Do you know that less than 1 lac Indians are Googling about when they should get married as compared to 33.5 lac Googling “marriage” per month? That’s less than 3% marriage maturity. Dumb, I say. But not much more than I was of course, when I took the plunge without bothering about whether I was really ready to get married.
How we came to make it work eventually is another story for another day.;)
Today I want to share with you my “hindsight” (they’re always priceless, you know) on the questions you should ask yourself to gauge whether you’re ready to get married. Now of course the number of questions you should ask yourselves before getting married is not ten, it’s more in the range of three and a half thousand. But I’ve tried to sum all that up in these ten questions in today’s (and the next) post. There are gazillions of other questions you can and should ask each other before proceeding to say “I do”, but these ten are ones you absolutely cannot afford to miss.
Photo by Marriage Bureau1. Am I ready to settle down?
Marriage always involves sacrificing freedom, in some form or the other.
It involves giving up (some of) those late nights.
It might mean spending less time with your parents or friends.
It means cutting back on Facebooking at 2 am.
It means being unable to blog 24X7 (in my case :P).
Depending on where these activities figure on your priority list, gauge carefully whether you’re ready for married life.
2. Are our visions of The Ideal Life similar?
You’re in love with the idea of a fast-paced life full of fine dining, dancing and partying in a metro, whereas your girlfriend/boyfriend can’t give up on their Neo-Luddite dreams of going back to the slow and peaceful lifestyle of their small hometown/village where everyone knew everyone else by first name.
Fun starts with shopping and ends with Son of Sardar for your partner, and you’ll have to replace those items with Fellini and Karnatik classical music when you think about yourself.
If your and your partner’s lifestyle choices and aspirations are as apart as the poles, while you can still be in love, you’re probably not ready to get married (yet). What we like (and can live with) within the limited window of a relationship, can become a dealbreaker when it comes to spending your life with someone.
Think about it.
3. Are our life and career goals aligned?
If you really want children but your girlfriend/boyfriend really doesn’t want any, it’s unlikely that you’ll be happy in a life shared with each other. Same if you want your career to span five continents and your partner wants geographical stability.
Take time to discuss your life and career goals before you decide to get married to avoid serious crises later. ;)
Photo by somaksarkar4. Do we know each other’s needs and have strategies to satisfy them?
I have a bit of need for dependency (embarrassing I know).
Our whirlwind courtship was woefully inadequate to give him any wind of this. We spent our first six months miscommunicating, creating wrong expectations, breaking them and each other’s bones – well almost – in the process, till he finally got it. And the funny thing is I had no idea that he had no idea about it. We tend to assume our partners will magically understand everything about us, you see.
What are your emotional and other needs from each other?
Are both of you ready to put in the efforts to provide these?
Unless you’ve answered the above two questions to the satisfaction of both of you, you’re probably not ready to get married.
5. Do we know everything (relevant) about each other?
Even in the midst of my raving mania of falling head-over-heels in love (when I met Shubho) I had the good sense to anticipate this one – if you get married on the basis of false impressions, you’re in for trouble. You wouldn’t believe this – within days of our first date I’d told him the darkest and deepest of my secrets. And he did the same.
Yes, some of them were shocking to him.
Maybe some of them made him think twice.
But I don’t think we’d have been able to give stability to our commitment if we hadn’t been able to cultivate each other’s deepest trust. And needless to say, deciding to share your life with someone without creating complete trust between yourselves is wildly and disastrously a bit stupid.
What are the other questions that bother you when you think about taking your relationship to the next level? Tell me by about them by leaving a comment. In the meantime stay tuned for part 2 of today’s post where I’ll talk about the next 5 of the 10 crucial questions to ask yourselves before tying the knot.