The words of the gushing, radiant, new celebrity bride on TV along with her exuberant husband, rose and fell while I moved around the house doing the chores. It all sounded lovely, almost diabetically sweet. How grounded they both were, despite being hugely successful, how ‘normal’ their upbringing had been, how she had dreamt of her wedding day since she was a little girl, like every girl out there…
Now that bit, that last little bit, let’s just rewind back to THAT bit. Like every girl? Really?
I don’t remember spending a single moment while growing up, dreaming about the day I would be marrying my prince charming. I don’t even remember any of my female friends or cousins ever talking about what it would be like being married or wondering what their wedding day would be like. If anything, I remember attending loads of weddings where the brides looked positively exhausted, having to go through with the twenty-ninth ritual for the thirty-ninth time...those brides had looooong given up on enjoying their special day! I hasten to add, I have also been to some wonderful weddings, where everyone’s had a brilliant time, so much so that the bride’s older sister has shot her dark looks for giggling too much.
Where are these little girls, spending their time dreaming about their wedding days? Not that there’s anything wrong, if you as a young girl while walking to school, were actually dreaming about eloping with the local hunk. Just saying that I am a little uncomfortable with the way that statement sounded - like weddings are of course what all little girls should be dreaming about, along with all things pink and sweet.
Should our dreams as little girls be so conditioned? Shouldn’t little girls be told that there’s more to dreams than finding the right person to share them with?
Companionship might ultimately be what a lot of us want as adults. And if that is the case, when you find that special somebody, it truly is a wonderful thing - I speak from personal experience. But let us not be led to it back to front. Let us first have the freedom to make that judgement for ourselves, to learn to follow our own instincts and choose our own paths. The end game for us, is not just to be happily married and ‘settled’ - whatever that means. I’ve seen enough rocky marriages around me and if that is ‘settling’, drift those poor souls out to the deep blue sea.
Though none of us spoke about weddings, there were lots of discussions in hushed tones about sex. I say hushed, because good girls did not talk about sex openly. I remember a group of us 10 year olds being horrified by a classmate who went up to the PE teacher, wanting to have a sit down, citing her period cramps as an excuse. I know...that wasn’t even about sex. Anything spoken openly about the female anatomy was enough to get all of us flustered. That was our conditioning. I also remember a biology teacher exploding in indignation on being asked a question about the reproductive system by a rather wide eyed, bewildered girl in class. “Go and ask your mother”, the teacher barked. This was while she was teaching us the chapter on the reproductive system. I think it’s safe to say that nobody was talking to that poor girl about sex, reproduction or any of that jazz, in any shape or form.
And no, talking about sex did not make us ‘bad’ girls. Curiosity about sex, did not necessarily mean we were all sleeping around, not that I am judging if you were. We had no context or idea about what it really was. Nobody told us that sex did not always mean love, that you did not have to marry or love the first boy you had sex with. I remember walking around in India and seeing young couples sitting hesitantly in various parts of the city, next to each other, elbows coyly nudging each other while they kept a straight face for the benefit of the nosy passerbys. All those sweet nothings, barely dousing their raging hormones. How many of those couples got married just so they could quench their curiosity? I’m guessing loads. I’m also guessing a lot of those prince charmings turned back to frogs in a few months after the initial flush of oxytocin (aptly, referred to as the “love hormone”) had abated.
I know that one day my daughter might ask me some difficult questions. And I will have to be honest and say that, liking somebody a lot is not the same as loving. Love usually doesn’t happen at first sight, lust does. And though it is wonderful to have a partner, it does not always hold the keys to eternal happiness, wellbeing or good health. We don’t have to bear relationships or expectations as crosses. After all of that sermoning, a day might still come when she sheds tears for having been dumped by the love of her life with the ever popular, evergreen line,”it’s not you, it’s me”. Let’s be honest, that dumping is almost like a rite of passage. Most of us have been there, done that and I sincerely hope, that day, after I have let her had her cry, I remind her that there is a whole world out there waiting for her to explore and discover.
I also hope that by then we will have managed to remove all traces of those god-awful soppy quotes that we get forwarded by that one well meaning, too kind a friend. They usually go along the lines of -
“If you love someone, set them free,
If they come back they were yours, if not, they were never meant to be”.
It is bloody pointless. I hate to say this, but by the time you’ve started noticing such useless dribble, while sobbing copious amounts of tears onto the screen of your Smartphone, with ‘your song’ playing on loop in the background, your horse has already bolted. No butterfly will be fluttering back to your lovesick forlorn heart.
You truly, truly deserve better. I would however, as a replacement, advocate this personal favourite of mine that I saw fleetingly somewhere on the internet years ago. Lacking the romantic fervour and gravitas of its nemesis and obviously as a result not having achieved any popularity, it said:
“If you love someone, set them free,
if they don’t come back they were never yours.
If they do, nobody else wanted them, set them free again.”
What it lacked in sentimentality, it definitely made up for in sense. Safe to say, I won’t be writing a romance novel anytime soon.
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