Love in the times of….

When my mother was my age, she had already been married, mothering two boisterous kids, teaching other children the basic nuances of classical music.. and so much more.At 27 she and my father had already bought the lovely ‘white house’ where my brother and I grew up. Conversely, I have spent six years, since I left home, floating from job to job, apartment to apartment, and on a constant lookout for a soulmate (I’m sure things would have looked up for me if I did not voice my strong opinions against the opposite sex so openly and within audible distance of all eligible bachelors! ). It’s true that I may be financially secure —now I can actually buy instead of rent (BUT OFCOURSE will have to pay whooping EMI’s for the next 20 years), marry and raise children, can set aside some money for my retirement too, but is my happiness quotient more than my parents at my age. I doubt.
Much to my own astonishment, I have developed repulsion towards the single status. Reasons are aplenty. I hate the hullabaloo created for a single woman. We are the prime market for consumer goods such as clothes, perfumes and shoes! Even singledom is commercialized by the matrimonial websites and the likewise..Now I ask, if my mum didn’t feel the need for any of these some 25 years back –how come I have this insatiable desire for these. They are anything but a necessity. From Santa Barbara to Friends, from Sex and the City to Desperate Housewives, stories about the hardship and evils of being a contestant in the mating game have been a sure-fire way for the media to earn cash. I ask. Why are we used as bait??!! After all, no matter what one' lifestyle may be, there is virtually no one in our society who would deny that romantic love is an objective worthy of a chase. Ha! my mom never had to face this issue.
Yet, if measured objectively, romantic love is one of the strangest notions. Although my romantic mind does not think of it as strange ..just think of the cultural traditions that date back thousands of years, the idea that young people are not only capable of going out into society and wisely choosing their own mates, but that they ought to, is very much a product of our modern, mechanized, material world. It was not so long ago that one's parents' desires were more of an influence on whom one married than were one's own wishes.What a dichotomy. But looking at my parents and their successful marriage, I don’t quite rule down the arranged marriage thing completely but when one is nearing the wrong side of 20S, things need to be questioned. No matter how one chooses a partner , how does it matter, what’s the basic difference ? I think it’s sex(or rather pre-marital sex). Sex has served as a flashpoint for those who have feared the wearing away of the "time-honored values" and the arranged marriage thing seems to have safeguarded that. But what is marriage exactly? Marriage is ideally the end result of the search for a mate—has four components: the religious, the legal, the economic, and, lastly, the intangible emotional idea of romantic love. Of these four, it is the last two—the economic and the emotional components—that have undergone the most change in the last decades. And that may answer the change in equations of my parents and my life…err absence of married life.

So here it goes, we so called young ‘snooty’ SINGLE WOMEN are now faced with the pressures of freebie romance, the pressure to remain young-looking and attractive, to keep up with sexual styles and fashions, has become overwhelming. This is disgusting. Love and romance still stay idealized and unadulterated… Marriage still fuels the eternal nurturer spirit of a woman… some things just don’t change.