The burden of the married man

I am a married man, but I believe marriage is not for everyone, which is not something everyone believes. So any time I advice a friend against getting married, it is taken as a comment on my own marriage — people tend to assume that I must have an unhappy marriage, for why else would I advise my friend not to marry? But as I said, marriage is not for everyone — marrying because you are expected to or because all your peers are doing so is possibly the worst reason anyone can have to get married.

But all the time one sees people, especially girls, getting married for exactly those reasons. And quite a few of them end up in unhappy marriages, when they could have had far more fulfilling lives if they had never married. While many manage to make their peace with the institution, basically by lowering their expectations from the relationship, and losing themselves in bringing up their children, some women tend to store up a big drum of resentment in their hearts that breaks open and spills its toxic contents once the children have grown up and moved out and the husband has retired. 

Some resentment is inevitable, for marriage is nearly always a losing proposition for women (Go ahead, deny that you are in denial!). In the less than perfect matches, they are beaten, abused, raped, burnt for dowry, and suffer harassment at the hands of in-laws. But even in the so-called ‘happy’ marriages where none of the traditional atrocities are inflicted on them, women somehow end up with the bulk of the responsibility in running the household.

Ironically, though it is women who are likely to come off worse, they are the ones who generally take the lead in prodding the relationship towards matrimony, while men tend to find marriage a most threatening idea. Of course, not in all cases is the threat perception justified — it depends on the man, and the woman.

Nevertheless, every man who has ever married would remember waking up with a sinking feeling the morning after the evening he had proposed (or was manipulated into proposing) matrimony to his girl and she said yes. It feels like your heart went under water for a few, lengthy seconds. You come back up into the cold air of reality coughing and spluttering, and feeling less dead than before.

Last week at a party, when the discussion turned to how so many of our friends were ‘already divorced,’ I remarked casually that we should carry our marriages ‘lightly’. Later, on the drive back home, my wife asked me if I felt burdened by our marriage.

That being a potential landmine question, I answered carefully.

“Marriages, like all institutions, are heavy,” I said. “A marriage is like Iridium. Very heavy.”

“You are wrong,” she said. “It is not marriage that’s weighing you down.”

“Then what is?”

“The idea of masculinity.”

I said I didn’t think my masculinity or whatever had anything to do with it. But she went on to explain her hypothesis.  According to her, the real burden weighing me (and all my male friends, in case you are reading this) down are the stereotypes of masculinity. Stereotypes that I have internalised, feel compelled to live up to, and feel inadequate if I can’t.

I asked her what stereotypes she was referring to. “You’ll find every one of them in a magazine like GQ,” she said.

“But I am not a regular reader of GQ.” It didn’t matter, she said. Men sort of absorb these values by atmospheric osmosis. And they absorb it from the men they admire, or are taught to admire.

And what are these stereotypes? She rattled them off. The first cliché of masculinity, of course, being that marriage itself is uncool, and reflective of low GQ — unless you are married to a supermodel who is rich, has the brains of a Nobel laureate, and the wisdom to acknowledge, with sufficient subtlety, your right to do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, with whomever you want.

But in case you are unfortunate enough to be married to a woman who doesn’t fulfil the above criteria, then god forbid that you should enjoy her company, and under no circumstances are you allowed to prefer her company to that of male friends, for that is as uncool as it gets in the macho stakes. From the marital perspective, there is just one saving grace about the GQ man: fatherhood is cool.

Apart from that, the fabled freedom of unfettered manhood that men dream about is basically the freedom to chase women, booze, cars, gadgets, sports channels, and whatever else they want to without the sobering effects of a wife or marriage — the role of a wife or marriage being, essentially, the sobering role.

This is the GQ burden of masculinity that every man carries into his marriage, and so long as his ego is constructed around it, he believes that it is his marriage that is weighing him down, summed up my wife.

I’ve been mulling over her theory, and I haven’t decided yet if she is right, but I don’t think I’ll admit it to her even if she is.