Whenever we think of a term marriage, immediately an image of the wedding day comes in our mind. We visualize the wedding day even with the minor details. This is because attending a wedding function starts has its charm right from our childhood. This charm is of things like - the fancy dresses of the bride and the groom, sparkling venue, music, lots of rituals and a nicely dressed gathering. So when one imagines his or her own wedding, this visualization of the wedding day of course contains images of family members, close friends, kith and kin. It becomes really tough to visualize a wedding scene without parents. There are some scenarios where parents reject their son’s daughter’s prospective partner.
Reasons Behind Such Strong Reservations
Different Culture/ Caste/ Religion
There is a strong belief amongst many family systems that marriage should happen in the same caste or culture or religion. These beliefs have no logical reasoning in the present generations.
Social Pressure
Sometimes even if the immediate family i.e. parents and siblings are not so conservative, but the related families like uncles and aunts, grandparents have the above mentioned strong opinions about marriage in same cultures and castes. So this dilemma of the parents to make choice between the harmony and respect for their related families, builds reservations in them.
Earlier Bad Experience
There are cases where the families excuse inter-religion or inter-caste marriage earlier but for whatever reasons if the marriage was unsuccessful, then the families become very rigid.
Dislike on the basis of Physical Appearance
Families have preset image of the spouse of their children. Their disapproval due to this factor might not be genuine yet in some cases they strictly decline the idea, in other cases they try to emotionally blackmail for some time and later they make firm decisions.
Reasons behind breaking of Marriages without parental consent
Not all the marriages fail if the families do not give their consent. Marriage is all about connection between the husband and the wife. In case there is lack of understanding the bond starts to break. The easiest of all is to superstitiously say that marriages without the approval of the elders don’t prosper. Yet some reasons for the marriages with the typical condition of disapproval of families fail with the following triggering factors :
Guilt
Some people go for the decision of marriage against the will of the families, but with passage of some time they experience a feeling of guilt. This feeling gets expressed negatively on the partner either verbally or in actions, thereby putting frustration in the mind of the spouse.
Self doubt
Many times we take decisions while the whole world is predicting the negative consequences of our decisions. After some time we do start doubting ourselves. This surely makes us perform some negative actions leading to fights.
Over-expectation from the marriage and spouse.
Some people do take decisions that are against the current but then, they act selfish by expecting unrealistically from their partner. They continuously remind their partner of their extra responsibilities. A stage comes where the partner gets totally fatigued.
Need of patch-up with the families after the marriage
In majority of the cases where people marry without the consent of the families, they start feeling a strong natural calling from their families of origin. In such cases they put a lot of pressure on their spouse so as to get easy access to their families. This results in discord between the couple.
Revenge of the Families after Marriage
In some scenarios the families suddenly agree for the marriage. But after a certain period the families have an unconscious need to settle earlier scores. This too creates biases in the minds of the partner which leads to a gap certainly.
Ways to tackle this problem-
Patience
It is important not to show any urgency for marriage. Marriage is a lifetime decision. Any critical decision taken in haste proves to be detrimental.
Understanding the underlying love and concern of both families
Whatever the situation may be, still the reality is that the root of the family’s strong stand is love and wellbeing of their kids.
Exploring the root cause
Counter reacting to the disapproval of the family is never good. There might be a case that the family has few concerns due to lack of awareness but reacting strongly to the need of knowledge of the parents is display of immaturity. One must try to understand the core concerns and observations of the family members. It is also possible that a warm discussion with the parents get you an opportunity to remove the misconceptions that they had regarding the partner or the alliance.