Nana doesn’t care much about watching TV so I spend most of my time streaming Dev, even when she’s around. She wouldn’t leave the parlour but she wouldn’t turn on the streamer. She will sit there pressing her phone, waiting to watch whatever anyone else decides to watch. I’m her usual victim, seeing that I love to watch Dev and she always finds new issues with it. She uses it as the gateway to criticize my entire generation, forgetting that whatever technology we enjoy was created by her generation. She expects us to continue creating skits and all the slapstick comedy that fascinated her generation. She says Dev is a videogame; that they are synthetic people and they have no souls. It’s clear that she dislikes everything about Dev. They cross all the lines for her, especially, religious lines. She claims they are out of God’s will for humanity, and calls Negasi ‘the Anti-Christ’. When I told her there was a church in Dev she was quick to remind me that even Satan had a church here on earth in their days.
When I turned on the streamer today, they were showing the different forms of free relationships on Dev and as expected Nana turned her attention to the screen just in time. I genuinely believe that she enjoys watching Dev but she has criticized it so much that she won’t be caught selecting the stream but will watch with rapt attention when someone else does. It’s very much like the reality tv shows they watched in those days. She talks about ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ but for the life of me, I can’t get how they pretended not to know it was staged and scripted. Well, I didn’t expect anything different from her today and she didn’t disappoint. When it comes to Dev and relationships, she has her reservations.
“This thing called marriage is dying a natural death.”
For context, let me explain what happens on Dev. It may seem like I’m defending them but maybe it’s because I understand them and appreciate the simplicity and honesty they openly embrace. In Dev, you’re as human as you can be here on earth, just without a physical body. So I believe there are emotions and feelings too. Now, without the need for long-term companionship and reproduction, marriage loses its flavour. It just becomes an unnecessarily long union if it’s just for sex. So there are very few marriages on Dev, and those ones are just to experience something not for companionship and exclusivity. People just meet and fancy each other, vibe, enjoy just sex, hang out and move on when that vibe dies. We don’t try to own other people by tying them to ourselves in relationships or marriages. This thing called marriage is dying a natural death.
It’s quite absurd, especially because on earth, we’re not yet done celebrating laws that allow people of any sexual orientation/gender to get married. However, Dev is the future. Same-sex marriage on earth confirms that marriage is not just for reproduction. The divorce rates and the level of infidelity also show that exclusivity is a farce. When you think of how many ‘till death do us part’ have been separated by everything else but death, you can also say that long-term companionship is not really the goal. What then are these people getting married for? It must be to legitimize sex. On earth, at least in my cultural/religious society, sex between unmarried people is fornication and sex between two married people who are not in a union with each other is called adultery – basically cheating. The rate at which these things happen makes you question their illegality. It seems are more naturally inclined to them than not. Anyway, all that marriage does is permit sex with one person or more, as is the case with polygamy and polyandry (these terms are just unnecessary).
I’ve explained this to Nana on more than one occasion but she already has what she believes. Most times she starts the same way – “I know you won’t listen to me because you think you are too smart. I will say it and if you like, listen, if you like, don’t”. That’s her disclaimer before she proceeds to start any argument. Then she throws in smirks and claps in amusement. It’s her facial expressions that get me first; the way she shows her indifference when I’m talking. A slow blink, a soft frown and the slow swaying of her head away from me. It’s like she has lost all hope in me and my generation and has given up trying to ‘save us’. She doesn’t understand why my generation doesn’t believe in marriage again.
She smirks anytime I try to explain my perspective on Dev issues. I don’t think her generation believes a young person can have a more rational perspective on any issue than an older person. She claims I’m too young to understand the issues of life. Somehow, for her, understanding is simply agreeing with all that she believes, not necessarily weighing the issue on the scale of logic and reason. She’s bent on ‘converting’ me to her medieval beliefs. There are many of them, and I must admit, she has won me over with some. However, this one seems a little too hard to wrap my head around.
It’s the issue of marriage.
I can’t tell how it all started. Even Nana’s version doesn’t clearly pick a clear path. The origin is a murky mix of religion and tradition but both strands become quite distinct with time. They both have different stories behind their claim to the origin of marriage. I find it hard to accept any of them. Nana somehow leans towards the church-based belief and she backs her claims with stories from the Bible. But when I confront her with the fact that the examples from the Bible seem more like traditional marriage, she claims tradition and religion were the same in those days. Somehow, she also agrees that the church can only bless the marriage but the real marriage is the traditional one. Nana’s belief even accommodates the court marriage as a symbol of constitutional backing. This part of the idea is understandable. However, my confusion stems from the idea of marriage itself, not the type of ceremony they choose to seal the union.
First, I don’t get how it’s a sign of trust if you need to sign a legal document to make sure you do the right thing. I don’t trust you if I have to tie you down with a legal agreement. Business is not love, so we can understand the need to use a contract to tie people down to certain duties. I mean, nobody signs an agreement for friendship. If you’ve got someone’s best interest at heart, why do you need a court to ensure you don’t leave the person? Nana said it was not always a thing of the court; it used to be an agreement between two families. She claims that a wedding ceremony is a statement of intent to God and a host of witnesses that two people have chosen themselves and nobody else. Such deceitful and well-packaged displays were a thing of their generation. Yet, they call us vain and claim we lack values and integrity. For a generation that claims to be grounded in ‘values and integrity’, the need to make your emotional decision a legal agreement is a sign of commonplace disloyalty, dishonesty and a lack of integrity. If they know, fine. If they don’t, fine.
Then they had these rings and bands that they used to mark themselves as ‘love slaves’ to each other. There were rites tied to the entire wedding ceremony – from elaborately planned and well-staged, sometimes staged, proposals to unnecessarily expensive engagement rings, wildly unnecessary pre-wedding photoshoots, bridal showers, bachelor’s nights, bridal trains (not actual trains but a line of humans who follow the couple for no real reason). They would hold on to the rituals and paraphernalia of marriage – paper documents and rings – and throw away the one thing that truly matters; their desires. They would deny themselves the freedom of chasing their basic instincts and try to make everyone else believe they were inseparable. Anytime I think about the entire thing, one phrase comes to mind – ‘love slave’. Nana’s face goes through a set of contortions whenever I bring it up. Today, I’ve decided to engage her and I’ve used the phrase again.
“Nana, I can’t be anybody’s love slave. If we vibe, cool, we can vibe and move on when the vibe dies. But I’m not going through the torture of a marriage and all”. I can see all the lines on Nana’s face deepen. Sometimes I say it to tease her but I strongly believe it’s slavery. While I may not be able to talk about all the cultural backgrounds that set the tone for this, I can say a little about the type of men, we’ve had. In Nana’s youth, marriage was only between men and women. Men obviously had the upper hand, stemming from a culture that didn’t think men and women were equal. They had what they called Patriarchy. So even after the fight for gender equality in the early 2000s, many men still saw marriage as a chance to express their dominance. It was almost like a form of ownership and control. They would decide, in most cases without just cause, what their wives would do, wear, where they would go, and even say in some cases. That’s the marriage life that Nana champions. Maybe not in its extreme form, but still one that subdues the woman and doesn’t allow her to fully flourish.
As my Father so often said, “If the leaves of a tree don’t tell you its use, its fruit will”. The fruits of this system called marriage are many. From kids to infidelity, paternity fraud, nasty divorces, broken homes, and a stigma that hangs more heavily around the woman. It was so bad that some women stayed back in abusive and unfaithful marriages rather than leave and save their lives.
It’s all rooted in tradition; how it was done in the past, without question. Someone said it’s peer pressure from the dead and I totally agree! There’s also the fear of being a ‘bad’ person that has made people stay in sad and monotonous engagements in the name of marriage. Don’t get me wrong though. There are still few people who are genuinely happy in that entrapment. However, it is not for me. The stress of dating is too much. You go through so many talking stages, so many first kisses and then you find out they all just want sex. Why do we all have to lie to ourselves just for sex?
Nana says I will be lonely when I’m old. She thinks I’m going to be here on Earth for long. As soon as I can save enough money to get the MaDe, I’ll leave for Dev. Nobody gets old on Dev. She doesn’t understand that forever is a very long time to commit to someone else. It’s easy to say it on Earth, where you know that one day you won’t be alive. There’s an end to it, so it’s not forever for them, but as long as they are alive. I wouldn’t want to spend ‘forever’ with just one person. I want to explore and experience different people, places and things. We are all humans and we were created to explore and expand. That desire for adventure is part of our lives. How do you then live with one person all your days?
“What about society?” Nana asks with furrowed brows. “Marriage is the root of the family and family is the nucleus of society. You can’t continue society without a family. What happens when people get old and die?” I see that she has only been hearing me but not listening. It’s common with people in her age group when they debate with younger people. They just talk and pretend to listen to you. I try not to sound cocky in my response because I still have to show her the respect she deserves for simply coming into this world before me.
“Nana, all that was before Negasi brought us MaDe and the technology to ‘culture’ consciousness. We’ve not yet learnt how to create one, but we’re close. People don’t die on Dev”. She looked at me with shock. I guess that was the first time she understood all that I had been saying. She looked terrified and irritated at the same time. Only God will judge you people and the rubbish you are looking for there”. You people want to be God abi? The day you join them, just know you’re not coming back to this house because I’m sure they will initiate you and give you their evil spirit, Nana said with palpable irritation.
I’ve been with her long eough to understand that when there’s no further point to defend her position, she resorts to this. She has nothing else to say to defend marriage, but she won’t accept that it is dying a natural death. I’m still on Earth, but I won’t be for long. I’ll try to leave before they start hounding me for a husband. The whole pressure and the need to just do things because my ancestors did it doesn’t sit right with me. In Nana’s famous words – “You’re not getting younger”, is a constant reminder of the reason why I need to go to Dev.. Being a love slave is not my portion. I’m going to find true freedom and life.