no point

 I love books in which people stand up to the heavy pressure of tradition… books in which people are constantly being told to marry, constantly being ‘setup’ to meet someone to marry. Everyone is getting married and having children around them and they defiantly cry out ‘no, I will not marry, I want to remain single and create. I want to paint and I want to write and I want to travel.’ Inevitably, this speaks to me. From an early age, I never wanted to marry, I never wanted to buy a house, I never wanted to have children in spite of everyone that I knew either telling me that I should do all of those things or themselves doing all of those things. I remember, at the age of 25, having a girlfriend who was 26… she owned her own home and got angry with me when I told her that I didn’t want to buy one. She argued that there was ‘no point to life’ and ‘no ambition’ if one did not seek to get married, buy a home, and start a family. That was not the last time I would hear such words through my relationships in life. 

                  Five years later, however, I did get married. It was not what I wanted, but I was in love and my girlfriend could not remain in England unless we got married... so we did. I feel somewhat ashamed to say that I felt uncomfortable with the concept during the three and a half years before we separated. I didn’t even like to use words like ‘married’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’. More than twenty years later, we are still friends, but our lives have taken very different paths. It’s interesting and puzzling to me that, as a society, even today, we still don’t accept that people are different. There is still an assumption that we all want the same things, we all listen to the same music, we all want to work the same way and interact the same way. 

                  Some theories argue that, in youth, people have hopes and dreams of marriage, a family, a home, and when they finally achieve those things they discover that they don’t bring the happiness they assumed they would and so they try to convince everyone else to do the same to share their pain and difficulty. There are, of course, many who are very happy in that situation because they simply never wanted anything else, they had no hobbies or creative desires, they lived in terror of being alone. 


Spy Pond, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

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