Life Partner

Dating getting evolved into marriage is incredibly scary now a days! I cannot even begin to explain the fear associated with married life I see around me. You see more and more couples delaying the big question in spite of having dated for years together. You also see a majority choosing short term hook ups because they are not willing to commit. Or the best of all, friends with benefits which is nothing but a hoax in my honest opinion! Simply because you are abusing both the relationships in this context - that of a lover and that of a friend. You can never cherry pick things, and may be that is why they land up alone in spite of having multiple relationships or feel inexplicably insecure in spite of prolonged dating. But there has to be more to it! If I ponder a bit on this I feel it lies in the lack of efforts to make things happen for you.

When you choose a life partner, you're choosing a lot more and very important things. This decision will define your life for the next 30-40 years at least. That person is going to share your bed, bathroom, kitchen and home. His or her habits are going to influence your sleep, hygiene, nutrition and leisure time. This person will significantly impact your relationships with your family and friends along with being a major part of your support system and a co-parent to your children. When you will have ups and downs in your career, this person will be your anchor who sticks through all thick and thin with you. When you want to take that break, he or she will be your companion who will make that break worth while! And when you will have wrinkles and slow down, this is the same person who will look up to you and feel that growing old together was a fulfilling experience! And if either of the above is something you are not okay with, can you imagine the rut you will render yourself into? This reality is much more intense than they can imagine!

I have my own doubts if such people can digest this intensity to begin with! They want a life partner who is all of the above but don't want to take efforts to become someone like it. I don't even think that they would ask these questions to themselves after a date, forget about while selecting a date! Then when it is too late, they will give into social pressures, get married and land up frustrated. If that doesn't happen, they will remain single and keep cursing the unreasonable expectations marriage brings in. The same people will have a list of things to say against marriage when it doesn't happen to them or breaks off pretty soon into it. Honestly, when you get into it for all the wrong reasons and when you look for all the irrelevant things in your partner, you can't really blame it on the marriage, you know!

What you see is not what you have

Click to enlarge. Pictures are really interesting! (No selfies involved! :-D)

The twenties of today are facing a new challenge to walk on the path of self discovery. Just a generation senior, but it seems unbelievably different from us! We were taught to look within ourselves, value of introspection must have been imbibed in us when we were barely out of diapers, and most importantly, we were made responsible for our lives way before we became self sufficient! There was never any scope to indulge in the blame game when something went wrong! What is more, if we complained of something, a clear response was - you can never complain about something you permit! In a nut shell, answers lie within oneself.

With the compulsive display of one's life on public forum, the current twenties seem to be trapped in this virtual world! They will rather spend time in making their online profiles look outstanding than actually invest time in building their personalities. They will compare others updates, picture perfect photos and judge themselves based on how others lives are panning out. Little do they realize that public forums have no scope for honesty. No one will ever share a post on failed projects, photos of a broken relationship or for that matter how their lives are empty with only images to exhibit the supposed perfect life in selfies! In addition to that, it is used in a very effective way to vomit all the frustrations in a sympathy seeking manner and just a little later complain that there is no privacy. It is also very commonly seen that in order to portray a very fancy lifestyle some share a little too much and then blame others of being judgmental! Some even show the courage to have personal arguments and then claim that people interfere a lot.

Public display of affection - parents, lovers, friends and so on; such a sorry sight really! I wonder if they invest even half of the time to meet their parents or have a deep conversation with their lovers or spend meaningful moments with their friends! Just imagine how different their lives would be if they gave as much thought to their careers as they give to their updates and profile details. If they spent more time pondering on why their best friends keep changing with every picture, or why their parents appear more on their updates and less in their lives, or wonder why they broke off from a seemingly serious relationship or why they get frustrated with their jobs in a few months into it, they would see it clearly! Just with a little more thought there will be real answers to their real problems.

Most importantly, they will find answers within themselves! No more sympathy seeking, good bye to judgmental interfering people and welcome privacy! Parents and family will be reinstated as support systems. Fake friends will not like this change, true friends will be there forever, they always are! Their jobs (even if they are in the wrong one) will give them work satisfaction and let them find their passion to follow in the future. The possibility of finding a serious relationship will be more because they will have figured out the type of companionship they are looking for. And the best of all, they will be happy with themselves and not their online lives!