If everybody you have ever met in life came together, would they be able to piece together every single bit of your life?
Jeffrey Archer answered it in part, I believe - "Everyone has had an experience that if they wrote about, it would appear to others as pure fiction".
Monday, November 28, 2005
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Single is saddening?
A friend emailed me yesterday. She had recently got engaged to some guy after having given the nod based on two telephone conversations - both of which, I am fairly sure, were the "lets see how much we can impress each other" kind. And here I am, paranoid about the eventual yes I might have to give some guy after my alloted 6-months to assess our compatibility. To satiate your curiosity about the "6-month ultimatum": it was a compromise between my hypothesis that you should live with someone for a while to be anywhere close to "assessing" compatibilities with them(which I did not dare to voice out loud using these exact words and when I tried a subtler, less forbidden version it came out sounding a soap-opera-ish "It takes a long time to really get to know someone") and the general parental 3-step strategy of 'look at resume - talk once - walk once'. We finally reached upon the 6-month-concensus after I convinced them that I will conform to their norms - just that the walk would be a long one. And they gave in, fearing that if they dint, the walk would turn into a run, and the run, into a run-away. While that sure was nostalgic to many, funny to a few, and insipid to the rest, the purpose of this entry is to disorient you in other ways. But I promise to chew on this topic some other day.
Reverting back to my friend, she and her fiance are now in the "getting to know each other" mode. And she is thoroughly enjoying having someone to fuss over her - quite fair: what more can one ask for than dedicated servicing? In her email to me, she had written "I hope you find your guy soon too - so that you can enjoy like I am enjoying." I was aghast. When did a single life become so agonizing that finding a partner was like the ultimate salvation from the excruciating pain? This is not a sole instance. After congratulating him on his new job, my college-mate's professor told him "Now, in a few months, I am sure you will want to be married". If he was prophesizing, wow, that is something; but if he was voicing his vote for escaping from single life, man, he should read this blog entry!
I am sure it cant get better than having a loving, committed partner to enjoy the bounties of life with. But being single does not mean you are down in the depressed dumps either.
Being single and independent is a liberating feeling. 1) While it is definitely relieving to have someone to descend all your worries upon and lay-back in the comfort that there is someone to divide your agony in half, it is bliss to grab it in full, solve it in solitary, and lay-back in the pride of achievement. 2) As cheesy as it may sound - you have a soul-mate in you who loves you exactly the way you love yourself - isnt this also what you look for in a third-party life-partner who lives in a different (and if you are lucky, a Brad-Pitt-ish looking :p) body? So how bad can it be to live for and live by yourself for a little bit of your life? [3) And then of course, you have all the time in the world to write desultory blogs on obscure topics to be read by other singles.]
Apart from those vaguely convincing set of reasons, I have my personal favourite. I want to establish a "me" before becoming a "we". There are things that I want to and need to learn by myself before I can do a combined-studies with my life-partner - there are things that one cannot learn once bonded in a life-long hookup (and maybe that is for the good, you think?). I have nothing against marriage - its a lovely institution and one that I will gladly be a part of pretty soon. But being single is an institution too - if you can call anything that teaches you, an institution.
"Sure thing!", I wrote, when I replied to her email, "I'm next in line :)"
Reverting back to my friend, she and her fiance are now in the "getting to know each other" mode. And she is thoroughly enjoying having someone to fuss over her - quite fair: what more can one ask for than dedicated servicing? In her email to me, she had written "I hope you find your guy soon too - so that you can enjoy like I am enjoying." I was aghast. When did a single life become so agonizing that finding a partner was like the ultimate salvation from the excruciating pain? This is not a sole instance. After congratulating him on his new job, my college-mate's professor told him "Now, in a few months, I am sure you will want to be married". If he was prophesizing, wow, that is something; but if he was voicing his vote for escaping from single life, man, he should read this blog entry!
I am sure it cant get better than having a loving, committed partner to enjoy the bounties of life with. But being single does not mean you are down in the depressed dumps either.
Being single and independent is a liberating feeling. 1) While it is definitely relieving to have someone to descend all your worries upon and lay-back in the comfort that there is someone to divide your agony in half, it is bliss to grab it in full, solve it in solitary, and lay-back in the pride of achievement. 2) As cheesy as it may sound - you have a soul-mate in you who loves you exactly the way you love yourself - isnt this also what you look for in a third-party life-partner who lives in a different (and if you are lucky, a Brad-Pitt-ish looking :p) body? So how bad can it be to live for and live by yourself for a little bit of your life? [3) And then of course, you have all the time in the world to write desultory blogs on obscure topics to be read by other singles.]
Apart from those vaguely convincing set of reasons, I have my personal favourite. I want to establish a "me" before becoming a "we". There are things that I want to and need to learn by myself before I can do a combined-studies with my life-partner - there are things that one cannot learn once bonded in a life-long hookup (and maybe that is for the good, you think?). I have nothing against marriage - its a lovely institution and one that I will gladly be a part of pretty soon. But being single is an institution too - if you can call anything that teaches you, an institution.
"Sure thing!", I wrote, when I replied to her email, "I'm next in line :)"
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