wanted to stay with her and in a middle class Catholic Indian household, marriage is the only way that was possible, and if that’s the way then so be it. I didn’t want to fight for a live-in, not with society, not my family, not anyone, so I budged, and I’m happy I did, it was an epic wedding, one that I couldn’t even dream off. No, if you’re thinking fancy big fat Indian wedding, take a step back, in fact take many steps back, it was a sasta-sundar–epic wedding, one of the best weddings I’ve been too (just may be my bias here).
So yes, I got married a month after I turned 25 and no, its not as bad people say, doesn’t feel too soon, doesn’t feel like I left the party at 9, it’s not a burden, it’s actually a lot of fun, way more fun than I imagined it to be but all of this your relationship and decision making will determine, so don’t take my word for it.