Is being single a sign of failure?-By-Kumar Bahukhandi

Why are you not yet married some someone  from a family  asked me , when I wasn't  ? This question made me uneasy , why the hell on earth I can't live single if I want to. Hence decided to float my Biodata on a matrimonial site before friends and relatives label me as an impotent . Thus in the journey I met two girls on the site  one after the other. The first said she goes temple everyday to pray for a groom. This after her first marriage had been a carnival of violence, sometimes landing her in hospital. The second was initially reluctant but agreed to talk , why I wasn't married, she too asked me. 

 None of my answers satisfied her, because they were based on the notion that marriage is only one of the many things one may or may not try out in life , or can decide to go for it at any stage of life  like I did in my forties -- a notion completely alien to her. She told me tragically that none of her romances had worked out. "I think it's supposed to be like that when you're this young," I joked. 

Had it been the same for me, she asked, persisting in understanding what she saw as my problem state. "They worked out," I assured her. "Some of them by ending!" Poor girl was bemused by my cheeriness in discussing what for her, was somewhat a sign of shame.

A couple of weeks later she went off to a temple as she told me ,where her family had arranged a puja to alleviate this so-called problem in her life. I wonder if she had to marry a tree.

I felt deep surprise that there are still so many people around made to feel such a sense of doom about the state negatively described as unmarried. My bad I guess, for mistaking a Karan Johar movie about bad marriages and extra marital love, not to mention the sexual confidence and buying power emanating from magazine covers, as signals of a changing India in which marriage is no longer the only route to completion. 

That's what you get for taking popular culture seriously. Just because the divorce rate in my own country had gone up 86 per cent in 10 years, doesn't mean that people have stopped keeping Monday fasts for good partners .

People should get married if they want to, of course, but still few girls and boys in India don't seem as depressed about not being married. While their parents might nag, parental anxiety about their remaining single, yes single daughters remains cripplingly high, making it hard for girls to shrug it all off and find happiness in other ways. What do parents fear will happen to their working daughters if they don't marry? Since economic dependence is not an issue, that leaves -- sex outside marriage. Gosh! What a fate, eh?

Across the world, once New York became the sixth US state to recognise gay marriage, we have been flooded by cute, heartwarming pictures of newly wed same sex couples of all ages, bursting with happiness. One cannot help being moved by their joy -- after all if marriage is a right, with tax benefits in that society, then everyone should have it. For some people not to have it is to make them less equal.

But it is hard for me to understand this, when after all, same sex love calls into question the supposed naturalness of heterosexuality on which, and to perpetuate which, marriage is founded.

If we should push those laws that give rights to the children of non-matrimonial couplings, to partners who live together, marriage might stop being so much of a duty, necessity or endorsement of people's worth.

You don't need marriage to be decent to the person, do you? you love, to share expenses, to take care of children, to have companionship, community, security or to be happy. Indeed the opposite has been shown to be unfortunately true, all too often. It's time we incentivised other kinds of choices, not least so that the guys who are single stop seeing their being single as a sign of failure.