Personal 
6 Comments Commitment vs. Experience: A Personal Note
I know. Its not the usual me to write such mega serial type topics on this blog. People are much used to me bitching about something like religion, technology, politicians & governments. Its okay, for a change lets see if i can say something useful and make sense too without F’ing the hell out of people & things that just turn me off.
Off late i notice around me the amount of failed marriages or relationships are quite staggering. Most of them are the traditional amma appa paathu panni vechcha arranged marriages but love marriages are no exception either. Running around trees, holding hands like as of they were atomically fused from birth and scribbling love notes on facebook & twitter, what not? No difference. Everything is down the drain hole and it seems people get tired off each other quickly.
Now i know what you are expecting. You expect me to say we are not biologically programmed for a one man + one woman relationship, which i will but then I’ve said it already so many times i do not want to repeat myself and sound boring. What I’m about to discuss is the social aspect of a relationship or lets say the courting process in human beings.
Human beings are very different from other animals. The amount of “Social” exercise that we involve in is staggering. Any other biological race that would compete with us in this “social” experience would look like a mole in front of a mountain. It is this “Social” dimension that separates us from the other kind. I fail to understand why or how but somehow we humans seem to be pretty comfortable with a single mate for a lifetime (exceptions are plenty) and we actually progress far better on this scale with even more bio diversity compared to animals that have multiple mates every mating season depending upon capability i.e., fertility, strength, environmental circumstances etc., It is extremely fascinating to see that this single mate ritual is something natural selection has supported and has worked for us pretty well. Yet, we see it slip so easily, it all seems like the probability of a withered petal from a flower tree landing on another petal or in the dirt.
The idea of a one man = one woman is not bad, in fact its good simply because it removes confusion, chaos and violence from the picture. Any race devoid of confusion, chaos & violence will survive better. Its self explanatory why there are close to 7 billion of us today on planet earth. Credit that mostly to do scientific progress but also due to the nature of us becoming less violent by the day. Don’t believe me? Watch the TED video below:
The point here is this. Relationships of today are on the verge of a major evolutionary change. Traditional expectations in a relationship is killing that very relationship.
Due to my lack of knowledge in terms of how relationships work outside of India I’m going to stick purely to Indians and Indian families. The days of “Kall anaalum Kanavan, Pull Anaalum Purushan” is dead. Education & empowerment of women killed it for good. The possibility of the man overpowering the woman is reducing very rapidly by the day and it shows in the amount of divorce applications pending in court and how the numbers almost double every decade. While divorce rates are still the lowest in India (& Sri Lanka) the rate of growth in divorce is not really the lowest. Women are extremely happy to walk out of a bad marriage. Now consider this, if a woman in India can walk out of a marriage which has so much social pressure attached to it, non matrimonial relationships are far more easier to walk out of. The time of the man “keeping the woman” is here. Of course, thanks to the largest genocide on planet earth we Indians are committing openly without any remorse, the gender ratio is as mucked up as it can be compared to anywhere in the world.
People seem to get into relationships initially enthralled by the experience. There is sparks flying everywhere and there is fun and there is romance. None of them care about the commitment portion of it. In my opinion commitment should only come into a relationship on how actively you are trying to engage your love in your life. Expecting to enforce commitment in a relationship is a disaster for any one. This is precisely why relationships fail. There are these imaginary moral values that come from nowhere that dictate how silly fantasies in life can be denied on the basis of commitment.
To me ‘experience’ is like a big beautiful mother hen. The ‘commitment’ thing is like the small chickens that follow the hen. The ‘experience’ is the mother of all things. Wherever it goes, the small chickens of commitment follow. This applies to all relationships, specifically very much to what happens between a man and a woman.
Stopping the rant for a moment, i will say i get so thrilled to be in the presence of people who value the ‘experience’ of the relationship. I have a few cousins, my best friend & another acquaintance i know of that fall perfectly into this category. It is such a harmony when you see them interacting. The best part is they disagree in half the things they come across in life, they could show the middle finger at each other, yet laugh it off right after putting that finger down and figure out what’s best for them. It deeply pains me to say, such relationships/couples are a rare find. Its like browsing through a backup CD that is about 7 years old and finding the DOS version of “Prince of Persia” or “WordStar 4.0”. There is no joy in explaining how wonderful it makes you feel to be around such people.
In layman terminology if i were to equate this with an example its like a man and a woman going to the ice cream parlor and sharing a cone of ice-cream. You walk into the parlor, you buy a cone, any cone and you sit down and finish the cone and walk back home and cuddle into bed. This is the ‘experience’. Now lets revisit the scenario. Man prefers to sit at home and catch up with India vs. Australia T20 match, woman wants to go in for ice-cream post dinner. Man & woman go, woman wants cornetto, man says cornetto sucks and wants feast. Woman complains of sudden cold like symptoms. Neither have ice-cream, rather ‘share’ the ice-cream and come home empty handed.
I know this is not a very good analogy but then i hope you get the drift of what I’m talking about. The moment a man & a woman have nothing to talk about (this includes an argument/disagreement) from then on its all just about commitment. Commitment is like a brick wall. It is static. It expects loyalty & sincerity and does not want to change. Experience is like the bamboo stick. You can bend it to make a roof or stretch it to make a wall lining. Experience always changes, it adapts to situations and people and environment. Experience is all about the moment, commitment is all about keeping the possibility of having these moments forever without ensuring the possibility of such moments to occur in the first place.
I just felt like writing this post today since I’ve been postponing it for almost 3 weeks now. Now that I’ve gotten this out of my head and heart and poured it here i think I’ll lay to rest and hear from you all.
~fin~
