Get The Hell Off My Marriage-Monkey!

I just got off a meeting with a friend, a married friend and you know how those meetings go. Especially, when you are not married and everyone else in the world is.

Last year, another friend of mine got married and I loved being at the wedding for him, but I hated being there for me. Endless questions about when I was going to get married, countless declarations about how I was next, with a few prophetic insights from God Himself, since it was a Christian wedding and all.

So…this person came up to me and asked me the obvious dreadful question, without consent, without permission and without even an attempt at waxing eloquent. I should have just done the whole ‘In-God’s-Time’ routine. But I was so tired and in no mood for concocted religious jargon. My answer was pretty snappy, pretty simple and pretty rude: I don’t find the need to be married. 

Now, that is something you NEVER tell an evangelical Christian! I mean, never!

Her face changed and then with a reaction that conveyed certain doom for my future, she controlled herself and spoke in that gentle Christian charitable tone; you know, the one where we love the gay people until we don’t; the one where we so badly want to pray for the man who is hungry, as opposed to just feeding him? That.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I understand, brother. I am not judging you.’

My first reaction should have been: Who the f*** asked you to?

Why can’t my married friends understand, what is extraordinary for them might just be something good in my eyes…and that, something just vaguely good, doesn’t necessarily constitute my idea of a fulfilled life? Why can’t they just understand that I don’t need to have someone to be happy? Why the hell can’t they get that, may be, I have come to a place in life where I am content with my lot in life, being single included. That may be my tether-crazy marriage-horse’s back was broken long ago and now it’s just refusing to want anymore?

Then comes the part, where I am allegedly averse to marriage because of my past relationships. This one’s my favorite because if it is true, then 90% of my friends are all world-class psychiatrists. Unfortunately, it is not! So that just makes them asses with unwarranted mouths!

‘Oh, don’t worry about it, Aden. You must be hurt. One day, you will get over it and want to marry. So, now just deal with whatever you are dealing with! It’s okay. We get it!’

Seriously! Everybody in the world seems to ‘understand’ the self-inflicted predicament of the single-class. We are just hurt, abused and depressed. And one day, like them, we will also have our own revelation, and this dancing doll of a babe with lips like a jewel and breasts like a fawn, will prophetically fall out from one of the songs of Solomon and we will find happiness…the everlasting kind!

Oh God, enough already!

I don’t need someone to rescue me from my so-called ‘solitude-from-hell’. That rescuing was done long ago. And the only thing I needed rescuing from, was from myself…my uncanny ability to self-destruct. Have I done that? Of course. So give me credit for that, married cow!

And the whole idea of a passing phase might hold true if I was still a doe-eyed teenager with more idealism than my raging pants could handle. It just so happens, I am not. My days of idealism are long gone, my emotional institutions are less prone to drama, my hormonal faculties are less predatory and my heart isn’t necessarily looking at every woman in church wondering who that ordained ‘One’ is! 

Don’t get me wrong. I am not hateful towards marriage or the extraordinary life that comes with it. All of my ideals come out of a core belief that I hold dearer than any other theology:

I am not incomplete. I do not need someone to come and complete me. I am not an incomplete half waiting to be made whole. The One that completes me is already on the inside of me. And that One is greater than anyone else in the world. I don’t need rescuing. I am not lonely. I am not starved for love. Period!

Now, will I never get married? I never said that. I might when I feel it is time.  Or maybe not.

But as of today, I am single. And there is an identity in that. The identity that goes with being your own person, being your own muse, being your own unbound, unfettered, untethered song, being your own mindless, poignant, melancholic soliloquy; without being tied down by the selflessness that is the hallmark of any good marriage. 

Instead of talking to me like I’m an idiot, you could just falsely accuse me of being selfish. At least that would sound closer to the truth than the other garbage!

Anyway, coming back to this friend, I just met. Now, I was expecting it to be something of a parade. It was anything but. When he began pouring his heart out, listing all of the issues he was going through in his marriage, telling me how he felt there was a certain kind of beauty in me being single, I was literally beaming with pride but reciprocating with gentle rebukes of the Christian kind. 

‘No, brother. You are so blessed to have someone exclusively for you.’

‘Oh please. Don’t say that. You are in an amazing….’

Well, you know the drill!

Now, here is my own real parade, a little nugget of truth that the married folks need to know, more than the one they are trying to communicate to me:

Your partner is not a cushion for your pain. Your partner was not created to molly-coddle you out of your stupidity. Your partner was not created to compliment your ego. Your partner cannot complete you, when you are a complete incomplete! And your partner is not responsible for your pain. You are. So, stop asking your partner to be your pillow and check if you are a good enough bed. And if you’re lumpy, then well, fix it, before trying to fix the other side.

Take this advice from an absolutely non-judgmental single man. Perhaps, it takes a single man like me, to truly save that illusive perfect union you keep relentlessly boasting about. 

Remember, Hillary, before the advent of Monica’s Stained Blue Dress once wrote: It takes a village!

It does…always!

With love, 

Single Aden.

Thank You, Fire! :-)

You know the story of ‘The Highwayman’; the one where the guy is in love with the girl he is not supposed to be with, and she is used as bait to bring him in and he gets killed and so on. It’s my favorite poem, and for a young boy of 13, that depressing account of lost and failed love was SO appealing, it should have served as a sign of things to come. Because, years later, I would find love and become the highwayman of my own making. I would get destroyed, but of course, I wasn’t an immortalized poetry. So, nobody got to kill me off. I did it all to myself but just before death, I held my hands back and decided, no more. And that depressing story became one of heroism, where I was celebrated by my friends for having dodged the bullet. True. But then it still was MY fault to have fallen in love with a gun. A bad one, at that. Double barrel, shit included!

In that relationship, the first year I was loved. The second year I was deprived. The third year I was despised. The fourth year I was thrown out. The fifth year I stopped existing. And the sixth year…well, there was no sixth year. I wasn’t particularly hurt that I was not loved. Love is a choice. I am okay with that. But I wasn’t ready for the onslaught of disrespect, disregard, willful pulling down of my name and the immature actions that go with being the ex-lover, namely bringing your new lover to church where your old lover is about to begin his song! Talk about insensitivity of the worst kind. Sometimes, our anger and sense of self-righteousness make us so inhuman, we do things that are absolutely disgusting, completely oblivious to the hurt we cause people. Now, with due credit to my own intelligence, I don’t for a moment believe this person was unaware. I think it was purposeful, done concertedly to prove a point to me and may be say: ‘Hey, look! How great I am doing, without you around! How cool I am, without you! Look at all my friends! Look at my badly-worded posts about you! Look at my ‘this’, look at my ‘that’! 

Vanity, dear reader, is always beholden to the bitch, pedestrian or otherwise!

Anyway, jokes apart, I was hurt. I was shocked. Because right in front of me, a person had gone from being a person to a monster. So bad, I even wrote a song about it. I named it ‘Monster’, of course.

It went on for a while and then it hit breaking point. I got so tired of it one day…I decided no more. By that evening, I had landed up in a hospital with major petrol burns on my body and a house full of soot and my mother rushing to Bangalore, to find out how my clothes caught fire while cooking! Truth is…my clothes didn’t. The clothes belonged to said Satan’s spawn! I had attempted to burn it with petrol, in a closed bathroom! Turns out, my anger was real. My sense of science wasn’t. Hence the trip to the hospital!

The final closure happened sometime in July 2014. I had gone to a local eatery for breakfast with a friend. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he exclaimed: Look!

I turned around and it was the face, I had loved and loved, over and over again, walking into the hotel, with a few friends. That moment, what I felt in my heart was absolutely blinding. I froze. My heart got caught in my chest. I felt the friction inside, like a panic attack. I mean, certified panic attack. I looked at my friend, caught his hand and ran out thru the side door. I sat on the road for a moment to compose myself and then left. I kept walking and never looked back. 

When I got back home that day, I realized something. It was over. So over! Somehow, over days, months and years…I had ripped that face out of my heart. It wasn’t the end of romantic love. That had ended sometime in early 2013. I am talking about the normal ‘loving’ and the left-over side effects of a relationship long gone. In fact, one look at that face and I had run out like I had seen the proverbial swine, finally rid of the pearl. 

Until this day, there has never been an apology for what was done to me. I mean I had gone through endless guilt over what I perceived as my mistakes in the relationship. However, there is only so much you can feel guilty for. How long can apology be one-sided? There was no apology tendered to me for my wasted years, my wasted relationships, the pain I caused my family, the financial detriment I put myself and my business through, the strain I put on my own self. But again, why should there be an apology, right? An ass will always remain an ass; cud, turd, hole and all! So, it was actually my fault to have fallen in love with one.

You see, at crux of it all, is this truth. Nobody belongs to me. And I don't belong to anyone. Nobody owes me anything, not even an apology. We are individual people that choose to love, choose to hate and choose to stay or choose to leave. Nobody has a certified hold on anybody. No religion, no value system can mend a heart, when it is hell bent on being broken. I got hurt, went thru pain…and that is because the other person was never mine, never meant to be mine, never should have been mine and never will be mine. I chose to build on a house that was not mine. I chose to spend my time painting a wall that had someone else’s door. 

You see, at the end of day, after you’re done discerning the love, the pain, the abuse, the hurt and everything else…you will find one thing that stands as truth:

You can either be your friend or your enemy. 

And that will determine whether you are burning clothes or wearing them! 

I am of course on good terms with said ex-lover now. I think people might even call us friends. The past is already forgiven. I am still fond of the person, regardless of what went wrong. I still respect the person, whether it is deserved or not. And I still cherish some of the good things that did happen, some of the gestures that can never be duplicated and some of the great things that I was blessed with, despite the shit that came after. But, the entire episode is in the hands of destiny now, to bless where it warrants a blessing and to avenge, when time warrants a reaping. There, of course, will be a day of reckoning and a time of reaping. I am sure of that. The problem is, I don’t care about it anymore. I don’t care for retribution, I don’t particularly favor punishment and I most certainly don’t wish anyone any harm. And, who reaps what for their actions, makes no difference to the equations in my life right now.

This month, on a Friday, seven years will come to a close, since I kissed and began that self-inflicted misery. I write this post as a symbolic closure, you know, to honor the biblical seven-year kind of ‘end-of-era’. And today, more than looking back and weeping, more than looking thru and complaining, I actually find myself rejoicing.

Not for my family, not for my friends, not for my gifts. I rejoice for my enemies. I thank God for the pain they caused me. I thank them for dishonoring me, for disrespecting me and for belittling me. I bless them for having cursed me.

You know why?

Because, I would never have become the joy-filled, at-peace, content man I am today, if I hadn’t entered into the lion’s den yesterday. For that, I am grateful. This ex-lover of mine and everyone else that hurt me, they were my destiny. They were my slingshot to greatness. They were my divine trampoline in an endless cycle of launch and fly. In fact, I have been blessed by my enemies more than I will ever be blessed by my friends. 

So I end this with a heartfelt thanks. 

Thank you, Enemies. Thank you, Detractors. And thank you, Fire.

And while I'm at it... F-you-too! 

Yours truly, Aden.