Happily Unmarried?

Who doesn't like being single... Being free to  make your own decisions, being independent and following your heart. But in India, being single is a whole new experience... sometimes good and sometimes simply exhausting.
Here are a few things a single person in India gets to experience:

• Stay away from the opposite gender: What is the most seen image of coed schools and colleges? Girls and boys sitting on separate rows in the classroom. Forget dating, girls and boys are not even encouraged to speak to each other. Though times are changing fast, ask any conservative Indian parent and they will still list the cons of letting opposite sexes get too friendly. I went to a girls only school and I still remember inter-school events where the possibility of interacting with with the opposite sex would be high and we would be expressly discouraged from talking to boys beyond the bare necessity. Oh the excitement of flouting those rules! Cut to college where a girl in my batch sat with two of her guy friends during a class and the professor made a polite but firm request to her to go back to sitting in the all-girls rows. 
• Don't dare rent an apartment in a society: The worst experience a single person in India can go through is when trying to rent an apartment especially if its in a so called "respectable" society. There are societies which actually have it as a rule that you cannot allow people of the opposite sex visiting your apartment. We had to sign a rental agreement which had this rule written and underlined in bold! Apart from the issue with the other gender, in general groups of unmarried girls or boys are frowned upon when they try to get an apartment. Many owners make it clear outright that they would only rent to families. Never mind if you don't even have a friend of the opposite sex... if you are single you are not to be trusted. Having being at the receiving end of many rejections and many scoldings also, I can vouch that this is one time when you would wish that you were married just so you can get a decent flat to live in.
• Marriage days are running out: I cannot stress on this point enough. Once your family sees that you are well-settled in your job (for boys) or reaching the age they have set as the limit for your singe life (for girls), the great tug-of-war beings. Imagine that you are struggling with one end of the rope and at the other end is your immediate family, your relatives, your neighbors and even random self-declared well-wishers (including a person who you met on the bus and who happened to inquire about your marital status). From those days when you were forbidden from interacting with the opposite sex, you are suddenly encouraged by the whole world to mate for life with one of them. There is no point of arguing too as you will soon learn that the reasons for you getting married are too many and too convoluted to defeat with logic.
• Dating at your own risk: One of the upsides of not being married is enjoying dating. Well good luck with that! From being lectured by the moral police on the sins of dating to being arrested by the actual police if you dare to be out on a date, there is no saying what you might end up with. In a country where even rapists are supposedly teaching you a lesson because you went on a movie "date" with a boy, it is indeed playing with fire and something you should do completely at your own risk. 18 is the legal age you say? Only if you committed a crime and need to be pardoned for it. As long as you are not married, you cannot and will not be allowed to venture alone with a person of the opposite sex.

Rethinking your marital status? Don't because at the end of the day being happily unmarried is as liberating as is being in a fulfilling marriage. And don't let anything convince you otherwise!