Roughly 40 plus percentage of all first marriages in the United States are estimated to end in divorce over time. Some persons divorce multiple times.
By comparison, divorces in India are rare, very rare - about 1%.
It's a worthy ponder - why?
Ours is the only living culture where even Gods and Goddesses get married. The Gods and Goddesses possess unique intrinsic qualities that are indispensable to the other, hence the interdependent relationship.
It is a balance, the very essence of being a complementary couple.
That message serves us in our mortal world - for married couples, for families, and therefore for humanity at large.
Our scriptures contain more stories with interpretive messages than any single person can possibly comprehend. These stories are the essence of our cultural pluralism. That a spouse is for eternity, including in reincarnated lives, is a powerful message emanating from our scriptures.
There isn’t even a word for ‘divorce’ in any of our hundreds of native languages!
To a Bharatiya, marriage is a civilizational duty.
It is a sacrament, where the day and time are chosen as auspicious, the process is ritualistic, presided over by a pundit, and witnessed by divinity itself, symbolized by fire.
There is no such thing as a poor marriage. It can be as grand or as small as one wishes. What matters is that it is attended by close family and blessed by elders. On getting married, in spirit, the couple's respective families are expected to fuse into one.
In the couple’s own cognition, upon marrying, they instantly inherit a cultural heritage and the responsibility to pass on the legacy of civilizational ethos by bearing children.
And so, ours is the only ancient civilization that continues to survive and thrive since thousands of years.
Only those distanced from their own culture are easily seduced by the illusion of absolute individuality, an alien concept in our society. It is they who are ready to abandon our time-tested ideas of family and well-being.
They fail to learn to accept the vagaries of married life, which are nothing more than karmic offerings and outcomes. Not having invested in matured bonding through sacrifice, and having focused only on the dividends of a relationship, marriage inevitably feels like bondage when friction from life's turning wheel shows up.
They then conclude that there is only one life, and that maturity lies in reaching one's potential through efficiency, rather than the more effective long-term ways of a stable family.
They attempt to make marriage work as a contractual arrangement, and when they discover that human relations are built on adjustment and not linear logic, they try to control their spouse, or simply abdicate responsibility by becoming indifferent to the other's needs.
With time, they separate or divorce.
Perhaps they rationalize that it is better to be miserably lonely than unhappily married.
They have become excessively Western in thought, and underestimate the significance of marriage, without assessing the impact of diluted marriage on Western society itself.
So, while Indian marriages endure, the innately Abrahamic-cultured nations are seen struggling to retain the family structure.
Having said that, the gold, glitter, glitz and glam of rich urban households during wedding season gets all the media attention and gossip traction.
We too are forgetting what marriage in our culture is about.
We have begun to associate a cluster of invented entertaining events with marriage.
No - marriage is not a party.
Marriage is also not just cohabitation. One doesn't just share half the bed; one pawns 100% of their sleep, discards their personal reality, and builds on new possibilities together with the significant other.
Let us not mistake marriage for the tamasha of pre- and post-wedding events.
Let us keep its sanctity intact.
In India, marriage is not the happy ending for a couple in love. It is the beginning of a love story!
