Have a Break!

We all need a break to beat the drudgery of life. We have breaks in schools, offices, factories, et al. Maya suggests that married couples need break too. Just be with your group of friends or visit your maternal home. It will rejuvenate you and keep the romance alive in your relationship too.

Constant work brings fatigue for sure and the idea of a break sounds pretty welcome. Be it the lunch break during the school hours to regale you by a lively chat with friends, a commercial break during a movie to allow you to go to the kitchen and grab something to munch, a break during those tiring hours of late night studies to recharge your batteries or a break at some dhaba (roadside eateries) during a journey by road.

These little breaks work big wonders.

They energise you like never before. They iron out the cricks of your back and freshen you up.

Being a bachelor has many pluses of its own. You are the master of your life. You have no constraints to accommodate your viewpoints to somebody else’s. If there creep in some differences between siblings, there are elders to smoothen things. You are a freedom loving bird footloose and fancy free. You love your freedom more than anything so much so that you don’t even like belts and ties that restrain the free flow of your blood.

After marriage, however, life changes drastically. This happens especially where you have to lay foundation for a nuclear family. You, your spouse, and later on, completing the circle of love, there are kids.

After a few years of married life, things seem to be falling apart. There are times when you need someone other than your spouse to be advised by, to be listened to, to spend time with.

It happens as both of you have started taking each other for granted. Both of you have known each other inside out so much so that there’s left no scope for simulation or dissimulation.

You can’t actually pretend anything for the moment you have your cap of fancy on, you are caught!

You have differences.

What two people are made alike?

Not even the twins.

Locking your horns, using harshest of the terms, digging corpses of past, hurling abuses at each other, saying, hurting things, which in a sane mind you never would is a pretty common phenomenon in each married life.

Solution?                                                    

Silence?

Bouts of crying?

Screaming?

No.

Just take a break.

Don’t mind if your spouse slams the door on your face and bolts the door from inside. Let your anger subside. Try to be cool, calm and collected.

Think.

Was the issue so crucial as to make you so hyper?

You feel like calling some near one of yours and justify yourself, your stand.

Our marriage counsellors very much stand by these breaks. These breaks restore you to the harmony, the equilibrium after a brief span of separation from your spouse. You indulge in self-introspection. The process leads you to discover the fact that you can be wrong too.

Remember when you are on one such break, don’t ease your mind by asking friends to drop in, advise you, entertain your whims or take you out for fun rides.

Marriage has constantly to be worked upon like all other priceless things in life that we painstakingly maintain.

I heard a female friend of mine candidly admit that she goes to her maternal home once or twice a year and that’s the time, which has saved her marriage till date. That’s the time she’s back to her own world, her friends, her kith and kin. How she loves to spend time with her friends, roam around the favourite hangout places of hers, how the late night gossips with her mother balm her heart, how she enjoys being cuddled and patted by her dad, like…like she was his little doll once again, how reading out poetry to him connects her to her roots once again, how listening to his feverish tales makes her feel she is his best friend he has long been waiting for to share things with, how her brother, sister-in- law and nieces long to be with her!

Back to life as though.

I wondered how she could remain away from her kids and her hubby, who she professed to love profound.

She made a clean breast admitting she couldn’t dream of getting separated from them ever but even they knew she needed to be herself for a few days at least once or twice a year.

Go on vacation with friends, live separate from your spouse for a fortnight or so, avoid communication in between, get a perfect grip on yourself, your priorities.

Do as you please but remember the therapy of this temporary separation is to dissolve differences between you and your spouse and not to deepen them further.

Remember you and your spouse are two walking books to your kids.

They learn from you more than anybody else.

The best investment you can make on their behalf is to be a loving couple and mutually having faith in each other.

There can be many ways you can dip into the serene pool of your own self.

Read. Write. Dance. Sing.

Do what helps you heal your sours.

You need no official break!

You need dive into yourself intermittently and emerge cleaner at heart! Wiser at mind!

Love your love like you never loved anything before.

Cherish him or her for a life time at least.

©Maya Khandelwal

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