I married for practical reasons and it was a terrible time of torment

Home / Personal Growth / Communication / A Turbulance Called Marriage

Please raise your hands if you can sail through it smoothly.

by PK   
 

Having grown up in an ashram, I was in a dilemma when it came to marriage.

Now marriage as an institution is an attempt by the human mind to bring some order in the chaos that sexuality brings. The average humanity goes through this mill and it is the only kind of evolutionary sadhana an average person goes through. Humanity has been brain-washed to find happiness in it – not just happiness but the ultimate happiness. Then religious factors have been drummed into us which are very contrary to real life. So marriage creates many dilemmas. Many of the dilemmas are so contrary to our own life’s path that a lot of pain is created.

Marriage until it goes beyond the hormonal level and social customs cannot give happiness. It was designed for regularity and social order. It can give a lot of happiness but until companionship develops between the two parties, there is no happiness.

I have known two marriages in the Ashram which were based on the necessity of the spirit and devotion to each other. Marriage vows were taken more for convenience of the society and its laws. The marriage in spirit was already made.

A very basic problem of marriage is that people outgrow themselves and both the partners do not grow equally and not in the same direction nor at the same speed. This creates even more self-centred pressures.

I could see the marriages around me and the lack of happiness in them. This was very discouraging. Most marriages were held together because of economic or legal hassles and sometimes because of the attachments to children.

I wanted to try out partnering with a woman but every time I made a friend or reached the embrace stage, the woman’s demands would begin and this was a big put-off.

Then I meditated and realised that I am reacting to the shape of woman automatically. This is something that is embedded in us since the beginning of time. If we focus sincerely within we soon see that it is not one person that we are attracted to but the basic characteristics of the opposite sex. Proximity plays a big part in these affairs of love. Leave two bodies together and they will find enough attractiveness in each other to want to mate.

When people marry they do just this, totally ignoring the person in the body. When the body’s needs are met the real person residing above the neck starts making his or her demands and thus the acrimony begins to enter the atmosphere.

Having realized this I concluded I wanted a love affair and not a marriage. Moreover I would wait till somebody found me attractive enough and love me for myself and then I would let myself go. I was very influenced by the book Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham. In this, he says, ‘Between two lovers there is always one who loves and the other who lets himself/herself be loved.’

And I could see this happening all around me and my own experiments with flirting proved that as long I was running after a person she would show interest but soon it would melt into nothingness.

Finally I had the experience of somebody who came into my life and gave herself without question at the age of 36. It was giving all the way. And it was a most beautiful experience. I had many elevating moments as I saw myself in all hues and learnt more about myself than I had until now. Suddenly my own self was laid out in front of me without any curtains.

Then circumstances changed and nothing came out of it.

I even discussed this with my teachers in the ashram where I had grown up. If I had to stay out in the world and not in the ashram, marriage was becoming a pragmatic necessity. But as a practitioner of numerology I had seen that marriage happened only with the diametrically opposite ‘number’. So if I wanted to get into marriage I should be ready for opposition, misunderstandings and turbulence.

Again as an experiment I started my love affairs. I would fall in love (so called) but every time I would propose marriage they told me that they did not feel needed and would leave me. I wondered what was wrong with me how these ladies could see through me.

Eventually I married for practical reasons and it was a terrible time of torment. But I decided not to run away. I learnt a lot about my own selfish attitudes because the feedback from the partner was immediate and honestly speaking true. So first I concentrated on my negative attributes and compromised with my partner at every stage. When the relationship began to stabilise and she started trusting me a bit, I stared discussing her attitudes and how some of her behaviour was hurting me. Slowly she also started to change her patterns but not as consciously as I had done.

Now I can say that marriage put me in a bind and forced me to look inward and gave me the final push towards enlightenment. When all is said and done, the best moments I have known in my life came through my child and I am enjoying my child like a person possessed. Because now my wife and I have found friendship we are having, generally speaking, a jolly good time, busy raising our kid. Her own insecurities do frighten her sometimes into quarrels with me but they are manageable. Filed under Communication, Marriage, Relationships, My life in perspective. PK- of s164gk1, New Delhi

Pradeep Maheshwari  - Resume

S-164 Greater Kailash, Part 1, New Delhi 110048. India

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My websites: 

http://indianartnetwork.com/profile/Pradeepmaheshwari

http://sites.google.com/site/pkcentreforchange/Home

http://pk.posterous.com/

Two of my books have been posted at posterous can be seen in full at: 

http://pk.posterous.com/soul-speak,http://pk.posterous.com/lovemetender

http://filedby.com/author/pradeep%20maheshwari/3534325

My essays are featured regularly on: 

http://www.tickledbylife.com,http://tickledbylife.com/index.php?author=16

Check my new compilation on artists and their work:

http://sites.google.com/site/theabcofartnership/

For originals tableaux from various artists please visit this link:

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Have been active in Import/Export/Representation of Companies from Europe and Marketing Consultancy, Counseling. Product design and Development, Persona Enhancement as personal trainer. Teaching FRENCH & English, Published author, My latest books: ( The ABC of Artnership, Soul Speak) Age 56 yrs.

I follow the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother of Pondicherry. I am an ardent believer in the lessons imparted by The Dalai Lama and Osho of Pune, Guru Nanak. The Sufi philosophy of living is what I try to emulate in my life.   

Writers that have had a profound influence on me are Bertrand Russell, Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, La Rochefoucauld among others.

Books that have helped in my forming are: Up the Organisation, Zen and the Martial Arts, Journey to Xtlan, Peter's Prescription, Cheiro's Book of Numbers, The Book of proverbs, The Reader's Digest and its many publications etc.

Turning thoughts into ideas, ideas into books, and books into thoughts again

Women Centre Stage: The Dramatist and the Play Poile Sengupta
Gender & Social Protection Strategies in the Informal Economy Naila Kabeer
Ritual Matters: Dynamic Dimensions in Practice

Son as surrogate

Home > Opinion > Boys need special focus

R Jagannathan

DNA, Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The end of the Noughties is a good time to think about boys and men. Contrary to what is articulated in the media and by card-carrying feminists, boys need more attention than girls — not because they are special, but because society has more to lose for boyhood gone wrong. When it comes to girls, we know what has to be done: allow them to soar. But do we know what to do for our boys apart from bringing them down to earth?

Do we know how to deal with the crisis of manhood? The issue is aggravated by the deluge of daily images of dysfunctional men: from rapists and molesters of various kinds to the Rathores who use positions of power to subvert the law, from boys who learn to murder for money to perverts who stalk potential victims on social networking sites.

Reverse sexism is not helping. You may not see gender-insensitive headlines like “Boys do better at IITs,” but “Girls top SSC rankings again” is par for the course. In short, men have very few positive images to build a reworked future where women will claim their rightful share and men have to do most of the adjusting.

Power corrupts. Male power has, over the past few centuries, been used as much to subjugate as to protect. It is time to change that —and the best way to do that is by focusing on how we need to bring up our boys so that they grow up to be the kind of men we need. Demonising men may be a useful way for damaged women to vent, but it is not going to get us anywhere. To understand why men need to change, we also need to acknowledge evolution’s impact on male development.

Fact 1: No species apart from humans has given only one gender extraordinary dominance over the other. Why did this happen? Answer: unlike humans, power is more equal between the sexes in most species. Have you ever heard of rape in another species even though all males in all species have the same biological urges? Probably not. Equality of power doesn’t mean equal physical strength. In all species, the male is bigger than the female. But in no species is the female incapable of defending herself well enough to deter over-aggressive males. Why did this happen only in humans?

Fact 2: Humans began to dominate other species because specialised male functions helped generate long-term wealth and consolidated power. Males developed physical strength, risk-taking abilities, and aggression. Females developed the ability to empathise with other humans and built networking capabilities. Tribes with specialised gender roles grew stronger and from this realisation it was just a hop, step and jump away to formal patriarchy and male dominance.

Fact 3: Women, especially Indian women, have played a major role in making men what they are. The typical Indian mother, trying to make up for the emotional deficit in her relationship with her spouse, ends up building up her son as surrogate to step into the void. (While psychologist Sudhir Kakar has made this point several times, a good recent book to offer insights in this area is Shaifali Sandhya’s Love Will Follow).

This kind of toxic maternal affection and high emotional expectations permanently scars boys and as they develop their own sexuality, they sometimes develop both deep bonds and deep anxieties about their mothers. Later on, they tend to see women only as mothers or whores, not equal sexual and emotional partners. This is the mindset that sometimes creates rapists and molesters even while ruining spousal relationships.

All these factors have taken a heavy toll of men. The vast majority of ordinary, decent men have limited awareness of their own emotional needs and an even poorer ability to communicate. Half their human faculties have been sacrificed to the cause of evolution.

Today, the relentless cycle of evolution is moving in the direction of female empowerment not only because it is the right thing to do, but because unbridled male power is damaging all of earth. The power imbalance is leading to constant conflict (global war-mongering), and destructive self-aggrandisement (the crash of the global financial system is a male greed issue).

As a society, we have a lot of things to fix. Top of the agenda is a focus on boys and their developmental needs — mental, physical and emotional, including gender sensitisation. A significant chunk of investment must be made in counselling parents and schools, for this is where many innocent little boys become transformed into problem men. There is no time to waste. 

Feelings of guilt and shame in women

How men and women respond differently to sex Hindustan times - ‎jan 4, 2010 - When it comes to sexual responses, men and women are poles apart, concludes a new study. Led by Queen's University Psychology professor Meredith Chiversk, the study found that men's reports of feeling sexually aroused tend to match their physiological ... Women 'may have lower sex drives due to guilt' Telegraph.co.uk Why men and women really are on different planets while in bed Daily Mail bolohealth.com - CBC.ca - msnbc.com - News Locale guilt may make women have a less satisfying sex life bolohealth.com - ‎jan 5, 2010‎ - Feelings of guilt and shame revolving around sex can explain the reason behind the low sex drives in women. Low libidos can trigger to unhappiness in their ... Women 'may have lower sex drives due to guilt' Telegraph.co.uk Men and Women Show Different Responses to Sexual Stimuli News Locale

Intimate Relations: The Natural History of Desire by Liam Hudson (Author), Bernadine Jacot (Author). Hudson and Jacot (The Way Men Think, 1992) make a perplexing and incoherent effort to analogize intimacy and art. The authors declare "that psychological differences between the sexes are both deeply engrained and imaginatively galvanising" and "that there exists a parallel between art and intimate relations." Unfortunately, very little that follows has anything to do with these potentially engaging assertions. (Kirkus Reviews) Differences between the sexes are both deeply engrained and imaginatively galvanising 10:40 AM

Women have a lower sex drive than men, and are more likely to lose interest There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women’s lust too deeply to unearth, to view. « Previous Page  7  Next Page » Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book, “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing,” will be published this month. More Articles in Magazine » A version of this article appeared in print on January 25, 2009, on page MM26 of the New York edition. 4:46 PM

Married (Happily) With Issues 
Do you fear the snakes in your own marriage? Are you clearer about your job as a parent than your job as a spouse? Share your thoughts NYTimes.com: December 1, 2009 (Page 10 of 10)  « Previous Page Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer, is working on a memoir about marriage improvement called “No Cheating, No Dying.” 9:15 AM 

Sarojini Sahoo: In one of my recently published interviews in Muse India, I stated that I differed from Simon de Beauvoir' in her 'Other' theory where she says “one is not born but rather, becomes a woman.” I further stated that I think a woman is born as a woman. Such a statement by me surprised some of my scholar friends in that how could I state this when it is known to me that according to social anthropology, gender is more a societal than a biological phenomenon. I have posted my new blogging “Being Feminine: A Matter of Socialisation or Biology?” at SENSE & SENSUALITY to clarify my stand. Your comments and suggestions will make me applauded and guided.  Sarojini 

Religious practices seem out of place in yoga

Integral Ideology An Ideological Genealogy of Integral Theory and Practice Posted by RCARLSON | Published: DECEMBER 16, 2009

RICHARD CARLSON

Although Sri Aurobindo, the founder of Integral Yoga formally eschewed couching his yoga in religion nevertheless, religious practices crept into the practices of its followers. It is in fact the transference of Hindu religious practices on to Integral Yoga which has facilitated a fascination of some of his followers with the fundamentalist rhetoric of todays militant Hindu nationalism (Hinduvta).

Some of his writings from the period in which he was a revolutionary leader of the Indian Independence movement have been been historically decontextualized and appropriated by various fractions of Hindu nationalist in support of their ethnically cleansed view of India. These writings usually referenced by Hinduvta authors, or even Leftist critics of the Hindu Right, are generally those of an early period in his work “between 1901 to 1913” (Heehs 2006 para 7) in which Sri Aurobindo discovered and immersed himself in the text and practices of Hinduism.

In many respects Hinduism for Sri Aurobindo was an indigenous resistance practice to the foreign occupation and value systems of the Raj. In his writings from this early period one finds the identification of the Hindu concept of sanatan dharma -eternal religion- with the self-determination of India itself. [...]

Sri Aurobindo’s life was in many way heroic, his knowledge was both complex and encyclopedic. He viewed his own accomplishments as the result of the efforts of a man aspiring for transformation and transparency to the grace received from above. He did however, speak of his yogic consort Mirra Alfassa (the Mother) as an incarnation of the Divine in its form of Shakti. For her part the Mother referred to Sri Aurobindo as an Avatar (divine incarnation). While it can be said that they both did not actively seek worshipers and were kind to their followers, it can also be said that they did not reject the worship and deification of their devotees.

It is one thing to believe that in a universe in which consciousness is delineated by various graduations, that on some planes of consciousness, expressions of devotion through the articulation of feelings (bhakti) are entirely proper, it is quite another not to comprehend – especially when one otherwise advocates for secular polity and eschewing religious dogma – that some followers will become attached to the forms of worship and inevitably confuse levels of consciousness, as well as secular and sacred, subcultural and cultural, theocratic and democratic values.

While claiming to disassociate his yoga from Hinduism many of the practices of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram during his lifetime (and certainly today) in fact mimic traditional forms of Hinduism. These practices include performance of an audience with the Guru (darshan) and prostration at the feet of the Guru. Moreover, it appears that these practices were deliberately cultivated to satisfy the psychological needs of Indian followers by preserving their religious traditions, because in the words of the Mother : “it gave them the fullness they needed”. (Heehs 2008 p356). Even if uttered with the best of intention this statement is absolutely patronizing. The fact that the Mother was French makes matters somewhat more problematic. Couldn’t Indian followers also adapt to a yoga that eschewed religious practice or were they too unsophisticated?

In short, while the rituals cultivated in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram are indeed indigenous religious practices of India they seem out of place in a yoga which claims to renounce religion and sectarianism. Although a genealogy tracing Integral Yoga to today’s Hindu nationalist politics can not be established, one can certainly find certain affinities with Hindu religious practices. It is this allegiance to Hinduism and the transference of its sectarian values system on to political discourse, that no doubt facilitates the embrace of some Integral Yogis of reactionary Hindu nationalism.

In general fundamentalism of any kind may also include fascistic orientations, chief among these is blind allegiance to a charismatic leader. Participation in an authoritarian culture also involves certain psychological orientations which favor hierarchical structures, linear paradigms of causality, and hegemonic gradients of power which are often expressed militantly. Conference Proceedings: Fundamentalism and the Future

Managing one's sexual urges continues to be relevant

Home > Opinion > Taming the sexual tiger
Abhay Vaidya DNA, Monday, December 14, 2009

The world has passed through multiple sexual revolutions since and India is just beginning to open up on this front. Sexual freedom is increasingly becoming a reality, especially for urban Indian men and women, and there is ample opportunity for experimentation, be it real or virtual. As our society embraces new attitudes on sex, making it challenging particularly for the youth, the fact remains that howsoever outdated and irrelevant Gandhi's thoughts may seem today, his focal point on managing one's sexual urges continues to be relevant.

All the more for people in the public glare, who have high stakes in carefully cultivated images which are often just facades. Tiger Woods is but the latest in the long string of notables from any and every country whose image has been shattered by the revelation of his sexual escapades. It was Bill Clinton before him who made headline news on the same subject. Both Clinton and Woods projected the image of ideal family men but confessed that they had erred in weak moments.

Our present ethic on fidelity in marriage can be traced to the traditions of the Catholic Church and 18th century America which "condemned sex outside marriage and exalted family solidarity". As it stands, marriage has emerged as more than a practical institution; it is a bond of trust among couples that weakens, if not breaks, with the discovery of infidelity.

The matter of suppressing sexual urges has been central to practically all religions, although virtually all religious orders have failed in trying to keep their priests and pundits celibate, as is evidenced from scandal upon scandal. [...]

The American philosopher Will Durant described sex as "our strongest instinct and greatest problem" after hunger. He strongly disapproved of the gross stimulation provided to this instinct by modern civilisation through advertisement and other means and looked upon marriage as a solution "to take our minds off sex, and become adult".

It may be forcefully argued that the traditional emphasis on suppressing the sexual urge has, on the contrary, fuelled the sex industry and, as a consequence, the trafficking of children who die young or end up as unwillingprostitutes. Legalising prostitution is one way of coming out of our denial and this thought was expressed recently by the Supreme Court.

The larger family mitigates the effects of aggression

A Duet Need Not Be Out Of Sync
Sudhir Kakar, TOI, 5 December 2009
Modern Indian marriages are negotiating intimacy and familial communion

When asked to specify the most important change in middle-class Indian society in the last four to five decades, my answer has been, ''The changing Indian woman!'' More concretely, it is the middle-class Indian woman who i consider the driving force behind changes taking place in many areas of social life. Here, though, i will concentrate only on one such realm: marriage.

The woman's role as the prime mover of social change was made possible by two developments. One, a revision of the traditional view on the education of a daughter, which encouraged higher education for girls and thus made their participation in work life possible. Two, the growing financial needs of middle-class families, partly due to their higher consumption aspirations, which welcomed the woman's contribution to the family income.

One consequence of these developments has been the woman's higher self-esteem and potential for self-assertion which, in turn, have led her to demand greater emotional fulfilment in marriage than was the case with women of an earlier era. In other words, women today feel more entitled and are more vocal in their demand for a universal promise of marriage: intimacy, a couple's mutual enhancement of experience beyond procreative obligations and social duties, a state of being that integrates tenderness and eroticism, human depth and common values.

Even a few decades ago, the nature of Indian social reality and family life was not conducive to the fulfilment of this promise, at least in the first few years of a couple's married life. The dangers posed to the larger family by the development of intimacy in a couple were suggested by such questions as: Will the couple's growing closeness cause the husband to neglect his duties as a son? As a brother? Will the increasing intimacy of the couple turn the woman primarily into a wife rather than a daughter-in-law and inspire the husband to transfer his loyalty and affection to her rather than remaining truly a son of the house?

These were, of course, not either/or choices. However, custom, tradition and interests of other family members demanded that in the redefinition of roles and relationships initiated by marriage, the roles of husband and wife, at least in the beginning, be relegated to relative inconsequence. Today, slowly but surely, the middle-class woman is pushing the Indian family towards a greater acknowledgement, grudging or otherwise, of the importance if not yet the primacy of the marital bond, and a far greater recognition of the couple in the affairs of the larger family. The outcome of the conflict between two different principles of family organisation the importance of the parent-son and fraternal relationships on the one hand and that of the husband-wife on the other is shifting in favour of the couple as the fulcrum of family life.

This shift, however, is imposing its own distinctive strains upon Indian marriages. As middle-class disenchantment with other institutions in our society becomes rampant, there is a danger that the strains placed on the couple as a space that fulfils the quest for authentic experience may prove too much for this still-fragile institution.

For one, the couple is an emotional hothouse albeit one that also grows wondrous plants where, at different times, the spouse is required to be lover, parent, child and sibling. The demands on the partner, mostly unconscious, to fulfil these multiple roles rather than their being spread over the larger family as was the case earlier can certainly become a major source of strain in the emotional life of a young couple.

Another source of strain on the couple lies in its tendency to isolate itself from the larger family. Here, the danger is that the inevitable upsurges of aggression in the life of the couple will have no other outlet than the partners themselves, and thus cause serious damage to their intimacy. The larger family mitigates the effects of aggression by either some of its members serving as the objects of its discharge or by providing the stage where the husband and wife can be hostile towards each other in the relative safety of an intimate audience.

Is the middle-class Indian woman's increasing emphasis on intimacy as a sine qua non (a condition) of married life overblown? I will answer by saying that the movement towards the couple is indeed desirable, a necessary corrective to the excessive 'familism' as i would call the traditional ideology governing intimate relationships. We need to be on our guard, however, that this movement does not cross over to an extreme that is defined by a complete disregard of other family ties.

Whereas we may welcome the modern Indian woman's wish to constitute a two-person universe with her husband, we must also caution against the couple's tendency to become a fortress that shuts out all other relationships. The couple needs to remain vigilant that intimacy does not degenerate into a mutual ego-boosting enterprise; that it does not become a joint self-centredness which is the bane of not just a few European and North American marriages. The writer is a psychoanalyst and novelist.

More intimacy meant less autonomy. More passion meant less stability

Married (Happily) With Issues Elizabeth Weil
Do you fear the snakes in your own marriage? Are you clearer about your job as a parent than your job as a spouse? Share your thoughts NYTimes.com: December 1, 2009 (Page 10 of 10)

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir. But there is a crucial problem: as infants we are monogamous with our mothers, but our mothers are not monogamous with us. That first monogamy — that template — is much less pure than we allow. “So when we think about monogamy, we think about it as though we are still children and not adults as well,” Adam Phillips notes. [...]

In “Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time,” Stephen A. Mitchell, a psychoanalyst, presents a strong case for the idea that those thoughts you might have about your spouse or your sex life being predictable or boring — that’s just an “elaborate fantasy,” a reflection of your need to see your partner as safe and knowable, so you don’t have to freak out over the possibility that he could veer off in an unforeseen direction, away from you.

Inspired by Mitchell, I decided to try a thought exercise: to think, while we were making love, that Dan was not predictable in the least. Before this, Dan and I were having regular sex, in every sense: a couple of times a week, not terribly inventive. As in many areas of our lives, we’d found a stable point that well enough satisfied our desires, and we just stayed there.

But now I imagined Dan as a free actor, capable of doing anything at any time and paradoxically, by telling myself I did not know what to expect, I wanted to move toward him, to uncover the mystery. For years, of course, I felt I knew Dan well, worried that lessening the little distance between us could lead to collapse. Now I was having the same sweaty feelings I had in my 20s, when I would let my psyche ooze into that of a new lover at the start of an affair.

A better marriage meant more passionate sex, this went without saying. But by now I noticed a pattern: improving my marriage in one area often caused problems in another. More intimacy meant less autonomy. More passion meant less stability. I spent a lot of time feeling bad about this, particularly the fact that better sex made me retreat.

There’s a school of thought that views sex as a metaphor for marriage. Its proponents write rational-minded books like Patricia Love and Jo Robinson’s “Hot Monogamy,” in which they argue, “When couples share their thoughts and emotions freely throughout the day, they create between them a high degree of trust and emotional connection, which gives them the freedom to explore their sexuality more fully.”

But there’s this opposing school: sex — even sex in marriage — requires barriers and uncertainty, and we are fools to imagine otherwise. “Romantic love, at the start of this century, is cause for embarrassment,” Cristina Nehring moans in “A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century.” She berates the conventional marital set-up: two spouses, one house, one bedroom. She’s aghast at those who strive for equality. “It is precisely equality that destroys our libidos, equality that bores men and women alike.” I can only imagine what scorn she’d feel for hypercompanionate idiots like us.

Still, I agreed with Nehring’s argument that we need “to rediscover the right to impose distances, the right to remain strangers.” Could my postcoital flitting away be a means to re-establish erotic distance? An appealing thought but not the whole truth. [...]

In psychiatry, the term “good-enough mother” describes the parent who loves her child well enough for him to grow into an emotionally healthy adult. The goal is mental health, defined as the fortitude and flexibility to live one’s own life — not happiness. This is a crucial distinction. Similarly the “good-enough marriage” is characterized by its capacity to allow spouses to keep growing, to afford them the strength and bravery required to face the world.
In the end, I settled on this vision of marriage, felt the logic of applying myself to it. Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage — the reason so few of us do it — stems from a misapprehension of the proper goal.

In the early years, we take our marriages to be vehicles for wish fulfillment: we get the mate, maybe even a house, an end to loneliness, some kids. But to keep expecting our marriages to fulfill our desires — to bring us the unending happiness or passion or intimacy or stability we crave — and to measure our unions by their capacity to satisfy those longings, is naïve, even demeaning. Of course we strain against marriage; it’s a bound canvas, a yoke.

Over the months Dan and I applied ourselves to our marriage, we struggled, we bridled, we jockeyed for position. Dan grew enraged at me; I pulled away from him. I learned things about myself and my relationship with Dan I had worked hard not to know. But as I watched Dan sleep — his beef-heart recipe earmarked, his power lift planned — I felt more committed than ever. I also felt our project could begin in earnest: we could demand of ourselves, and each other, the courage and patience to grow. « Previous Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer, is working on a memoir about marriage improvement called “No Cheating, No Dying.”

Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedman

Home » Opinion » Edit Page TOP ARTICLE
A Date With Reality Amrit Dhillon TOI, 2 December 2009

It's easy to visualise the Pune teenager who arranged to meet her boyfriend the day before Friendship Day recently. Just 15, she must have been flushed with excitement at the prospect of feeling special and desirable, and coming home later from the rendezvous floating in that delicious dreamy delirium that characterises the early days of a relationship. But the boyfriend brought along three friends for some 'fun' and they raped her in turns. The following day, the girl hanged herself. In their tragic interplay, i imagine she was seeking love while he wanted sex. Her humiliation and death reveal how the dating game in India is going horribly wrong because boys and girls are playing by different rules.

Girls are eager to explore their newfound social freedom to experience the headiness of loving and being loved. Physical desire is obviously an important part of this exploration because the hormones of a teenage girl are fizzing just as furiously as those of any young male. But girls venture into this new world almost utterly defenceless and, as mostly small-town ingenues, are vulnerable to the first predator who comes along.

So girls are filmed undressing by their boyfriends. The MMS clips are sent to friends or used for blackmail. Girls who end relationships have acid thrown on them. Girls who reject boys' advances are stalked and threatened. In the West, young girls absorb vast amounts of information about relationships before acquiring their first boyfriend. From TV programmes and debates, magazines, playground gossip and conversations with mothers and elder sisters, they develop a sixth sense for detecting a false note or a whiff of aggression that could endanger them.

More than information, certain ideas have entered their minds. The theories of the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards in the West made women aware of the power dynamic between men and women. The ideas of Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedman filtered down into popular consciousness. No doubt, they were diluted and reduced to slogans by the time they reached the woman on the street but they nevertheless coloured the landscape of her mind.

This process has been absent in India where such debates have been largely confined to women's groups and magazines such as Manushi. Here, girls plunge into the dating game intellectually blindfolded, groping (excuse the pun) for signposts as they navigate this new terrain. They possess none of the psychological tools to discriminate between genuine and fake interest. Having had arranged marriages themselves, their mothers and elder sisters are of no help.

Quite apart from the limited help available from their families, even the wider culture around them fails to imbue girls either with sense or suspicion. How can it? For centuries, social norms have imposed strict social segregation. The new freedom for the sexes to mix is so new that society has barely woken up to its implications. Whereas in the West, relations between the sexes evolved gradually, over decades, in India, the process has been squeezed into 10-15 years, jumping from Jane Austen to Paris Hilton in the blink of an eye.

As girls, without being forewarned, rush into the arms of their beaux, they misread the signals. Exacerbating their vulnerability is the desire for male attention that virtually consumes girls at this age. Not all young men, of course, are hell-bent on abusing their new access to women. Plenty of them treat their girlfriends with respect. But many, just like the girls, misread the cues.

They see a woman in a bar wearing attractive clothes as 'available' because they have never been educated by literature, films, books and newspapers to grasp the notion that a woman can be drunk, dressed revealingly and behave suggestively but if she says 'no' to sex, it means no. They too are confused. All the old familiar rules have gone and it's a free-for-all. Just the other day, at least in some circles, they were taught to believe that any woman who displayed pleasure during lovemaking, even with her own husband, was a whore. Now they have to learn that women can pose semi-naked, smoke and drink and yet must be treated as respectfully as they treat their mothers.

India has moved from segregation to mingling between the sexes without any of the attendant debates on sex, feminism and contraception. There has been no transition. Many men have leapt from believing that women should be sequestered inside the home to expecting their girlfriends to take responsibility for contraception. Girls pop the 'morning after' pill casually, rather than as an emergency measure. The boyfriends are happy to be carefree and few even bother to find out whether there could be repercussions on the girl's health.

Young Indian women need to realise that many of the new sexual freedoms that were hailed initially as 'liberating' in the West (such as the availability of the pill) turned out to carry a heavy price. When neither side knows the rules because the rules are still being worked out, the dating game becomes potentially lethal. ( The writer is a journalist)

Patriarchal and masculine nature of Max Weber's social and political thinking

Love or greatness (Routledge Revivals) Max Weber and masculine thinking
By Roslyn Bologh

This work, first published in 1990, reissues the first thorough examination of the essentially masculine nature of Max Weber's social and political thinking. Through a detailed examination of his central texts, the author demonstrates Weber's masculine reading of 'social life' and shows how his work advocates a masculine form of life that poses a challenge to contemporary women and to feminism. In particular, she addresses the patriarchal implications of Weber's belief in the need to relegate the ethic of brotherly love to a private sphere in order to make possible rational action and the achievement of greatness in the public sphere. ISBN: 9780415570749 Published October 21 2009 by Routledge.

Nov 30, 2009 Women's Lives in Medieval Europe A Sourcebook
Edited by Emilie Amt

Long considered to be a definitive and truly groundbreaking collection of sources, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe uniquely presents the everyday lives and experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This indispensible text has now been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect new research, and includes previously unavailable source material.

This new edition includes expanded sections on marriage and sexuality, and on peasant women and townswomen, as well as a new section on women and the law. There are brief introductions both to the period and to the individual documents, study questions to accompany each reading, a glossary of terms and a fully updated bibliography. Working within a multi-cultural framework, the book focuses not just on the Christian majority, but also present material about women in minority groups in Europe, such as Jews, Muslims, and those considered to be heretics. Incorporating both the laws, regulations and religious texts that shaped the way women lived their lives, and personal narratives by and about medieval women, the book is unique in examining women’s lives through the lens of daily activities, and in doing so as far as possible through the voices of women themselves. ISBN: 9780415466844 Published November 30 2009 by Routledge.

Encyclopedic Examination of the Seemingly Mundane, June 11, 2003
By Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Fernand Braudel is probably the most distinguished historian associated with the Annales School founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. This Annales method attempted to revamp historical inquiry by enlarging the scope of analysis to include disparate places and through different times. Annalists were not content to research political institutions; they wanted to delve deeper into the past, to look at social and economic factors in order to reach a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of humanity. In order to be so inclusive, the Annalists looked at historical forces over great arcs of time, recognizing that many human factors change slowly and are not capable of discovery in snapshots of time. The title of this book, "The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to the 18th Century" captures well these two central tenets of the Annales School. "The Structures of Everyday Life" is the first volume in a three volume series.

When Braudel refers to everyday life, he means it in the strictest sense of the word. The topics covered in this encyclopedic volume are seemingly banal because they constitute the backgrounds of our lives: corn, wheat, rice, clothing, buildings, money, and other commonplace items that we take for granted in our day to day existence. Other sections deal with discerning the population of the world in a time when census records were crude or nonexistent, the development of heavy industry and its effect on the world, diseases, and shipping. The emphasis here is on economics and how the growth (or lack of) economies increases or decreases the growth of a society and how that society or region waxed or waned in prominence.

Much of the time, the greatness of Braudel's book is in a detail, or a turn of a phrase. For example, the author concludes that the massive pyramid structures and immense jungle cities of the Mesoamerican cultures resulted not from huge markets or an intrinsic need to construct enormous edifices. Instead, he traces their societal structure to agriculture, specifically the reliance on maize as the staple crop. In the warm climates of Central America, corn does not take much work to plant or maintain. This left the indigenous populations with plenty of time on their hands to build monuments and participate in elaborate religious rituals.

"Structures of Everyday Life" appears to be a huge book, and it is, but there are so many illustrations, maps, and charts that it does not take nearly as long to get through it as one might think. I read somewhere that Braudel traveled and worked abroad in places where he could obtain copies of primary historical documents, whether they were paintings, letters, financial statements, or other relevant documents. He gathered these by the thousands over the years and used them as the basis for his wide-ranging researches. You simply must admire a historian who notices someone picking food out of a bowl with his fingers and then compares this to another painting some years later where the figures are using utensils. Most people just do not think to look at things like this.

Braudel's book is a valuable contribution to historical studies, but I don't think I will read the other two volumes in the series. The amount of information in this volume is so overwhelming that I don't think I could assimilate the vast amount of facts in the other two books. As far as "Structures of Everyday Life" go, even reading one or two chapters is enough to get the gist of what Braudel is trying to say. Reading the whole thing is like reading an encyclopedia; it is fascinating but difficult. Permalink

Are dalit women more “liberated”?

EPW Current Issue : VOL 44 No. 40 October 03 - October 09, 2009 See Full Contents>>

Violence against Women via Cyberspace Anita Gurumurthy, Niveditha Menon
A report on a consultation on women and the use of information technologies that addressed how policy choices need to avoid narratives of fear around new technologies, narratives that can effectively constrain women’s freedom to use digital spaces. [Abstract] [Full Article]

[SPECIAL ARTICLES]
Amchya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (The Bioscope of Our Lives): Who Is My Ally? Shailaja Paik
This paper questions the commonly-held view by mainstream feminists and some dalit men that dalit women are somehow more “liberated” than high caste women. I argue that dalit women also face patriarchal oppression, though it has a specific quality [Abstract] [Full Article]