Tag: when to get married

“When Should I Get Married?” 10 Questions I Wish I Had Asked Myself Before Getting Married – Part 2

Hello penguins! In the last post I talked about 5 of the top 10 questions you must ask yourself (and your boyfriend/girlfriend) to determine whether you’re ready to get married. Here are the last 5.

1.      Do we know each other’s negative sides and have strategies to deal with them?

Do you know what your boyfriend is like when he’s really (I mean really really) angry?

You can’t live without your dogs. Do you know if she can live with them?

Are you too ambitious for him/her?

Before you decide when to get married, make sure you know about (most of) those aspects of your partner which you don’t like. For this, you need to know each other closely enough. Don’t decide to get married in a rush (like I did, and had to put in a lot for effort later, before we came close to finding solutions).

When should I get marriedPhoto by midgetmanofsteel

The second step after figuring each other out is learning to deal with each other. When you should get married will depend largely on what kind of time you take to develop strategies to handle each other’s negative sides.

For example, decide whether you’re ready to live pet-less for the rest of your life for the sake of your pet-o-phobic partner. Make your peace with your partner’s may-not-be-so-awesome career before you’ve decided to get married. Taking the plunge carrying qualms and disappointments  in your mind is a near-perfect formula for marital disaster.

2.      Do we respect and admire each other as individuals?

Are you in love? Great. But it also means you have a fancy pair of glasses on your eyes (I know I had). Glasses which make him/her seem like The Best Thing on Earth, The Thing to die for, The Thing to live for.

Of course I’m joking. Of course you’re not going to think about marriage in that stage of your relationship. The stage when everything looks pink. Unfortunately I did, and I really hope and wish (and warn) that you don’t.

You love each other and care for each other. But also ask yourselves whether you value each other as individuals, for the qualities that you have (and beauty or physical attractiveness is not one of them, because its magic wears off). If you’ve never bothered about those, start now. You don’t want to know what happens when you marry someone thinking they’re gold and your shared life proves them to be only glittery, and not gold.  

3.      Have we become part of each other’s family?

I cannot emphasize the importance of this one enough, especially in an Indian context. Knowing each other’s families and becoming integrated is important not only because you’re expected to spend time with them after marriage, but much more importantly, because you can’t know a person fully unless you know their family. When you’ve spent time with your partner in their home, with their family – you get to know them in their most comfortable context. It’s here that you get to see their truest self.

This is important especially if you and your partner have met each other at a later stage in life (say, after college). Never make the mistake of taking your relationship too far (close to marriage, that is) without knowing your partner’s family well enough. People grow out of their homes and can develop an exterior which doesn’t show their true self, their core values and beliefs. When you spend enough time with their family, get to know about their childhood, their relationship with their parents and closest friends – you get to look past that veneer.

When should I get marriedPhoto by rikhei

Secondly of course there’s the question of developing a relationship with each other’s families. This involves knowing their positives, negatives, expectations from you etc. You might like them, you might not. But in any case you need to have your strategy of dealing with them in the best possible way. This strategy is best developed over time, in a no-pressure situation. In other words, before marriage (unlike me ;)).

4.      Can I see him/her as a parent of my children?

The import of this one of course needs no re-emphasis. Does it fill your heart with happiness to think of having children with him/her one day? Is he/she the kind of person you’d want to share your genes with, in the form of your legacy in this world?

On this count, the question of his/her family comes into play once again. You might love each other and want to live with each other. But before deciding when to get married, be conscious of the fact that your children are as much a product of your family, as hers/his. Are you happy to think of your child as a dot on the line of his/her family?

If not, think again. And very carefully.

5.      Is he/she The One?

I’m an idealist when it comes to love. I believe in all the good old concepts like there being a special someone waiting for each of us, and a couple being two parts of a whole which fit perfectly into each other, and each other only. While everything I’ve mentioned so far is crucial to deciding when to get married, nothing replaces that special connection you feel with him/her which you’ve never felt before. Only this morning I was thinking of how meeting your Special One is like resonance in physics – you’ll never get to see the how much your heart can fly unless you’ve hit the resonant frequency, of which there’s only one in this world. In fact I posted about it (along with a lot of other fun, romantic and quirky quotes) in our Facebook Page.

If this box is not ticked, deal’s sure off. No questions asked.

And after many shameful confessions of not asking (most of) the right questions before marriage, I’m bloated with pride to inform you that this one is something I managed to tick the first thing after I met him. :D

6.      Is there a #6?

Well there wouldn’t be, but as our most enthusiastic friend and follower Connie Omari has pointed out in the comments to the last post, a shared spiritual (NOT religious) belief is crucial too. You’re an atheist, your partner goes to the temple every Thursday, you’re fighting about it every day and you’re still hoping it’ll all be ok after marriage – unlikely to work.

What are the questions you’re planning to go over before your marriage?

What did you ask and what did you forget to ask before your marriage?

I can’t wait to hear it all out in the comments.

Have a great day!

“When Should I Get Married?” 10 Questions I Wish I Had Asked Myself Before Getting Married – Part 1

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.

When to get marriedPhoto by Marriage Bureau

1.      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. ;)

When to get marriedPhoto by somaksarkar

4.      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.