Marriages are made in heaven but people aren’t. If heaven gave us angels and halos, it also gave birth to hellfire. If it gave us Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Saaquel, and Raguel, it gave us Lucifer too.
So, not all good things are made in heaven. Some are born right here. On our very generous, gigantic, and gaga Earth. Just like to live in relationships. Now, before some of you start to frown and decide to click the home button, hear me out. I’m going to break down why live-in relationships aren’t such a bad thing using what I like to call ‘The circle of life’ You begin and end at the same place because that is how everything is supposed to be.
Time.
What’s the first memory you have of yourself as a child?
It could be anything from a bruise you got learning how to ride a toddler bike, to learn the first step to your still favorite track.
It’s a very funny element, time.
Most often the things we want to forget to stay with us for a brief span and the memories that brought us joy to no extent are easily forgotten. But that’s not why time is funny. I use this unusual adjective for it because of its two habits. 1. The beauty of time is that if you give it, it, you will always forget. Every memory, everything you've ever learned, good or bad, if it made your heart skip a beat or brought tears to your eyes, it never stays with you forever 2. Why is it beautiful? It’s because although you forget, with the help of time itself you can always learn them again. However, what you choose to learn is entirely up to you.
Learning.
Throughout life, we’ve been brought up with certain thoughts and values. We’ve been taught good and bad and then are expected to walk on the same lines when it comes to beliefs as our parents. Like they did with their parents at our age. These values and beliefs aren’t wrong. They just haven’t been corrected.
For example, You are taught not to cut your nails after sunset. Why? No one knows. Neither did I. Hence, I decided to look it up and I found that hundreds of years ago people avoided cutting their nails in the dark, not because of ghosts or bad luck but simply because back then there were no tube lights or bulbs.
Some are taught that women who show skin aren’t worthy of respect. Some are taught that men don’t cry or feel pain.
Similarly, most of us are taught that getting married is the next big mandatory step. That the only way to have a family is by getting the government involved. And because of the fact that we’ve been instilled with these thoughts at a very young age, we believe them.
So when you ask yourself the question ‘Why would I want to get married?’ The convenient and average answer to this ranges from ‘I would want to spend my whole life with someone I love'.
However, if you look closely you shall realize that most of the replies that you give yourself don’t really require marriage but simply a partner.
Live-in relationships aren’t just born here. They are also the love child of modernization and ‘freedom to be’
People often blame modernization for making ‘leaving’ too easy and ruining century-old traditions. But I disagree.
I believe that if someone is given every way out and still chooses to stay, then it’s because they want to.
When you get married, you realize that you have to be with someone because you’re obligated to. Suddenly, loving and caring become your duty. But Love is not a chore.
On the other hand, if you live with someone without being bound by legality and moral obligations, spend your days and nights with them, make breakfast together, and come back every day even when you have every resource and way not to, you do it simply out of love.
You choose to spend every day and your lifetime with them not because you have to but because you want to. There lies a very thick line between the things you have to do and the things you want to do. The line is as thick as the earth’s crust. We sometimes choose not to look at this line because of what others might think. We’ve intentionally made it thin to the extent that most of the time the line doesn’t exist. So very thin, again just like the earth’s crust now.
Humans have always had the tendency to pick out, overlook, or draw lines at things as per their convenience.
According to the Bible wearing lipstick is also forbidden but we had to draw the line only at LGBTQ, didn’t we?
In fact, look at one of the world’s greatest love stories. One that the majority of this country has grown up reading, loving, and idolizing for centuries. The story of Radha and Krishna.
And if we jog a little down memory lane, they weren’t married either, were they?
So the two very important questions are, do we frown and shake our head to a definite no when it comes to living in relationships because we don’t like the idea or simply because we’ve been taught to do so by everyone around us? And if our case is the latter how do we unlearn these centuries-old ways of thinking that we’ve been instilled with? The answer is we don’t.
Just like falling out of love is more difficult than falling for someone. So is the case with learning and unlearning.
So instead of unlearning, we learn.
We learn a new way to look at things. We learn what’s right not what we’ve been told the definition of right is. Even if it’s the North Pole to all that we’ve learned all our life, we still learn. And then like I said earlier, we wait for time to do its trick and make us not unlearn but eventually forget.
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