Open Marriage

Recently I stumbled upon an article by Carrie Jenkins on how a hackneyed romantic ideal is used to stigmatise polyamory and that it’s a usual thing to wish for an open marriage. My thoughts on this tilt in the opposite direction, wondering why one would need marriage at all if one wishes to experiment with different relationships or even one night stands? Is marriage really necessary in our times for women who desire that level of freedom?

My builder friends tell me that swish new luxury apartments have two ‘master’ bedrooms, one for the lady of the house and one for the ‘master’. Changed viewpoints have nearly taken away the concept of joint families and married couples often communicate in short notes matter-of-factly. Many place careers over each other or having a child. And often singledom over marriage. It’s more “convenient” they say. Director Vikram Bhatt tells me marriage is a concept of the past? If marriage is on the brink of separate homes then why marry at all?

If we make a case for open relationships, then we do realise that physical chemistry too has to be kept going. Both partners have to work at keeping it alive, keeping the sex appeal going. There is no space in a marriage if you want to keep it going happily for it to get uninteresting, jaded, boring. After a point it’s quite obvious that everything in life needs reinvention and some effort. What was an exciting vortex of passion now needs to be invigorated. It might then be more practical for couples who couldn’t be bothered with the effort -to live without the marriage tag, or then like the author says in an ‘open marriage’.

Today’s urbane successful girl in a love relationship has a mind of her own is lucky she can be the Contemporary urban thinking woman in our society. She is often focused on career advancement and is able to travel around, run a home on her own, drive around, spend her own money and doesn’t really need a man to support her, ‘protect her’ and to survive. So the relationship angle is then about having a great ‘fun’ companion for as long as it lasts. She is often happy to let pass the comfort zone of the husband-home-family thing! Counsellors say it’s a very recurrent urban scene.

Here I am listening to a confidante’s tale of helplessness. It’s the third similar situation I’ve encountered in a year, enough to think the scenario out there must be getting common enough.   I’m listening agog, the very words, the very teary helplessness and longing! It used to be a woman thing, but this is a man friend in front of me weeping into his tepid coffee because his lady love does not wish to get married. ‘It’s great the way things are, why complicate things with marriage?” she insists. Wasn’t this the refrain of the man in most couples? The contemporary urban thinking woman wishes to have her freedom or then an ‘open relationship’ where she is able to exercise choices and is no longer ‘in need’ of a man to ‘exist’. Things getting more equal and traditional mind-sets are being turned upon their head?

Female sensibilities are getting more defined to individual expression than what papa says or the Jones think.

In my book- either you are in a marriage the old fashioned way of making things work with love, meeting halfway and adjusting timings, temperatures, hobby timings and enjoying the journey savouring time together or you go the freedom from traditional routes and choose a life of no strings attached. It is purely my belief that a mid-way path of being married and living with multiple partners is a confusing quagmire that could result into bitterness where the gap can gape bigger and wider with time until nothing is left.