Equality Matrimonials- are you serious?!

As a married woman you may question my intention behind the close scrutiny I gave the matrimonial column in the Sunday edition of a leading English Daily. But when something has the intriguing title of “Equality Matrimonial” it is bound to attract attention. You immediately wonder if there are also some inequality matrimonials lurking around that you don’t know of!

So my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give this new age matrimonial a read. It turned out that the newspaper felt that there is a population out there which feels that a “traditional” matrimonial doesn’t really spell out all the complex needs and expectations they have of a marriage and need a new specialized matrimonial version that lets them spell out in detail what they are looking for in a prospective life partner.

What I read both surprised and disappointed me. The two large “letters” written by “liberalized” women sounded like a badly written pre-nuptial agreement that ensures minimal emotional ties are formed and what they get in the name of marriage is an alliance of convenience. Agreeing to a marriage like the one these women seem to desire would entail keeping separate finances, parental responsibilities and even houses. Neither partner is under any “traditional” pressure to do anything more than they absolutely have to, will put their own careers first and acknowledge the presence of in-laws only if allowed complete freedom in every aspect of thier married lives.

Now I can see how a relationship like that may hold merit for someone – especially some women who have worked very hard to build their identities and have tasted the bitter impositions of traditional set-ups where they are instinctively expected to sacrifice everything for home and hearth. They are simply protecting what is theirs and which men so easily take for granted. So my grouse is not with the relationship nature. All I question here is why call it a marriage in the first place. If you have the guts to demand absolute “freedom” why not break free from the shackles of a traditional relationship type called marriage? Why not simply agree to be monogamous with a man till it works out for both sides, and give him a special place in your life and proudly show that some religious ceremony, a certificate is not needed to seal your “relationship”?

Maybe it is because even though these people (and I refer here to both men and women who have advertised in this section) have not been able to take the final step to breaking away from all conventional notions of what a lasting bond between a committed man and woman should be. They still want to be “married” though the alliance is nothing like what we know as marriage. They want that social sanction and protection of the law that is given to “married” couples and at the same time want the freedom of the single male or female.

At one level it may just be the perfect solution for the new generation (and I use the phrase at the risk f sounding far older than I am because I think the situation is grave enough to merit the risk) but at another, it is a death knell of a beautiful and much maligned social system.

A marriage is not any more unequal than any other relationship. Whether it is that of a parent-child, employer-employee, each relationship often requires one to give more at one time than the other. To assume that a traditional marriage will always mean that the woman giveth and the man avariciously taketh, is wrong. I know plenty of committed couples where the man has willingly taken on domestic responsibilities, shared the burden of his in-laws, because the woman has made him realize the importance and the benefit of it. To be a strong man or a woman who should be part of an equal relationship does not mean keeping everything separate. It means having the self-belief and the skill to form a loving relationship where respect and freedom is earned by both and freely given by both. It needs no pre-nup type agreement from an “equality matrimonial”. It needs the simple understanding of two human beings who know together is better than separate and are willing to work at it even if it sometime means sharing.