Upon Entering the Emotional Realm of Womanhood

After an emotionally and physically exhausting weekend for the first time in my life I have caught a glimpse of what it is to be a woman. What it is to give up, move on, keep secrets.

I have so much to say, so much that rages in my veins, so much, that after struggle and defeat, has already been suppressed, so much that words don’t describe as much as a pillow choking my face does. About how simplistic marriage can really be in India – a checklist of family, money, education, and looks – where girls have agreed to marry a guy upon meeting him for a few minutes simply on the basis of his face. Where a couple of meetings and a basic list of hobbies, domestic/money-making skills, and exes is all that matters. Besides that je ne sais quoi that makes up a couple’s chemistry and gives the couple the faith to make it through without overanalyzing. Ive been trying to get over my disgust at how… CONVENIENT the process is. At how love doesn’t matter, adoration, romance, sparks, quirks really don’t matter, at how it really is a matter of ‘no expectations’, though how that is possible I’ll never know. Is that how marriage works? On a philosophy of “Expect the worst, hope for the best”?

There’s more I want to say, as a woman, as a lover, as a daughter, as a sister, that I’m scared to, because my expressing them will make them real and scare me further, will allow people to misuse them, will shock and hurt many, including myself, not only because women don’t say these things, but because women are supposed to be … empty. Brand new containers to be filled with the stuff and errands and politics that conjugal life offers. That love, unfortunately, while being the most important ingredient in every detail this entails, is often glazed over.

Ive discovered that behind every seemingly placid married woman, is a love that, like a volcano, exploded, and in her fear and confusion, destroyed an important essence of herself. She realizes this, and scrambles to recover the vestiges of that most important essence. Afraid of this most important part of her being being scorned, desecrated, by those unworthy of understanding, perhaps rationalized, as a more social acceptable explanation, for being concerned for her reputation, she buries the embodiment of that essence deep inside, covering it carefully by years of forgetting, and by the blood and sinews and habits of a more… permanent… man. A love story that was impossible, unrealistic, irreconciliable, impractical. A path that is abandoned, albeit with great struggle and resistance, for the more acceptable, predictable path of security. Happiness that is passed over for a bunch of material goods and services, for relationships that should add up to something very much like happiness, in the immortal words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But not quite.

I remember my mother being very affected by the movie Devdas. And once she asked, “What if I had chosen love, instead of security?” And try as I might, I never got another word out of her.

What if, indeed?

It is this secret that women keep, that qualifies them to enter the hallowed world of the wife, joining the ranks of millions of women who tell their husbands everything. Technically.

The funny thing is, the invisible pointing fingers we fear are all an illusion. And the illusion is our undoing.

All I want to say is I wish I had been allowed the choice.