u/Jolly_Row2826

When you are one of those kids who has shared everything with your parents, every little joy, every fear, and confusion then you eventually grow up understanding love through them. You realize that the people who have truly been your best friends are your parents. They understand your sadness without you having to explain it. When you cry, they feel it with you. When you succeed, their happiness is often greater than your own.

As a girl growing up in this country, my parents taught me to have a voice, to stand by my opinions, to stay true to myself, and never to bow down in front of anyone. They raised me to be independent in my thoughts and confident in who I am. And as I grew older, I saw them grow with me. Even though they belonged to a different generation, a different time, and a different social environment, they tried to understand mine. They tried to bridge that gap. They let go of many things they had grown up believing in, just so they could give me more opportunities, more freedom, and a different life.

But somewhere, when it comes to marriage, that freedom feels like it suddenly has boundaries. In a country where marriage is still deeply tied to caste and social expectations, the idea that I must choose within a particular framework or that if I cannot choose, someone else will choose for me then I can't help but feel that this is an unspoken taking away of my autonomy. And perhaps that is what hurts the most. It is not because I have someone in mind. It is not because I have been waiting to marry a particular person. It is not even about rejecting their choices. It is about wanting to feel that this one decision, this deeply personal part of my life belongs only and only to me. They do give me an option to decide, but the options themselves are decided by them. And that subtle difference is what creates a distance I have never felt before. I have never felt this disconnected from them, because they have always been the people I felt closest to.

Sometimes, I find myself thinking that maybe I do not want to get married at all. But then I wonder if that feeling is truly mine, or if it is a reaction to feeling pressured and losing control over the choice. The very way this process is happening is making me develop an extreme aversion to the entire idea of marriage itself.

Maybe the hardest part is that the conflict is not with strangers or society alone. It is with the people who taught you to think freely, and yet, in this one supposedly most important decision of life, you feel your freedom becoming conditional.