Would Love Go Better With a Side of Paperwork?

It is often easy to think of marriage as a culmination of love — but was love ever truly enough to sustain a marriage? Marriage as an institution is something that has baffled me of late. Growing up, I used to think of marriage as something you just do in life — you know, just like how you are expected to go to college, get a job, retire, and die. The basics. I don’t know whether to blame the societal thought that made it seem so, or something else altogether.

  But as your understanding of love evolves, or as you see more and more marriages around you, I guess it’s normal to wonder whether marriage has anything to do with love at all. In conversations with people, the question of why a piece of paper would set apart marriage from a normal romantic relationship came up quite often. The dreamers, as I like to call them, described it as a somewhat complicated, bureaucratic declaration of love. The pragmatists described marriage as a tool of convenience — finances, getting flats, not catching side-eyes from aunties in your society — all valid points, of course. While you can’t really ignore the pragmatists or the dreamers, I think it’s easier in many ways to think of marriage as a middle ground between both sides.

  Lately, though, relationships themselves seem to have lost their ease. We spend so much time trying to decode gestures — who texted first, who left the message on “seen,” who cared more. It’s as if love has become a game where everyone is pretending not to want to lose. But if you were truly secure in who you loved and why you loved them, would any of that matter? Wouldn’t love, in its simplest form, be the one place where you didn’t have to calculate your next move?

  I guess, in many ways, the idea of a life partner — someone to witness every step of our lives — is soothing. But it’s easy to confuse the initial sparks of marriage or relationships with real love. Fancy brunches, vacations in tropical islands, maybe even a few romantic pictures. I get mildly pissed off when these images pop up, along with equally absurd pink cartoons holding hands, when I google “happy marriages.”

  I strongly believe that marriage, or commitment, boils down to being able to talk to the same person till we’re old and wrinkly and our canes have tennis balls underneath them. Wasn’t friendship, in many ways, more crucial to a relationship than love or these fleeting, intense romantic daydreams we often see? And when the absolute burden of being alive hits you like a sledgehammer, would you rather have someone you can talk to — someone who will try to understand you — or someone who simply shares your economic or social background, or fits whatever narrow, excluding criteria we consider when we so carelessly brand someone as “marriage material”?

  Like they said in the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, I guess we’re all just looking for someone to do laundry and taxes with.