Twenty Five Years

 

In the summer of 2024, I quietly marked what would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary of my first marriage. An emotionally and verbally abusive, nearly soul-destroying marriage to a narcissist - which I thought I had to stay in and tried to make work for an entire decade of my youth. 

On that anniversary, I spent some time analyzing the many social dynamics that push Indian women into toxic and abusive marriages, and then pressure them to stay. I realized that most if not all of these dynamics and expectations are completely avoidable - IF we have the will to change.

Here are the social root causes I identified. All of these are negative messages we send girls and young women throughout their childhoods and youth. NONE of these are true. 

As a caveat, these are based on my personal experience, and not all of these apply to all women in all social and economic strata of Indian society:

1. "Your worth depends on how you look"

This is the original sin. Moms, Dads, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents - everyone gushes about the fair-skinned little girls with big eyes or other attractive features. Everyone frets about the darker girls, and as early as primary/ elementary school age, they start planning for fairness creams and warn them not to spend time in the sun. 

Of course, it only worsens when the girl reaches her pre-teen years. Those years are already awkward but made worse by well-meaning grandmothers, or not-so-well-meaning aunts and family friends (who want their own daughters to be more desirable in the marriage market) commenting on hair that isn't perfectly straight or a figure that isn't that of a model. Usually, older women comment on features in young women that they hate about their own bodies. 

2.  "Your worth depends on who you marry, and by when"

I belong to Gen X and I am sure many of my contemporaries grew up hearing that if we didn't get married by a certain age we would never get married. The "certain age" was a dependent variable that was a function of your education level, the family's overall attitude towards their girls' life paths, in some cases an astrologer's interpretation of your horoscope, and the norms prescribed by the larger community you belonged to.

In my case that drop-dead age was 25. Somehow, whatever it took, I needed to get married by then because an astrologer had said that Saturn would delay my marriage until the age of (gasp!) 30 if I didn't take advantage of the pre-25 window.

3. "Your value as a woman in the marriage market is inversely proportional to your income and qualifications"

This is a big one. Apparently, the more a man earns the more in-demand he is by prospective brides, but the exact opposite is true for high-achieving women. So when I was completing my Master's degree from a top university in the U.S., and had four attractive job offers, a lot of the men my parents would connect me with as arranged marriage prospects would back away after they looked up the ranking of my school and the average post-graduate starting salary.

It didn't help that a female relative of mine - who was genuinely well-meaning and cared for me - kept telling my mom that she knew a friend's daughter who had graduated from the best B-school (at the time) in India, was scaring men away as a result, and at the ripe old age of 29 still remained unmarried!

My parents finally found one man who was better qualified than me, earned slightly more than me, was attractive, charming, and said all the right things. At that point, my Dad (despite being the kindest and most progressive man I know of his generation) felt enough pressure to tell me "You won't get another guy like this, you should go for him". So I did. And there began the nightmare.

4. "You have to stay for the sake of the kid(s)"

Not true. In fact, decades of research show that remaining in a home where kids witness abuse of any kind leads those kids to grow up into (best case) low self-esteem, traumatized adults, and (worst case) abusers themselves.

My breaking point came one evening when my then-husband was amid an (as usual) irrational screaming outburst. I walked away and went upstairs to get away from his craziness. Then, I proceeded to start bath time for my toddler. The narcissist got so enraged that I had the gall to walk away from him, that he ran upstairs and dashed into the bathroom screaming - all this while not caring that he basically ended up screaming in our 18-month old son's face. The baby naturally was scared out of his wits and started crying and screaming. 

At that point, I realized that this man had NO conscience, and didn't mind behaving abusively to me in front of the child. That was what gave me the courage to get away.

5. "Be careful - they'll call you a 'loose woman' now that you're divorced"

So this one turned out to be 100% true. Our culture, sadly, is so misogynistic and patriarchal that when a woman shows the courage to get out of a bad marriage, many other men and women feel threatened. In some cases, they are feeling envious but can't admit it. I lost count of the number of men both in my professional environment and social circles who hinted when I got promoted at work, that I hadn't done anything to deserve it so "it must be because of something else". I had a few women and one man in my social circle immediately start being rude and making their disapproval of my choices known. Worst of all, many many men in my company - regardless of marital status and ethnicity - automatically assumed that I was "available" and went out of their way to suggest I meet them for "a drink". Even at company conferences and events. I even ended up with a married Indian male colleague - someone at a higher level than me - stalking me with multiple calls after I had told him to stop and threatened to report him to HR.

So - what is the point of my writing all of this? It's not to attract pity from people a full 15+ years after I got out of that hell.

The point is to raise awareness and to encourage younger generations to intentionally shield their daughters from these negative messages. To support them in building a health self-esteem and encourage them to become financially and emotionally independent - regardless of what path they choose for their lives.

Most importantly - for those of us with SONS to raise them around secure, balanced male role models who respect the women in their lives. To raise them with the expectation that they will do an equal share of housework and treat girls as equals. To see their mothers be self-assured and charting their own paths through life.

We can do this. We as a society MUST do this to end the cycle of abuse.