Open Season

The new generation doesn’t mind marrying late or walking out of relationships.

Arti chaudhary got married at 28. Her husband was 30. It was ‘just the right age’ by the standards of here peer group, in which it is normal to remain single, well into the 30s. five years into her marriage, Arti is now “thinking about having a baby sometime”. Her mother got married when she was 16 and by Arti’s age she had grown-up children.

Arti says, there was no time to marry earlier for her. She was studying and wanted to settle into a carrer before tying the knot.  Arti, an HR executive in Mumbai is the typical DINK(double income no kids) person.  Her life might be very different from the one her mother, a homemaker, led. Yet, her existence is very traditional, compared with people around her. Another couple a few doors away from her, has an open live-in-relationship, unshackled by matrimonial commitments. Several of her friends have already had divorces and most others are yet to find “someone worth marrying”.

The new millennium brought in an era where people are more individualistic in their relationships. They marry when they want to, not because the parents have found a match. They walk out of bad relationships, preferring the public inquisition of neighbours to the private torment. It is also a generation for whom sex is not equal to marriage.

This is not to say that things were totally different 2-3 decades ago. Young people had adventures back then too. But those were mostly hush-hush affairs, and ‘mistakes’ could only be remedied with marriage or suicide. Today, there’s an openness that many people might frown upon, but  at least it doesn’t stifle those within the relationships.

When actor Neena Gupta decieded to have daughter Masaba out of wedlock in the late 80s, she was in a way, a trailblazer. But single parent families today face fewer questions and are almost considered normal, especially in bigger cities. A big move was when the government decided that a mother’s name in the school admission form was enough.

By the time Sushmita sen decided to adopt kids and not get married, the choice wasn’t even considered avant-garde.