Being married isn’t just a way of life - it’s a full-time job that requires hard work. Weddings are fun and exciting but to sustain that joy of finding the one you’re gonna spend the rest of your life with can get tricky, especially when you’re exposed to so much content through social media.
Two years into our marriage my husband and I were being pressured to have children. ‘That’s the only way to keep your love alive, by moving forward’, our families said. But we were not willing to use a child as a tool to maintain our companionship. To the world we were husband and wife, but we were still figuring out what kind of couple we wanted to be.
Instagram is full of couple goals. There were plant-parents, dog-parents, vegan-duos, traveling-partners, fitness-jodis - so amidst all of these, who were we? Couples opting to go the conventional way of having a baby looked happy too! All these options led to a lot of chaos in our minds. We would often discuss our values and dreams - some matched, others didn’t.
Ajit and I were a regular couple, we had no hobbies in common. Our weekdays were spent apart at work and nights were spent browsing through all the content available on Netflix and never being able to decide on one film or show that we both wanted to watch. On weekends, I liked running and he liked gardening. So if it were up to Instagram, we would have been divorced. But thank god we did not let social media decide for us.
The most important thing that my husband and I did have in common was mutual understanding and respect. We accepted each other for who we are and loved and appreciated the qualities that we didn’t have in common. Not the annoying ones, of course. We chose to be partners who live and let live. There was nothing extraordinary about our story - but there was consistency and there was calm - something many couples struggle with.
It’s human to get overwhelmed by all kinds of amazing things that people do with their partners. Fancy dinners, expensive vacations, unreal body-goals. Ajit and I do none of those things. But I do pick up his favorite chips while grocery shopping and he gets me hot-water bottles when I cramp in the middle of the night, and both these things make us feel very special.
So we’ve decided to be a couple that shows a million small gestures rather than a handful of grand ones. For us, consistency is key and we are hopeful that we will share life’s joys and sorrows, till death do us apart.
