Emotional Dependence

Too Close for Comfort - New York Times

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

I loved this article by Stephanie Coontz. In fact, I'm going to get her book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage right away to read her opinions on Marriage.

"EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”

I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history."

As any desi from a conservative family, I get a ton of pressure about getting married soon or else ... Life will be a drab, lonely journey that I will regret to no end. Not that there is anything wrong with that (hehehe, Seinfeld reference), but there is so much else to life besides marriage. Of course, we need emotional attachments, but a big mistake people tend to make is save all their emotional energy for this "right person", and that puts a tremendous amount of stress on a new relationship and a lot of expectation to meet. Expecting emotional attachment from one person can become pathologically dependedent. It wasn't always that way for us.

"It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process."

I have known so many desi friends that disappeared overnight the moment they got married. I may sound bitter or jealous, but I would still argue that despite the new found joy in a person's life in the form of a spouse, diverting all your social energy into personal life is not healthy in the long term. What happens when there is any kind of rupture, however small, in this supposedly ideal and perfect relationship? You've just become emotionally stranded because you have alienated all other relationships.

"The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion."

There is more to life besides marriage.