Pleasures of Bachelorhood

Being a person born and brought up in my own locality, I always get the privilege of getting invited to almost all marriages happening in and around my place. More often than not, I make it a point to attend them as well because my mother is someone who believes that it is very important to attend those functions as a sign of giving respect to those who had taken the effort of coming to our home and inviting us for the wedding. The most interesting thing that I frequently notice in a wedding ceremony is the way in which a very peculiar form of “marketing” happening in almost all these wedding functions and it is of course, done by the mothers of those “hope-to-be-bride-soon” girls.

I safely presume that my female friends and readers will forgive me on this, as this might seem offensive to some of them. In the wedding gatherings the mothers bring their daughters in the finest of attires and garbed in the most glittering ornaments and they also meticulously choose the right persons to introduce their daughters to (these right persons, incidentally are those young men or the parents of those young men presumably considered as the most eligible bachelors around). For some reasons yet to be discovered, these mothers find it absolutely difficult to accept me as one of those most eligible bachelors - undoubtedly to my delight and happiness, as I’ve no intentions of getting married in the near future - and this apparently has prompted me to have introspection and more importantly to delve deep into the reasons behind a young person’s constant desire to remain a bachelor.

One of the greatest pleasures of bachelorhood is that seemingly innocuous freedom of enjoying the beauty of a lady with the faculty of vision, unperturbed by the possessive attitude-laden close surveillance of one’s significant other. I strongly believe, by virtue of my common sense, that a married man, who is already under the fearsome control of the “close surveillance” of his wife, is the best person to approve the veracity of the above statement, though the probability of such an overt approval is minimal for obvious reasons. It is always said that one should get married to realize the real joy of remaining a bachelor, but by then, obviously one will cease to exist as a bachelor and hence any hope of enjoying the fruits of bachelorhood would thereafter sadly linger in his heart as an unfulfilled pipe dream.

The pleasure of being independent, being away from the bonds of family responsibilities could be yet another reason for a bachelor to ardently seek bachelorhood. The autonomy to do things as he wish, the liberty to travel where ever he desire, to tread through paths which are supposedly more perilous, though innovative, to spend time on things logically considered irrelevant by the majority, to utilize money on things of interest although alleged as an act of squandering by the external world and so on and so forth. This independence, treasured by most could be a very strong reason for a bachelor to impede a drive, from inside his consciousness and from the outside world, to jettison his tag of bachelorhood. We all cherish it so much so that we feel more inclined towards complying with this inner drive of remaining single and feel, more often than not, that there is more enterprise in staying on as a bachelor than being bonded in the demanding nuptial chains.

The ability to encounter and solve problems is one of the most exhilarating aspects of human life. Though often unconsciously, we all enjoy facing problems in our lives and the hard work - physical, mental and emotional - that comes together with facing and solving problems makes ordinary lives of people something worth living. Being a bachelor gives you the best chance to stride into paths that are believed to be rather problematic though challenging since there are no marital strings attached to your life that would pull you back into walking through ordinary paths often treaded by ordinary people accustomed to playing safe games in life. Youth is the period in one’s lifetime where there are larger chances that a person would take decisions that are bold and possibly decisions that are capable of changing the way he would live rest of his life and perchance capable of changing the way this whole world would live thereafter provided the extreme decision he would take is a revolutionary one. So it seems to be pretty normal that a young man would seek to remain as a bachelor during his gallant youthful days. This argument could be sometimes wrong for I have heard married people saying that you have to be more courageous, gutsy and intrepid after marriage hence married life provides more opportunities for you to face vivid problems and hence more opportunities of solving it through physical, mental and emotional exertion.

Bachelorhood is certainly the most colorful phase in one’s life - when you live your life with the least possible constraints, by enjoying the concern, care and affection of your parents, by savoring the moments of taking the most delicious food prepared by your mother (particularly so when the talent and interest in cooking is just a rarity among modern day girls and hence any expectation of the same from modern day wives is as absurd as absurd can be), and by benefiting from the freedom of taking extremely daring decisions without caring for even the slightest of concerns.

Having detailed the different reasons that are prompting me to stay on as a bachelor, which might hold good for some other bachelors too, I should confess that if I ever get a proposal from a girl similar to the girl at the ophthalmic center where my mother goes for treatment – that tall, fair girl with brown eyes who is smart, gifted, exceptionally graceful, intelligently loquacious and elegantly well dressed – I would perhaps be forced to rethink on my status quo as a bachelor. This is firmly because life at certain times needs a positive change, a change from the fearless life of a bachelor to a responsible life of a married man, for human life can hardly be considered complete unless one gets to encounter all facets of worldly life at some point of time or the other - my married friends would acknowledge, I reckon.