{"id":21088,"date":"2021-04-05T09:25:56","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T03:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/?p=21088"},"modified":"2021-04-06T15:17:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T09:47:11","slug":"stay-single-stay-safe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/stay-single-stay-safe\/","title":{"rendered":"STAY SINGLE. STAY SAFE."},"content":{"rendered":"

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. <\/em><\/p>\n

Oscar Wilde<\/em><\/p>\n

Question: Are a majority of women killed by intimate partners and family members?<\/p>\n

Answer: YES.<\/p>\n

Here is a chilling finding from a United Nations Report<\/a>: A total of 87,000 women were intentionally killed<\/em> in 2017. More than half of them (58 percent)\u00a0 \u0336 \u00a050,000\u00a0 \u0336\u00a0 were killed by intimate partners or family members\u2026 More than a third (30,000) of the women intentionally killed in 2017 were killed by their current or former intimate partner \u00a0\u00a0\u0336\u00a0 someone they would normally expect to trust<\/em>. (italics mine)<\/p>\n

Vulnerability: woundability, a state of being susceptible to injury or attack. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I want to share a Vulnerability Story:<\/p>\n

She met him at a relative\u2019s wedding. He asked for her phone number. They became friends. After a few months, they got married. The wedding took place a month before the pandemic hit. Covid turned their lives upside down. His fledgling catering business came to a standstill with no weddings happening. She lost her job as a sales person in a mobile phone shop. They were stuck with each other under the same roof 24\/7. Arguments about money began. When she argued back, he resorted to violence. One day, a little over a year into their troubled marriage, things escalated to a point of no return for her.<\/p>\n

Strangulation? Suicide? Abetted suicide? Homicide?<\/p>\n

No charges have been pressed against the husband. He\u2019s a free man.<\/p>\n

You could call it a Covid-facilitated fatality. But Covid didn\u2019t cause her death. Covid exacerbated the economic situation that exacerbated her vulnerability, her woundability. But did she deserve to die? Her parents, and she herself, were relieved that she was finally getting married after several failed match-making attempts. Marriage, the only pole of respectability to aspire to for all unmarried women, was going to hold her up too. Relatives who had taunted her at family weddings, \u201cWhen are you<\/em> going to get married?\u201d would finally shut up.<\/p>\n

The largest contingent of voiceless, lonely women with limited agency in the subcontinent must be its married women. If they\u2019re fortunate enough to be born and reach adulthood, a woman\u2019s parents and society make sure she becomes an adult brainwashed into self-alienation and self-loathing. She\u2019s not their child. Her birth-home is not her<\/em> home. She\u2019s paraya dhan <\/em>(another’s property). She\u2019s groomed as a product-on-loan by her parents. To be eventually packaged off to her husband\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

Patrilocal marriage, the most common form of marriage in the subcontinent, makes a woman relocate to live in or near her husband\u2019s family. She tacitly commits to love, honour, and serve her husband and his family for the rest of her life. Patrilocal marriages contribute to a large chunk of low self-esteem, loneliness, isolation, and increased vulnerability to violence among married women. To whom can they turn to in times of crises? Usually nobody.<\/p>\n

If marriage is heaven on earth, why are <\/strong>so many married women killing themselves<\/strong><\/a>? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Forget homicide. In 2019, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, almost 60 housewives died by suicide every day (calculation mine, based on the available NCRB data). Housewives were the second largest group to die by suicide after daily-wage workers<\/a>. This sorrowful statistic is likely to have gone up during the lockdown. The pandemic year has been a year of unprecedented oppression and family violence.\u00a0 Seriously, does anybody think that raising the age of marriage for girls to 21 is going to render the institution of marriage much safer for women?<\/p>\n

We are still telling our daughters there\u2019s no future for them sans marriage. We parcel them off blithely, to live in the homes of strangers who, overnight, become their new family. We don\u2019t wonder whether such a move increases their vulnerability to mental and emotional breakdown<\/a>. What does it say about our intelligence? Oscar Wilde was so right to call marriage a triumph of imagination over intelligence. We are besotted with the idea of marriage as the best and only possible way for women to sacrifice themselves.<\/p>\n

Does a husband usually agree to relocate to live with his wife\u2019s family? Does he commit to love, honour, and serve his wife and her family? Why not? Because patriarchal marriage is not a bond between equals<\/a>. But here\u2019s a puzzle: Why, in the face of overwhelmingly negative outcomes for marriage for women, is the educated, professional, and financially independent woman still opting for marriage? Why, why, why? Our collective cultural imagination continues to triumph over our innate intelligence, and will do so for decades to come. Perfectly sane women will turn into desperate wives and continue to get killed or kill themselves.<\/p>\n

P.S. The handful of men who do relocate to accommodate their partner\u2019s career or social-familial needs, I am all admiration for you.<\/p>\n

On a less grim note, here\u2019s a marriage joke.<\/p>\n

A daughter asks her mother: What is marriage?<\/p>\n

Mother: Marriage is a fancy word for adopting an overgrown male child whose parents can\u2019t handle him anymore.<\/p>\n

Wouldn\u2019t it be the dawn of wisdom if more South Asian mothers said this to their daughters? If they stopped them from playing nannies to overgrown male children? Wouldn\u2019t it be welcome if intelligence finally triumphed over imagination?<\/p>\n

Lest you think I\u2019m an ‘anti-love’ feminist, let me make this clear: I am all for love. I am only against compulsory patriarchal, patrilocal marriage. I support the union of hearts and souls and bodies, be they queer or non-queer, inter-caste, inter-religious, inter-class, or inter-national. Provided such unions are entered into consciously by consenting adults, and are mutually respectful and loving. And when they stop being so, can be dissolved.<\/p>\n

But until the institution of marriage evolves to become such a union, an expectation that belies experience, let marriages, if they must take place, be social contracts renewable every few years by mutual agreement.<\/p>\n

Who controls your life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To married women, or single women about to get married, do ask yourselves: Who controls your life? Who will control your life once you\u2019re married? Are all your needs being met in your marriage? Are they likely to be met through marriage?<\/p>\n

According to the psychologist, Abraham Maslow, people have five levels of needs. [1]<\/a><\/sup> Maslow\u2019s hierarchy of needs is:<\/p>\n