What you make of marriage

Im struggling to rein in the buzzing in my brain My thoughts are all over the place not scattered but in a state of anticipation waiting for the authorial I to yarn them over so they can manifest as a pattern as formIt intrigues me that I remain unable to post a picture on any social media platform about my apartment after having emptied it of my presence after having erased every trace of my eightyearlong inhabitation within its walls so as to prep it for a potential new residentEven until a week later I found myself looking at the videos I had made of each room as my documentation for its owner who lives in Manali proof that I had left everything in order was respectful and considerate She was moved by my civility and sent me a blessing for my future It has been exactly two months since I vacated my nest In retrospect it feels like most of this year was spent preparing for that moveMeanwhile exactly one year has passed since we spent the day in a court in Delhi with our three witnesses waiting for the submagistrate to sign off on some papers and declare us legally marriedIts not nothing to have been married to a person for a whole year I wont deny that to many of my friends and family the decision seemed rushed at the time I had known my partner for a little over a year and half of that time had been spent longdistance Funnily I had no sense of hesitation about our decision to marry once we had made itWhen I look at my right hand I smile compulsively because I see this silver ring Ive been wearing since January 2019 My partner had come to India to spend a month with me and since we were going to be travelling and because in the past Id been targetted in small towns by police for being an Indian woman with a white man I thought itd be best if we pretended to be marriedAt first I may have been kidding about it but he seemed to be calmly on board with it We went to a jeweller in Khan Market and bought two silver rings That night we made a mockceremonious gesture of placing the ring on each others fingers Four weeks later when it was time for him to leave I asked if he was likely to keep wearing the ring I wanted to know so that Id accordingly either wear or remove it Rings were never a preferred item of jewellery for me We thought about friends who would chide us for doing something so tacky but we decided to do what felt right to us By then wed both gotten used to seeing the silver on our right hand We went along with itThe past year with him has felt easy like that Because my parents were never one to be satisfied with a civil marriage which is in fact the more important and legally binding we had agreed to undergo a religious ceremony which we have yet to doThe Catholic church however demands that anyone who seeks to marry within the institution must go through a mandatory preparation course This we did do back in early January this year in MumbaiI have to confess some of the lessons we learned there have been fundamentally nurturing to our relationship We found two components to be most crucial one on intimacy did you know there were five kinds of intimacy and one on conflict how when managed lovingly it could enable even greater intimacy If youre inclined to learn more look for the book we were made to read called Creative LoveOnce when I was railing against the heteronormativity of the institution to a friend she told me that marriage quite simply was what you make of it I held on to this definition because it contained the promise of something customisableA few days ago when I finally opened my journal to make notes a little card popped out a drawing made by a friend Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan of a blue cat with red polka dots around which she inscribed in sketch pen this excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people that each should stand guard over the solitude of the otherIt eerily exemplifies the nature of my relationship with my partner Neither of us perform fixed roles instead we cater to each other intuitively and by communicating our feelings without assigning blame It is the healthiest relationship Ive ever been inEvery night I go to sleep grateful that I didnt give in to the worlds pressure to marry that I took my time to evolve a strong sense of my selfhood and that I learned to be financially and emotionally independentI wish more energy was spent encouraging women to build and exercise our own agency rather than policing us into subscribing to patriarchal norms That is the world we must continue to build One year into marriage I delight in knowing I am directly responsible for my state of happinessDeliberating on the life and times of Everywoman Rosalyn DMello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover She tweets RosaParxSend your feedback tomailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paperCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news crime news 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