One of my friends recently wrote to me, asking for advice regarding higher studies in international locations. He's interested in a PhD, but that would take a time investment of five years, which his parents are not willing to allow. They are okay with a Master's program apparently, because that requires just two years, and they want him back home with them as soon as possible. Now that is a completely natural sentiment. A lot of parents feel like that for various reasons. But guess what? One major reason is that they want him married soon enough. In fact, they have also simultaneously started looking for a bride for him. This news freaked me out rather badly.
He's just 21. Why do they want to get him married right now? He's just starting the prime of his youth; this is the time to be free, to be single, to not be burdened yet with the responsibility of keeping care of a family and all. The young mind works best when its free, when it doesn't have to be caged within social relationships. The very fact that they are looking for a 'suitable' match means that they intend to get him wedded within three years.
A friend pointed out that people have religious beliefs that bring about this sort of idea. One typical belief is that parents feel that they must 'fulfill' their duty by finding a suitable match for their kids, as soon as possible (although I thought this idea was applied more to daughters than sons). Another idea is that kids should be married off soon, before they get 'disruptive' ideas that would turn them in other 'undesirable' directions. And especially for a kid who's going abroad, they don't want him to stay there too long and be influenced by the ideas of a foreign (and morally depraved) land.
There are several other ideas of this sort. I don't find any sense in any of them. Teenage and early twenties are the best years of one's life, the prime years. It's a time to grow, to discover, to develop, to explore. And this happens best if you are single. The process of exploration contributes in a big way to becoming a mature person, and it's a little silly to make a commitment as serious as marriage before being mature enough to handle it. People get into relationships to start with, because they allow you to explore, but do not enforce the other serious attachments that come with marriage. (If you get out of a relationship, nobody has to think about who gets the house or how much is to be paid in alimony.) Life is a sort of experiment, and it's only fun if you play with the equipment and the materials yourself and have some freedom to do so, as opposed to someone standing behind your shoulder and whispering instructions all the time. Saddle yourself with a fixed idea right at the start, and that's the end of the experiment.
And people are too young at 21, or even 23 or 24, to get into something so intense as marriage. That's just too young an age to make a decision about something that should potentially last your entire life. The personal bias entering at this stage is the fact that I don't believe in arranged marriages (in fact, I think that entire concept sucks), but even without that, how fixed is your character at 23 or 24? People change so much in their teens, and they tend to start stabilizing in their 20s. It makes sense to make the decision of sticking with one partner for good a little late, when you've stabilized enough and your decision would with high probability be a sensible and reliable one.
In cold, calculative reflection, it's probably very easy to soliloquize about this. I'm sure everyone does it. And yet, people often make such weird decisions with their lives. The moment it's happening to us, the cold calculations all go down the drain. There ain't no solution for that, I guess. Except blogging!
