Let us start with the fundamentals of our emotional support infrastructure and it goes back to the days when we matured arranged marriage process, methodology and execution.
Questions related to LOVE, Marriage and relationships are not new but are becoming very relevant for us now as we transit into a very different world compare to our last generation. Let us track how we began asking such questions?? Did we ask these questions with same intensity as now centuries back?? Or did we have different challenges?

During Medivinal times, we were asking questions more related to mystery of life. Questions like who is god? What is life? Who am I?? What is my duties Etc…. and our national customer care help line run by temples (churches) in name of religion failed miserably to such questions and they rather exploited as middle man between us and god(mystery) ( now you know why property prices are high when we buy through dealers).
The failure to get replies to our fundamental question related to mystery, misery and pain of life, drifted us and we began to indulge in life and experiment with the mind to go on our own to find replies in trial and error. This cultivated mind and probably gave birth to materialism through industrial revolution. It all began from West while India having strong roots in spiritualism still lived with questions and accepted mystery of life as divine and gift of universe rather than questioning.

With industrial revolution, when we began to develop faculty of mind, we began to create logic and started doing analysis. We began to see worthiness in our living and rather than asking questions to solve mystery of life, we began to create whatever we could lay our hands on and achievements in life for the first time became yardstick to measure and quantify life which we could not have we tried attempting to answer life through religion. It created sense of purpose, worthiness of life for that era which went on to become legacy of creating wealth for next generation.

Till then, we did not question LOVE. We did not question marriage and we did not question any of our social norms to the extent that it becomes a burning desire to explore. It was given and granted and it was available in abundance to any one and every one. LIFE was acceptable, social fabric was strongly interwoven and intact making people live in harmony as dependent on each other and it has built in self regulatory system which was effective even till last generation of ours.

All these centuries, there was very little innovation or evolution was done in our basic social infrastructure as majority of work was done in the field of mental capabilities to be extended and to explore and concur the world and indulge and that created a tradition to build rat race.

Something has gone terribly wrong during all these centuries or may be the timing is just perfect to ask such questions as we move from interdependency to co dependency to independent living and then come back to old paradigms with new rules. The basics of living are challenged now as go full circle from denouncing the LIFE(Indian religions) to indulging in life to accepting the life.

We have lost center of gravity of our soul or rather evolution of mind has drifted the center and I find this very interesting time as we are now defining new social infrastructure for our children who would have very little generation gap.

Each society, each individuals is looking for balance point and center of gravity of his soul to be able to do justice to present life & present circumstances and this makes life and this is where we are asking questions on LOVE, Marriage, relationships and their longevity etc..

In the beginning of society, the acceptance of life gave birth to a state of being, which was full of love within. It was state of being for every one of us. Since mind was not any differentiator, marriage was accepted, we lived with love within and we gave the same.

So social currency for us was LOVE and love was for life and clearly since life flows through people, we rubbed them with LOVE and other person felt it. Marriage gave us life long opportunity to experience LOVE and LOVE was never talked about, because it was assumed that it exists and people focused more on their dharma, karma and strengthening the social fabric within the four cast systems to become vertically strong and support each other within the ecosystem so that life flows.

People of our generation are caught by surprise that we are suddenly left alone without any formal training in leading our life. Uprooted from our joint families leaving our cities and coming to metros, dealing with strangers, we are asking what is LOVE??? While actually what we are wondering is where have we reached in pursuit of economic freedom and independence… we lost ours elf somewhere and now suddenly LOVE has become need???

And this is where we are going wrong. LOVE has become need and the moment it becomes need, it becomes tradable commodity and you need a yardstick to measure and you need a currency to substantiate this??

While LOVE is lost within us, we are asking what is marriage and what does it give me??? We have seen it working for our parents and suddenly find it does not work for us to the extent that we expected LOVE to provide us that soft music to our soul all the time.

Over the years and more so in last 50 years, we are demanding a lot from ourself and that is good news as we question every aspect of life, However, more questions also making us do mistakes and we demand not only from us but also from our partners who is also struggling to find same questions and for sure in the bargain, we have forgotten to be honest with our self and our quest has become obsession rather than finding solution and replies for it.
Personalities of today are becoming more powerful to be able to handle emotions, spiritual and mental and physical aspects on daily basis and that puts lots of pressure on other person to perform ( na…na do not imagine.. I am not yet in your bedroom) to be able to fulfil the needs of ours.
What we see now is a trend that on daily basis we need to have multiple needs being satisfied by different people around us rather than one person being able to handle it all like old times and that broke marriages in the west where social fabric had already weekend and divorce was easy.

None of it has been a solution so far simply because we are not asking right questions?? More so, we are uprooted and have lost center of gravity for our soul and we our self do not know if we make any sense to any body.

If I were to sit down and say let us start-making corrections to our self and let us discover our self, I would go like this but would be brief on the risk of boring all of you.

First I would ask, who am I?? What is the purpose of my life?? Why am I born to the parents I am born to?? What is that which I need to carry forward and fulfill as legacy to be born to the family?? You will be surprised to discover that you are doing nothing new but carrying on the job your father/mother could not complete so we are nothing but extension of parents and if we believe we have achieved something on our own in spite of being born to the family, we are born to then it is confirmed that you are lost… then you need to go back to first question, who am I? And start all over again. By the time you know it, you are down by 5 years if not 10 and you would have lost on major part of your sex life but would have done great value enhancement to your neighbor’s, so be sure asking questions has a cost.
Once you discover purpose of life, then it is all about making sure that you bring those kind of energies to be able to walk on it and that requires lot of guts but has no rules on how many years it will take…generally by the time, you know it, it is time for your daughter to get married….and you realize that you did your dharma well and got your daughter settled… but you probably still have same neighbor and you want to make some changes in your life….