Two young women I recently met, went on urgent trips, one after the other.
Two young women I recently met, went on urgent trips, one after the other. The first journeyed to some far away temple to pray for a groom. This after her first marriage had been a carnival of violence, sometimes landing her in hospital. The second, had asked me at dinner one night, why I wasn't married. 
Illustrations/ Jishu Dev Malakar
None of my answers satisfied her, because they were based on the notion that marriage is only one of the many things one may or may not try out in life -- a notion completely alien to her. She told me tragically that none of her romances had worked out. "I think it's supposed to be like that when you're this young," I joked.
Had it been the same for me, she asked, persisting in understanding what she saw as my problem state. "They worked out," I assured her. "Some of them by ending!" Poor girl was bemused by my cheeriness in discussing what for her, was somewhat a sign of shame.
A couple of weeks later she went off to a temple where her family had arranged a puja to alleviate this so-called problem in her life. I wonder if she had to marry a tree.
I felt deep surprise that there are still so many women made to feel such a sense of doom about the state negatively described as unmarried. My bad I guess, for mistaking a Karan Johar movie about bad marriages and extra marital love, not to mention the sexual confidence and buying power emanating from magazine covers, as signals of a changing India in which marriage is no longer the only route to completion.
That's what you get for taking popular culture seriously.u00a0 Just because the divorce rate in Mumbai had gone up 86 per cent in 10 years, doesn't mean that people have stopped keeping Monday fasts for good husbands.
People should get married if they want to, of course, but men in India don't seem as depressed about not being married. While their parents might nag, parental anxiety about single daughters remains cripplingly high, making it hard for girls to shrug it all off and find happiness in other ways. What do parents fear will happen to their working daughters if they don't marry? Since economic dependence is not an issue, that leaves -- sex outside marriage. Gosh! What a fate, eh?
Across the world, once New York became the sixth US state to recognize gay marriage, we have been flooded by cute, heartwarming pictures of newly wed same sex couples of all ages, bursting with happiness. One cannot help being moved by their joy -- after all if marriage is a right, with tax benefits in that society, then everyone should have it. For some people not to have it is to make them less equal.
But it is hard for me to understand this, when after all, same sex love calls into question the supposed naturalness of heterosexuality on which, and to perpetuate which, marriage is founded.
If we should push those laws that give rights to the children of non-matrimonial couplings, to partners who live together, marriage might stop being so much of a duty, necessity or endorsement of people's worth.
u00a0You don't need marriage to be decent to the person you love, to share expenses, to take care of children, to have companionship, community, security or to be happy. Indeed the opposite has been shown to be unfortunately true, all too often. It's time we incentivised other kinds of choices, not least so that young women stop seeing their being single as a sign of failure.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction.
Reach her at www.parodevi.com.
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
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