In India, a woman or even a man is considered to be “settled” when he/she is married in a good family and a good spouse. This article is not going to be anything about gender equality or demoralizing a really pure and beautiful tradition. However, this article is going to revolve around “choices”. The choices that I want to make with my life and why they are correct for me and everyone who wants to make these choices.
Coming to marriages, whether they are in India or anywhere else in this world, people shed a huge amount of money in them and as much as I have seen, hosting a big fat Indian wedding has become more of a show-off than a custom. Nowadays, people spend lakhs of rupees for just one wedding and it is considered to be just normal. However, this normality is not for me. It is nice that people want to get married but it is also perfectly okay if someone does not want to.
I, on instance, do not believe in the concept of marriage and having kids later on (which is apparently the next step for being “settled”). I would prefer to spend lakhs of rupees on travelling the world over a big fat wedding and this choice is completely justified.
1. I want different things from my life.
It is not necessary that everyone wants to have a married life to get settled. At the end you need to be satisfied with your life and have a smile on your face when you look back. I found my happiness in traveling and I know that this cannot be replaced with anything else. Maybe my idea of a ‘Happily Ever After’ is different from others.
2. Invest in travelling to get a life full of experiences.
When I compare the amount of money invested in a wedding to the same amount invested in travelling, I found out that the latter gives more returns. I mean that you spend so much money for one day to host hundreds of people for a dinner, who judge the function on how tasty the food was (haha); later on do not even remember it. But when you invest on a road trip or a year-long tour to Europe, you get such experiences that feed your soul and change you as a person for your whole life.
3. I cannot forget myself and be selfless.
I have seen all the women in my life, from my mother to my elder married sisters; selflessly put every person who is dear to them before themselves. My mother had sacrificed a lot of her wishes for us and has learnt to be immensely selfless. I love all of them but I do not want to be like them. It is not because what they have done in their life is lame but because I do not have the courage to be so selfless and think about so many people before myself.
4. Because being settled has another meaning for me
For me, settling down means that I have travelled around the whole world, visited unknown and unexplored places, made friends worldwide and ticked off everything in my bucket list. I would find solace not at the home that I have nurtured and cared for but in the place that I had always wished to go to. Unlike most people, I do not want a beautiful home to come back to. All I want is to get a one way ticket and start my lifelong journey with no definite plan.
5. You do not require the certification of marriage to live and travel with your loved one
I want to have a happy life with my partner and travel the whole world with him. On the contrary, what I do not need is a stamp of being married to that person just so that the society does not judge us for living and travelling together. And it may also happen that on some of these journeys you find the person you were looking for your whole life. It is better to give yourself the time to fall in love than living a compromised life.
Lastly, I would end with saying that it is okay to have a great married life but it also okay to want something else from your life. It should be made into a choice, not a compulsion. Being settled does not only mean having a family, it means to have a constant pace with your life. And travelling is the constant of my life. That is why I would prefer to have a happy life travelling.