After more than 3 years of dating her, I married my girlfriend(now wife) Shilpa in Hyderabad this month.

To assemble a planet, like the earth, energy is expended. The energy utilised to assemble the configuration is the stored potential energy of the object. That potential manifests itself as the gravitational well from which escape requires explosive energy of rockets. But it is also that gravitational well that provides a platform for life to plant its feet firmly and thrive.

We similarly expend enormous amounts of energy into creating the union of 2 people. They then spend their lives in that gravitational well, of all that spent energy and more. We enter that well, to build our life, so that the price of marriage, and the gaze of society, create a platform that helps the best of us thrive, and becomes a barrier for when the worst of us feels fuelled enough to explode.

The physics metaphor notwithstanding, everyone has a sense of the huge commitment that marriage is. And I get a lot of “how did you really know you wanted to marry her”.

There’s a simple answer to this question that pretty much everyone knows! “You just know!”. Of course I knew! I was infact extremely anxious as to how I knew so easily. So I gave myself a simple check. If, by the time its actually time to go to families, I don’t see a red flag, I will marry her!

But that’s a shitty reason to marry someone! You can’t give this answer to people. So I spent a lot of time musing on what I feel, why I feel this utter lack of friction. This daunting sense of comfort where, I feel like I’m home!

And to me, that’s kind of where the answer lies! The ideal partner to me, feels like home! I realise that this is a contentious claim. People feel that we seek out partners like our parents in the hope of finding comfort and then suffer similar emotional torments at the hands of similar people. There’s no denying there’s a chance of that. But I mean the feeling of being at home in a broader sense.

I wrote in the previous post too, that we do have some intuitions that are pretty hard to articulate. Eating a sugary dessert vs having a well balanced meal, feel different! Evolution has armed our mind with some markers of safety, pleasure, nurture and love that we can see, if we really look! Corrupting agent like excess sugar try to hijack those systems, but our brain, in some corner, just knows!

That’s how, according to me, you find the right partner. There’s all sorts of people who will taste great because of all the sodium and sugar and fat they have! They will give you passionate hits of dopamine and you will wake up craving them. But if you have them for days on together, they will make you sick! Just like cheesecake everyday. And when you get sick, you’ll know your body was telling you something was wrong from day 1. You just didn’t listen.

Then there’s the comfort food mom used to make! For me it is the simple daal chawal. Daal too, the simplest, toor daal. With the simplest tadka, of jeera and ghee. I could have that meal EVERYDAY! I wouldn’t fall sick! I’d like to have that meal after a long tiring day of work, and it would nourish me! Infact, it would taste better if I prepared it myself, put in my own effort and creativity to make it my own! Sure, every now and then, I could add papad or achaar along with it to jazz it up. But I could have it daily.

THAT, is how you know you want to marry someone! You marry them when you know they’re your daal chawal.

Originally published at http://blog.abhirathb.com on February 19, 2022.