A Conscious Coupling

ON THE DAY OF MY WEDDING, EVERYONE went about reminding me how everything I did that day would be the last time I was doing that thing as a single man. The week before, I’d apparently bought coffee from the shop near work for the final time as a bachelor. I concluded that I’d also watched my last Slow Horses episode the previous night, unsaddled with the chains of matrimony. I considered making a list of things I would want to do one final time, once more with feeling. Shaving would be pathetic. Dialling Hong’s for thukpa would be performative.

In the end, I decided to get up and run down the stairs for a chore that wasn’t to be done by the groom, my yielding father unyieldingly declared. It all seemed like an ominous stage-managed ritual. On the way back from the store, I grew even more concerned at my fiancée’s plight. As a woman in a traditional joint family, she was obviously getting a much, much rougher deal at her place. The stinging barbs of finality and separation, even if they were cloaked as humour.

Obviously, I gave up on that half-considered list. Whatever remained of the sworn iconoclast inside me scoffed hard at the whole ceremony of it. Why did I need to do anything one final time as a single man? In a few hours, wouldn’t I have boarded the bus I had been breathing so hard to catch all my life? It was a long-haul fishbowl bus with rounded silver exteriors that would take me to Happyville, in a little town named Familyborough. Excuse my shit attempt at Donna Tartt symbolism—all I’m trying to say is, I had always wanted a life of my own—especially in the way of a free-flowing, new-values domesticity.

The suggestion of clipped freedom in that idea of finality didn’t sit well with me. And it wasn’t because I had to finally contend with the fate women have dealt for centuries in marriage—it was because of the well-meaning but sexist suggestion that freedom was my prerogative as a single male. And that a relationship could drastically change the way I moved through the world.

I grew up seated front-row in the reality show that was the erasure of my mother’s identity. It happened without drama, matter-of-factly, as she went about watering three males—including my father—from the ground up. In my adolescence, I experienced a strong disillusionment with my parents’ relationship. Adulthood arrived and my doubts about marriage as an institution intensified. I ultimately concluded that marriage wasn’t in any way essential—if anything, it was entirely avoidable unless an unpredicted storm appeared in the offing and swept you away to the shore. The unfulfilled spectre of

that future sat next to me almost everywhere—when I was idle at work, as I scrolled on my phone during breaks in movie theatres, or when scenic beauty passed me by on my travels and when an excellent passage in a book caused my flesh to go all tingly.

So when in the months leading up to the day of the wedding, astonishment was the flavour of the season, I wasn’t fully surprised. How could anybody believe that the curmudgeon who never went to any weddings could have one of his own? ‘You and marriage?’ or ‘How did you know she was the right person?’ were usual simplistic reactions that were easy to shrug off on the surface or respond with generic crap. But when it got to ‘Marriage? In this economy?’ I figured I needed to have a mental response to it. I figured marriage didn’t have to be embarrassing—on the contrary, it could be cool.

What they really meant was emotional economy. Conservatism around romance. Dating and relationships as the constantly-brought-up elephants in every room. And indeed, the times call for a radical new individualism.

How the dating terminology bank runneth over is a symptom of that. We light up ‘trauma’ and ‘toxicity’ at the drop of a hat and stub them out faster than that. Cultural commentary for women damns relationships as boring and now boyfriends as embarrassing. Guys have set out to be giga chads or gymbros. A steep rise in religiosity and traditionalism among the Indian youth has been reported, too.

In a climate like that, the first response to anyone seemingly sane signing up for a lifetime commitment like this must be shock (even if you experience it internally—because I strongly suggest not letting it show on your face). If millennials

have learnt anything from loveless marriages and broken relationships, lack of transparency and systemic patriarchy—conjugality should be viewed with suspicion.

For me, however, stepping into marriage has been a long-awaited swipe at empowerment, free will and individualism. I found it courageous to choose an old blueprint to create a new machine that will serve my needs. I’ve stepped into the choppy waters of matrimony to hold my own and interpret this institution in my own way. It’s an opportunity to reclaim for myself a dignity of safe and responsible masculinity that’s forever slipped from my hands all this while when I didn’t have the dignity to do so. It’s my own well-intended social experiment—the biggest of my life so far—to see for myself if I can do it right.

All along, the wait and indecision were just a matter of chancing upon the correct person to do it with. My wife—I agree I’m still tap dancing around that term because of how ‘unwifely’ she is—is a beautiful, funny, joy-seeking person who loves moving and staying in just the kind of frequency that harmonises with my own. Ever since we met over a year ago, she has seemed like family and someone my unique brain chemistry would find it easy to bond with. From dates to the altar and now in our home, promises have been followed through on—not out of any bureaucratic conscientiousness but because this conscience is the very basis of our relationship.

At the same time, it’s easy to offer her my gnawing need to be a better person without ever feeling apologetic about it. For the first time in my life, I feel like my instinct for care, love and service—which I had to stow beneath layers and layers of a cold, detached exterior that still exists—are headed in the right direction. With my wife—excuse me again—indulging those needs doesn’t feel embarrassing or needy.

Somebody recently asked me if I intended to ‘correct’ the injustices faced by my mother—the first woman in my life— through my marriage. I answered that I intended to use that fire to give a body to the spectre of familial bonds that has lingered with me all my life. And that’s that.

The actor Aaron Moten in a recent interview brought up something that’s needed saying for the longest time: that not many rites of passage for men remain in the modern era. And it struck a chord: us men’s lives have increasingly become—to extrapolate F Scott Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby—boats with the current, borne ahead ceaselessly into the future. Where are the watershed moments of our lives, apart from us leaving home and working in a different city or having terrible breakups?

My marriage is my rite of passage—my fatherhood, my conscription, my day out hunting. It’s the first fully conscious, responsible decision I’ve made. And I’m happy to report that buying coffee from the shop near work feels just the same. I’ve remembered to carry all the keys to work and packed lunch for my wife—sorry again—in that funny way of mine. We both love it.

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