Now I Get It!

So... I always thought that blogging helped me understand myself better. It did and it does, but apparently not completely. I had to read another blog (www.unmana.com) to understand why I as almost 'betrayed' by SO's willingness to have a traditional wedding. To understand why I'm always afraid of his turning out to be somewhat different from what he thinks he is.

It's a rather dramatic statement, I know. But what I mean is, that when we discussed stuff like religion and rituals, we seemed aligned. We both seemed to agree that ritual means nothing to us, and using it to 'get married' didn't make sense. And yet, that's exactly what we did. Which is probably a part of why that day was not 'special' for me. That's another dramatic statement, and not one that I'd acknowledged much before.

Let me see if I want to take this one further.

Marrying the SO has been a challenging affair. I will say this, he was the one to first mention marriage, maybe seeing it as a given if a guy and a girl get 'physical'. I, on the other hand, was quite willing to let the 'physical' happen cause I wanted it to. What happened later, happened later. In my defence, I was 24 and relishing my first job and independence.

We progressed beyond that, to SO being totally resistant to the idea of getting wed before he was 30. So, at 23, he was ok with getting married at 30. Cool huh? I struggled with this, but it was weird to break up because he wasn't willing to get married. It hurt then, and to some extent it still does, but we went with it. We enjoyed each other's company, he didn't seem to want anybody else and was willing to put enough effort into it to ensure I didn't want anybody else either.

Then the actual discussions began. The discussion of when, where, how etc. When (as I'm sure I've blogged on here) shifted by a few months. Now when I look at it, it was just 2 months, but after 4 odd years of waiting, movement for reasons that I wasn't very convinced with was a let down.

Where, was relatively easily resolved. The 'how' caused me a lot of pain. SO, who refuses to visit temples, who doesn't do any pujas for festivals, agreed to have a traditional wedding. Without consulting me. Just agreed. Would consultation have helped? Probably not, I'd have been just as shrill and hurt, without understanding why. My parents also failed me sort of - they agreed to a traditional wedding without consulting me, but my father has always been strongly on the side of tradition, so I was not surprised there.

I guess it's all weird right? You test all relationships - knowingly or unknowingly. You put pressure on them from time to time and see if they'll hold up, of where the points of failure are. Then you address those one way or the other. With friends, you fix that by altering the rules of friendship, or by discussing what went wrong and vowing to be more supportive in future.

With a spouse - what do you do? I'll tell you what I did. I decided that we were too far along the road to call it all off due to my 'discomfort' with my spouse to be. I was a mess, I did nearly call it off (depressing my parents in the process). I did also speak to SO, to the extent possible. I was saying at that point, that he was not communicating enough.

For various reasons, we got past that. I'm ok with the wedding and the marriage. I will always have some scars from the process, but most of the wounds have healed.

Here's hoping that new ones aren't created.