I see so many jokes, as well as real-life conflicts around marriages. I often feel that we need to discuss marriage with an open mind. Probably, two people marry because there is a deep desire within all of us to have a companion, with whom we can share our lives, we can take care of ourselves and we can take care of him, and we can explore this world together. This desire is the manifestation of an inner connection with the divine. We have a deep connection to the divine just like a drop of the ocean has a relation with the ocean. Since we have been and are always a part of the divine, we too have the same nature of oneness as the ocean.
However, every drop has its own size and shape which is a result of the surface tension that ensures the unique size and shape of the drop. We may call this tendency, to protect our uniqueness, the ego. Since our basic nature is like the ocean, love is quite natural to us. Love means merger. When two drops merge with each other and in fact all the drops merge with each other to form an ocean. However, the Ego does not want that merger at the cost of losing itself. That is the reason that we want others to merge into ourselves and to become like us and to merge with others.
We have so many different relationships in this world such as parent-child, friends, siblings, colleagues, and so on. In all these relationships, the boundary lines are well-defined and generally, there are fewer conflicts. For example, parents know very well their role is to take care of the kids, grow them up, ensure good education to them, and then they will grow as an adult and take decisions of their lives themselves. Parents have to set their kids free after a point in time, and the parents who do not understand this develop conflicts in their relationships with the children. Thus, there is an implicit understanding that parents take care of the kids while they are dependent and as the kids grow independent, they take care of themselves. Yes, there is love and affection and mutual care always. However, the understanding is quite clear that once the kids grow up, they make crucial decisions in their lives. Definitely, they may consult parents if they consider them to be wise and experienced guides. The boundary lines of the relationship are well-defined though.
Similarly, the boundary lines of the relationships between siblings, friends, and colleagues are also well-defined. Therefore, the Ego does not have any conflicts. At best there may be certain issues with the fairness in the give and take. Somebody may feel that he has given more in a relationship and has received much less. In such cases, we redefine the relationships and expand or contract the scope of our interactions based on the feedback.
However, the relationship of marriage is quite different. It keeps testing the boundaries. Husband and wife come too close to maintain their Ego boundaries. It's like two drops of water in a frying pan, a little apart, coming together, and when they are quite near, they merge with each other to form a bigger droplet. In fact, the merger of the two drops is not sudden. If we look at it in slow motion, we would notice that there is a lot of effort by each of the drops to protect its separate identity due to their respective surface tension. In fact, when we watch a drop of water being dropped into a glass of water, it's interesting to watch that the drop does not merge into water instantly as against our common understanding. Rather, a part of the drop merges into the water, and then it bounces back and then again sheds some of its mass and then again bounces back and then merges into the water completely. We may like to watch that in this YouTube video:
Probably that's how the Ego operates. The surface tension, or the sense of separateness, does not allow the ego to merge that quickly. Generally, other relationships allow that safe distance, but spouses come so close to each other that there is a constant struggle between the surface tension of the two droplets. The spouse with stronger ego boundaries tends to maintain the Ego more forcefully. We have some marriages wherein one partner becomes dominant and the other becomes docile. The partner with strong Ego boundaries maintains his or her Ego boundaries and the other droplet merges into the first one. In such cases, the ideas and opinions of the first one prevail. In some cases, both the droplets have their own strong Ego boundaries and both maintain their ideas and opinions. In such cases, if they are intelligent enough, they understand that they are different and decide to cohabitate to play their functional roles or to stay apart. If they are not so intelligent, they live in constant conflict and fight.
I feel that a merger is a beautiful concept. As we can see from the video above, the merger is divine. Shedding our identity makes us light. We become a part of the whole. There are many religions that consider it as the ultimate aim of human life. However, a droplet may, while being the droplet also, maintain awareness of that merger. In that case, the droplet is always full of love and willing to merge with every other droplet, not at the cost of taking the color of the other droplet, but to share the source where we all originate, i.e. consciousness. However, some drops are so obsessed with their colors that they lose awareness of that consciousness within themselves and want other drops to have the same color. Some drops have lost awareness of their true identity and developed a strong association with their size and shape that they are extremely afraid to let it go and merge into a bigger droplet. They just want the other droplet to keep supplying the resources so that they can maintain their own Ego. These are the reasons why marriages, which should have been the most beautiful relationships in this world, have turned out to be the biggest disasters and the most famous subject matter of standup comedies.
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