From being single to ’unsettled’

I fell in love with the term 'unsettled', mostly because it made me feel less heteronormative about our decision to marry, like I wasn't just giving in, that I was exercising my own free will

From being single to 'unsettled'

You could say that our wedding reception was on July 20, because we had some of our best friends over in my apartment in Delhi and, under the guise of a house party, celebrated our impending solemnisation as if it had already taken place

Rosalyn D This dispatch comes to you from Jamta, a small town perched among the Himalayan foothills, near Nahan. A search on Google will reveal a number of things one can do in this non-touristy part of Himachal Pradesh. Besides one failed rain-drenched trek; a whole lot of feasting on excellent North Indian food, courtesy the cook at Sirmour Retreat, where we're staying; reading; sleeping; and countless rounds of Watten, a card game played with a special Alpine pack of cards, famous among farmers in Tramin, we haven't done much else.

In exactly one week, I will officially no longer be a "single" woman. We have a date with the sub district magistrate of Amar Colony in New Delhi for July 31, and I will have to learn to embrace my new status as a married woman even as I find ways to subvert it. You could say this trip to Jamta is akin to our honeymoon, except we're not alone, but have my fiancé's best friend and his girlfriend as excellent company. You could say that our wedding reception was on July 20, because we had some of our best friends over in my apartment in Delhi and, under the guise of a house party, celebrated our impending solemnisation as if it had already taken place.
Though we love each other, we're both clear that if we didn't live in different continents, we perhaps wouldn't have opted for marriage, given both of our concerns with the patriarchal nature of the institution. It also pains me to exercise a privilege that isn't available to so many people who aren't heteronormative. But I made peace with it after my fiancé put it in more digestible terms. "Think of it as a sharing of citizenship," he had said to me months ago, when I found myself apprehensive about adopting this state-sanctioned strategy that could potentially open up more doors for me than it could for him.

Because I had long ago completely committed myself to being a single woman, this state of couplehood feels new. I hadn't imagined that I would so enjoy being alone with another person, which is to say, that I would derive contentment from allowing another to inhabit my solitude while allowing myself to inhabit his. I was excited to turn 34 because it marked for me a milestone moment; it meant that I had successfully resisted the repressive societal pressure to be hitched in my 20s and to fulfill my biological destiny before 35. I have this suspicion that my current state of happiness comes from the knowledge that my life decisions have been premised on a certain brand of selfishness, or rather, from my learning to assert myself in a more unapologetic, unabashed way. This isn't wisdom that is necessarily bequeathed to us by anyone, because as Indian women we are socially conditioned to believe that our eventual goal in life must be to marry and bear children and make great wives, mothers and daughters-in-law. We are permitted to educate ourselves so that our degrees can be added as credentials on our matrimonial resume, but the choice of holding on to our careers is not one over which we have much agency. I have many friends who are currently being pressured by their families to 'settle' down, and when they reluctantly meet prospective male suitors, are quizzed about their decision to continue to work after marriage, as if there were indeed a right and a wrong answer; as if their response surely entailed a consequence; one of being rejected.

Mona organised the cake for the party on the 20th from the extraordinary Mandakini Gupta who runs Smitten Bakery & Patisserie in Delhi's Shahpur Jat. We didn't have candles, nor was the cake tiered. It had one simple invocation on its decadent surface: Happily Unsettled. My brother remarked that the phrase was usually Happily Unmarried. But I struggled, in that moment of unadulterated happiness, to communicate that this blessing was coded. It had been arrived upon after a conversation between Mona and me about how this "marriage" felt like the opposite of the convention. We were not "settling down", because we actually had and continue to have no plan about where we might potentially live. We only have a sense of the immediate future and had decided to cross all other bridges once we got to them.

I fell in love with the term 'unsettled', mostly because it made me feel less heteronormative about our decision to marry, like I wasn't just giving in, that I was exercising my own free will. There is a lot to be said for marriage as an institution that has historically legitimised the oppression of women. But I'm learning that there's a lot to be said for being in a relationship of astonishing equality, where we elicit each other's consent on a daily basis, where I feel for the first time in my life the active and engaged presence of an emancipated man who is invested in my happiness and in my aspirations as a writer and an intellectual. If you've ever wondered, as a feminist, if it was possible, I can now say with some first-hand experience that relationships can in fact be greatly empowering, if you perhaps follow one simple rule of thumb — don't settle for anything less than what you know you truly deserve.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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