Things That Bang

Love is blind but marriage is an eye opener- anonymous

People fall in love all the time and then just like that they hand in their divorce papers within a few days (in Britney Spears' case the next day), a few months or few years. Sometimes people who've been in live in relationships for over decades throw in the towel once they get hitched. I know people who hold back wedding gifts till the couple cross the first year of marriage. Call it a clever strategy or lack of faith in romance and happily ever afters.

But there cannot be happily ever afters in marriages. Are there 24/7 happy relationships? We fight with our siblings, our friends and even our parents so isn't it natural that we would bicker with our spouses as well?

Yet, I am the first one to say get out of the relationship before you stab each other with kitchen knives as if re-enacting the War Of The Roses. When love sours it brings out the worst in us. We say and do things that would make even our mothers who proclaim they know us best say - my kid wouldn't be smelling his wife's underwear for her office spouse's sperm?!

Okay, I am exaggerating but you catch my drift people in curdled relationships bring out the worst in each other and yet we say - hey buddy, tried a therapist? Stay together for the kids, Stay together for the money, just frikking stay together to save the institution of marriage!

And the cherry on the cake is that those who do dish out these platitudes are the ones who enjoy stable marriages. A woman with a broken jaw certainly wouldn't insist marriages are made in heaven or a man with nagging hag be the happiest best man at his buddy's wedding.

But things needn't be that extreme either to part ways. Sometimes people grow apart, drift away and realise that the person living next to them is a complete stranger and rue the phantom years spent together.

So why do we tell people to hang on to dead beat relationships? Why do they stay in dead beat relationships?

I still believe one has to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince but there can be no happily ever afters since he is a frog under that charming skin and you out of sheer desperation to get married kissed the tenth or the twentieth froggie with a baggage full of expectations that curtailed any hopes of that hazy death to us part deal!