How to make Marriage work? - Lesson:2

Our Paradigms about Marriage - 1

Paradigms are mental maps which drive our actions. Let us look at few paradigms about marriage in this post. 

For some historical reasons the society believes that 'Men are stronger than woman' and hence they should dominate and control them. This is evident from the joke "Marriage is the costliest way to get your laundry done!" This is ridiculous in my opinion because it indirectly implies that the women are supposed to wash the men's cloth. When I was a irresponsible bachelor my mother used to say "This fellow will become alright once he is married and after all who will look after him after my days?" Can you see the rider in my mothers agenda? 'Look after' which means cooking food, give birth to my child and wash my clothes !! Alas, someone did not produce a 'Girl' child for my slavery. In reality women are stronger than men; may not be physically but emotionally and many times intellectually. Let us take few areas to prove this paradigm wrong.

For some unknown reason nature has decided that woman will bear the child and the poor lady carries that little one for 9 months which is the result of few minutes of pleasure for the husband! After the baby is born, she sacrifices her sleep, comfort etc and looks after that baby for 24X7. When the guy waits outside the maternity labour room to see his baby and the moment that "Chintoo" is handed over in his hands, he keeps it for less than a minutes and immediately hands over to the midwife. He does not realize that his wife carried that baby for nine months!!

Just imagine for a while if the nature has decided that the first baby will be delivered by the wife and the next one by the husband, in this world there will be only one child for all families! Alas the very idea of carrying the baby in the stomach and the delivery pain is frightening for the men of this World!! If the guy cannot hold that Chintoo for more than a minute how he will carry the same in his belly for nine months? Now tell me who is strong, Men or Woman?

If you carefully study men of all ages have attempted to abuse the interest of the women - be it dowry system or child marriage or forced to shave off their heads after the demise of the husband or forced to enter the pyre of the husband and so on. In most of the custom the woman has to be tied a Mangalsutra (a rope tied around the neck on the day of the marriage) as an ID that she belongs to a man. Why this should not be applicable to men by some ID? Is it not a sign of a slavery because one human claiming rights on the other?

Let us deal with these paradigms one after the other because if there is no "Paradigm Shift" there is no improvement in the quality of married life.

Jai Gurudev
Love
NC