Excuse Me? You Forgot Your Emotional Baggage Behind!

I was listening to the radio a couple of days ago and in their usual segment about news of international celebrities, they told the audience that Justin Bieber has decided to take a sabbatical from his music career. Now Justin Bieber has remained in and out of controversy in his tenure as a musician but this particular move is because he recently got married.

Don’t worry, his wife is not asking him to give up his career and become a homemaker. He and his spouse realized that marriage is a lot of commitment.

And in order to fulfill that commitment, one needs to be in the right frame of mind to ensure that it turns out right for both individuals. Justin Bieber was quoted saying that he has to work on a lot of personal issues and resolve them, so they do not affect his marriage.

This is a huge realization, especially within our generation. We are the post-industrial generation with a very globalized world view. What this essentially means is that growing up, we had access to a lot of information and absorbed it as well. When an individual grows up within such an environment, there are bound to be disagreements with friends and family and one is also bound to disagree with several of the social norms of their society. What that does is leave a lot of people emotionally scarred, and it is not a one-time thing. It happens consistently. People don’t really realize that it is a problem and an especially bigger one if it starts affecting people around them. At the same time, we also grow up internalizing a lot of information, changing in ways we may or may not realize and develop very strong personalities, which when put in a relationship require a lot of understanding and commitment to make the relationship work.

Marriage is a huge undertaking – whether arranged or love.

Two people entering the sacred bond of marriage need to identify how complex each individual is. The person you are about to marry is going to be as complex and dynamic as you are and it will not be easy to mold those two personalities. We might not even have the same privilege as Justin and his wife to put everything aside to work on the marriage. We might have to juggle with it along with everything else and that is going to take even more commitment and understanding and patience. But a relationship with your life partner should have a priority on your to-do lists because you will be spending your entire life with this person and it is important that it works out right. Most of the times, we also enter marriages with the idea that it won’t make us happy and will be limiting but that should not be the premise of a relationship you are going to build a life upon. Fulfilment and joy should accompany that relationship and that only comes through understanding of both the parties involved.

This is a reminder for each one of us that in order to succeed in certain relationships – be it friends, family or our partners – it is necessary to address our emotions and ideas. Due to the ginormous generation gap between us and our parents, we have been raised to believe that it is okay to avoid conversations. Confrontation and conflict resolution are two areas which we have not been able to master and when we take those traits into a marriage, we are setting the foundation of a failed relationship, which when retained is bound to affect the next generation.