In India there is a special term for getting married to someone you first fell in love with - "love marriage". The idea is that we marry someone we can presumably share our soul with and love forever and if love is gone then the marriage is not worth it. And in the case of loving the purists will say that loving someone is not enough; you have to be IN love for it to work.
That's the idea in it's purest form, driven by romantic love.
I grew up in a culture where this notion was an after-thought. You can learn to love, they said. No specifics were given. Love, confused with romantic love further confused with a fondness one can't help but feel for someone you get used to were all interchangeable. And then this idea that really, literally you can learn to love. This was of course in the context of arranged marriage. Loving someone before you agree to share the rest of your life with them is not critical. A commitment to making it work is. I see the tragedy of it - always have. And that part's easy.
What I do see now however is something quite different, even contradictory to what i noted before. What I see now is the sheer commitment, the faith of it - in the best sense - and how it pervades the culture to make marriage something you sign up for and then you work on. It's not a honeymoon affair, it's not something susceptible to a seven year itch; it's a lifelong thing. I don't have a blind admiration for this idea. In fact I only saw too clearly how often it went wrong and more clearly how it missed the essence of romance, which to me is the ultimate tragedy. What makes it possible and still pervasive in a culture like India's are two factors - economic reality and the strength of social pressure.
But there is much from it that we can learn. I don't know if we can learn this and somehow imbibe it in our culture -- without throwing the baby out. How does a culture do that?
That's the idea in it's purest form, driven by romantic love.
I grew up in a culture where this notion was an after-thought. You can learn to love, they said. No specifics were given. Love, confused with romantic love further confused with a fondness one can't help but feel for someone you get used to were all interchangeable. And then this idea that really, literally you can learn to love. This was of course in the context of arranged marriage. Loving someone before you agree to share the rest of your life with them is not critical. A commitment to making it work is. I see the tragedy of it - always have. And that part's easy.
What I do see now however is something quite different, even contradictory to what i noted before. What I see now is the sheer commitment, the faith of it - in the best sense - and how it pervades the culture to make marriage something you sign up for and then you work on. It's not a honeymoon affair, it's not something susceptible to a seven year itch; it's a lifelong thing. I don't have a blind admiration for this idea. In fact I only saw too clearly how often it went wrong and more clearly how it missed the essence of romance, which to me is the ultimate tragedy. What makes it possible and still pervasive in a culture like India's are two factors - economic reality and the strength of social pressure.
But there is much from it that we can learn. I don't know if we can learn this and somehow imbibe it in our culture -- without throwing the baby out. How does a culture do that?
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