Marriage - An overrated institution?

Marriage – An over rated institution?

Recently, I was reading a post from another blogger in which she had described how two colleagues at work were discussing how they think that marriage is an overrated institution. It got me thinking. It brought me to the age old question of why do people get married in the first place? I started thinking about the pros and cons of marriage and to my surprise found that there are more cons than pros.

So read on.

Disclaimer:  This post in no way means I am against marriage or regret getting married. On the contrary, I am happily married with a two year old daughter. This post should be taken in a very light note the way it was meant to be.

Reasons to not get married

·         Not being able to hang out with your girl gang and do girl things like shopping, movies etc. I don’t mean to say that marriage prevents this, but definitely the number of outings gradually reduce and eventually you find that you have no girl friends left, all are either “balancing work and personal life” or “taking care of children”

·         If you have annoying in-laws, having to put up with them

·         Having to change your food habits as per hubby. Again may not be true in all cases, but we women tend to pamper our hubbies, so we will prepare his favourite dish even if we don’t quite like it.

·         Moving away from your parents’ home, why should only women have to deal with the ordeal associated of moving out from your comfort zone into a new environment altogether?

·         Having to deal with the arguments, fights, nagging, shouting, screaming.

So why do people get married?

·         Love – you fall in love with someone and want to spend the rest of your life with him (In my opinion this sounds very filmy and cliché but my friends who have had love marriages might not agree)

·         Companionship - You get a best friend for life and a shoulder to lean on always

·         Experiencing motherhood – There can be no bigger joy; you have to be a mother to understand the feeling.

·         Social recognition. Marriage as an institution is recognised in society, perhaps people want to play a safe game and fall into that married category rather than being stereotyped as a single loner.

So here I am, not any closer to answering the age old question of why people get married. But my humble opinion is that marriage is a package, it comes with its share of happiness and grief, but in the end the pros outweigh the cons by a huge margin.