The existence of life on earth is irrefutable; the existence of intelligent life on earth is still hotly debated. Are we not but fools to give the “wedding” which is nothing but a temporary affair, so much importance as compared to the “marriage” which is supposed to last “until death do us part”.
Everyone seems to want a ‘fairytale’ wedding. I mean it’s perfectly acceptable to want to celebrate the “biggest day of your life” but what I cannot comprehend is the need to involve the whole town. Dozens and dozens of people whom the bride and groom haven’t seen all their lives and some whom they haven’t seen for 15 odd years and no longer have anything in common with. A majority of the guests are there just for the food or to comment on the flowers and decoration, whose grandeur is directly proportional to how rich the bride’s father is. The price of the bride’s lehenga is pondered upon, the dance skills of the relatives are evaluated, the bride’s weight, the groom’s height, the bride’s jewellery, the groom’s lack of proper judgement for marrying a girl who isn’t very “pretty”.
Why do we need these peoples’ involvement in something so sacred, which is supposed to be just between two people and their immediate families? Today they are hogging free food at your wedding, in a year’s time they are the ones wanting to know if you have a healthy sex life because you haven’t reproduced yet. Are we really so scatter-brained? We are actually spending all that money just so that these people have something to talk about? The lehenga worth four lakh will never ever be worn again, and we are the same people who bargain with our household help when she asks for 4000 rupees for an entire month of washing and cleaning our own filth.
The pre-wedding photo shoots! Everyone seems to be living the Bollywood dream. It seems like it has become as mandatory as the signatures on the marriage certificate. If there were post-wedding photo shoots, all the photographers would be out of business. Just saying.
Why do we fail to understand that a wedding is more like Cinderella at the ball, with everything coming to a halt at midnight? Marriage begins where the fairytale ends. A wedding is like watching a two-and-a-half hour movie in which you’re transported into another dream-like world, whereas marriage is the bit where you’re jolted into reality once the end credits begin to roll on the screen. A wedding requires hard work for a couple of months; marriage requires hard work for the rest of your life. Marriage is silently waiting at the end of “and they lived happily ever after” with a smirk on its face saying “oh really?”
How about we focus on making our marriages more beautiful than our weddings? After all, life isn’t a fairytale, and reality- that old killjoy does get in the way.
In the same way that the stewards on the Titanic were more concerned about the un-emptied ashtrays on the bar than the enormous hole on the side of the ship, which was letting in zillions of gallons of water, are we too worrying about the unimportant and ignoring the vital?