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gopimenon December 7th, 2009

`Staying Happy in a Marriage’ is vastly different from `Staying in a Marriage’!

It is a statistical fact that more marriages in the West end up in divorce than in the East.  However it does not mean that most couples in the East who remain married are happy!

Many married couples are living `lives of quiet desperation’ because Eastern culture places a lot of value on self-sacrifice.  So, unhappy couples stay together for reasons such as:

• We don’t want our children to suffer the loss of a parent.
• We can’t do much about it – just accept it as FATE!
• `What will the people say?’ syndrome.
• Public view of female divorcees is very negative (in typical male chauvinistic fashion).

So it does not mean that just because the divorce ratio in the East is less, the marriages are happy!

But it does not have to be like that! You too can stay happy in your marriage if you know the secret!  The secret is simple, but it takes discipline and effort to implement.

Before I reveal the secret, let me tell you a story – a true story but with names changed.

The Marriage Woes of Sham & Meena

Sham and Meena had an arranged marriage.  Basically both were good and honest people with many sterling qualities but they differed greatly in their outlooks on life.   Sham was more of a dreamer while Meena was very practical and bound by traditions.

He loved reading books, seeing movies and generally lived in the ‘mind’ world of ideas while she was bored with movies or books.   She did not consider them real!   She preferred talking to friends about people and ‘real things’ – like who got married, who is expecting children, who got promotions, etc.  Sham had another word for that ‘reality’ – gossip!

Meena’s memory for facts about people and their relationships was incredible:  she could remember which niece’s son was studying what subjects, in what school; which uncle’s daughter is getting married to who; their occupations and so on.

Sham, on the other hand, had an incredible memory too – for inspiring quotations, for ideas, for movie stories including the names of actors and actresses etc.   He could be moved to laughter and tears by books and movies but unlike Meena, was not very affected by actual funerals or weddings of relatives!

Meena believed in ritual prayer, she fasted once per week, she loved to attend temple functions and recite  bajans (hymns) in Sanskrit, which she did not understand!

Sham believed that since God was everywhere and understood all languages, why bother to go to temples and pray in certain approved ‘sacred’ languages?  We might as well pray at home and directly to God without using an intermediary!

As you can see Sham and Meena were hardly the most compatible of couples!  But their basic values were the same: integrity, honesty, kindness etc.   Both loved children and would never hurt them.  Both were very honest with each other – sometimes too honest!

So they stayed together for years… for all the wrong reasons stated above, always unhappy at perceived slights and uncaring – needing only the most trivial of incidents to start another argument, bringing up past grievances and adding to their misery.

Each one felt that the other was uncaring and unsupportive and tried to prove the other was at fault.   Thus there could be no solution until they realized that changing another is an impossible task and one can only change himself/herself! 

When a brother suggested to Sham that he should be the one to make the change (because he was the one who enjoyed ideas and thinking etc.), Sham asked: “Why should I alone attempt to change myself?  It takes two hands to clap!  Why should I alone be giving in?”

So Sham and Meena were always unhappy – angry with each other and just waiting to find fault with each other.  As they say “What we focus on expands!”  So when each looked for faults in the other, they found it aplenty!

So much so that one of their sons even asked years ago: “Why do you two stay together if you are fighting all the time?  Why don’t you try separation?”

Is there any hope of saving such a marriage?

Strangely enough, in spite of their incompatibility, their marriage did survive?  How? What was their secret?

All will be revealed in the next episode of ‘Sham & Meena’s Marriage Woes’  in the next post.

• happy living , marriage , self acceptance
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