“I wish you were a girl, I would have definitely married you.”
How many times have you heard a “straight” guy say that about you, or may be some other friend of his. A few weeks ago, I visited a friend of mine. While enjoying the breeze on the terrace, we met another bachelor named Sandy in his apartment (who was quite friendly and hot). My friend needed some movies and so we went to his room, which he shared with another friend of his. The room of Sandy’s friend was very tidy and maintained as compared to his own, and that is when he joked, “Had he been a girl, I would have definitely married him,” going on about how he has the habits of a girl.
This was not the first time I was hearing such a comment, and that got me thinking, is it just because the whole concept of marriage that is taught to us from childhood is so heterosexual in nature that even when a man likes another man, he cannot accept his feelings, because a marriage after all has to happen between a man and a woman? The situation gets more complicating in a country like that of India, where the whole society revolves around the idea of marriage, where if you reach “marriageable” age, the “society” starts questioning you why aren’t you getting married. Not every man is so willing to go against the norm. If the concept of marriage had been taught to us from childhood as gender neutral, would the situation be different with Sandy? Did he really have “feelings” for his friend which was hard for him to accept, or was he just expressing qualities he desires in his future wife?
While I cannot comment about the feelings of Sandy whom I met for just a few hours, what got me writing about this weeks after meeting Sandy is the way the guy I have been dating sees marriage. While he does express his feelings, but when it comes to marriage, he cannot imagine it between two men. For him, a guy has to marry a girl at the end, because that is what everyone does, that is what everyone says. While he can obviously be classified under the “confused” category, somehow, he is not the only one who thinks on those lines.
That is exactly what triggered my thoughts. What if children were taught in schools about same-sex marriage? Will it become much easier for people to accept their feelings? Will a supposedly “straight” guy like Sandy who starts liking his friend, be more open to the idea of seeing him as his partner, rather than wishing that he had been a girl? This is a question that probably the future generations, who would (hopefully) have been taught about homosexual couples in schools, will be able to provide an answer to. This is a social experiment (rather change) I would love to see.
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