Commitments and Relationships

The past one week has shown me that even across 6000 km, parents and relatives are always worried about when do they start the search for your life partner. The push is higher when you are of "marriage-able age", typically for Kerala Hindu Men it means between 27 and 30 years of their age. Being a victim myself, I am taking some time off to understand this whole issue of commitments and relationships. And I  should admit this well before that for the first time in my life, I feel like I am in stranger tides even though I am sure of the way forward.

The word commitment and relationship, according to me, differs in the sense that while the former is a promise, the latter becomes the actual process of keeping the promise. And as one of my cousin mentioned, there is a point in everyone's life when he knows that he is ready to jump forward into these. For me this comes when you have an emotional maturity along with financial security. Now by emotional maturity I refer to the following aspects:

• Ability to understand that the girl is another human being with her own thoughts and feelings.
• Respect for the private emotional spaces of the other.
• Ability to be empathetic, at least to some extent.
• Ability to control one's frustration and anger on the invasion into his activity cycle, as long as it remains outside the zone of private emotional space mentioned earlier.
• Ability to improvise and adjust based on circumstances so that no one's feeling gets hurt.

The financial security part is the straight forward one. It is the feeling that gets generated when you are sure of sustaining the lives of both the individuals with the current available income.

Now across the past several years I have heard lots of friends jibe at my inability to handle the thought of a relationship. To this day, I have always posed a brave front by using funny forward messages that you see on the issue of marriage.But seriously the issue was more related to the concepts discussed above. I believe that my emotional growth as an individual started during the final years of UG. And after getting a job, the financial  part of the equation also started to emerge. But even with all these I was still in a naive/infancy state till about the first 4 years after B.Tech. I think I slowly started walking with support during the latter part of my first year at IIT. (This never stopped me in keeping on that brave face and the lame jokes whenever such questions popped up.) I have discussed part of these issues with some of my friends in IIT, but like the classical me, I always kept most of the finer details with myself.

But now, I think, I should peel of some more layers of those tissues to make myself very clear of where I stand on this whole issue. 

• Like most men, I too am a free-bird and want my freedom. But the major difference that I have felt is that I try several activities, or lets say fields, to ensure that I become a Jack of All Trades without mastering any one of them. This would mean that my habits, interests and activities will be having changes every now and then. Even in a relationship this would be the case, which is never a good sign.
• Add to this my limited experience of the world. They say that I am pretty good at building rapport with people. If that is so then what life has taught me is that there are multiple resonant frequencies for every one. All you need is to strike just one and the confluence would be just perfect. So it doesn't matter whether its Person X or Y, all you need is to find a single resonant frequency F.
• I never felt the need to understand or support the emotional baggage of a person. Now when the time has come for me to really think of future, I have grown a huge baggage for myself which never had anyone to support as I never asked anyone. This becomes a huge issue, as along with the life experiences, this baggage becomes heavier and it would take some herculean effort to reduce it. And unless and until this is reduced, there is no point in starting a new relationship.
• Though I taunt and satirically jibe at most of my female friends, I always keep them in the highest regard. This comes from seeing my aunt and mom right from a young age. I have never seen them complain even a slightest bit on what fate has given them. All their actions were as if they accepted it wholeheartedly and enjoyed all those small joys that come in their way. I was trying my level best to be like that in the past two years, but honestly it takes immense effort. So when I look around and see how some of those female friends manage their lives, I can  only sit and revere. These people achieve the emotional maturity much before us. Hence it is important that I realize this and act accordingly.
• There is a side to me which keeps certain ideals and values at the pinnacle. It becomes really hard for me to budge from them at any point of time; even when your closer ones push you. Not taking my convocation or never taking any of my courses seriously are just minor examples for this. Call these my ego or my free-will, I enjoy being myself and I am proud of it. And problem comes because most people find it hard to accept.

So what do all these finally point to. I am never against a relationship, but neither am I looking for one. To even start one, first I should have an emotional availability which is currently missing. With a tightly packed schedule filled with soul-searching experiments, travel and academic commitments, I am not to keen on increasing my baggage. It is true that all these would change when I meet "the one", but my honest guess is that this could be any other one. And I am being assured that search for one will not start until year end.