LOVE REVISITED

Everybody needs love. As cliché as it may sound, you and me and every living things on this earth needs someone to tell them that they are needed and loved and cherished for who they are.

Some people search for their true love until the day they die. Some people thought they have found their true love and become satiated with what they have although eventually, they are rendered unhappy. Some people, like me, could not be bothered about love as when love comes, two things might happen; either you got to keep it or you have to let it go and pray that it comes back again to stay next time.

As you get older, people are bound to ask questions, albeit personal ones, about aspects of your life that concerns love. When you’re still in school, they will ask you, “Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?” and the same question is asked until you get married. As for me, turning 27 this year, the same questions plus another new question that people keep asking me after I graduated, “When are you getting married?”, both questions burn a hole in my heart and also in my mind as every single family gathering or even bumping into my/my parents’ acquaintances, both questions will be asked in different sentence structures that boils down to the same semantics, “You are getting older and you’re a woman, you need someone to look after you.”

The problem is, I don’t need someone to look after me. I learnt to be independent ever since I got into college. Learning to handle my finance and planning my activities and differentiating between right and wrong. I learnt how to drive so I don’t have to be chauffeured around. I learnt how to make a loan and bought my own car and another car for my brother. I learnt not to depend on others because one day, you’ll be alone eventually and if you didn’t start early, you’re going to have a bad time adjusting to one sad and cruel truth, all of us would die alone and it’ll be us and angels of death inside our grave (this applies to my religion and I don’t know how other theological beliefs view death).

 When I think about the times, I could settle down and own a house in the suburbs with a handsome husband and lovely kids, I said to myself, “Nah, that would never happen either in this lifetime or the next”, because when you decided to make a leap from singledom into marriagehood (I coined these terms out of thin air, maybe Oxford would like to put these words in their latest dictionary), your life and every single aspects of it, whether you like it or realize it or not, will change. For the better or worse? Depends on how you look at it.

Doing household chores’ the cleaning, the cooking, the washing, the folding clothes, the feeding: all of these things are tiring and when done daily, could bring about health problems like high blood pressures. No wonder housewives are always stressed out and resort to other forms of escapism like ‘membuat ketupat’ (if you’re Malaysian, you know what this term means). Don’t be mad at me, this is just an overt generalization that I make and not all housewives are like this.

The thing is, I felt like a housewife already although I have a professional job as a teacher. My foster grandma cannot walk and refuse to try and my mom is sick at the moment and she cannot move that much (doctor’s order). So when I came back every afternoon, around 3.30 p.m. (the earliest if I punched out exactly at 2.15 p.m.), I have to do everything a housewife does. My father is currently building a rock fence around the house so I’m the one in charge of domestic matters. And although it’s a half-day gig, by the end of the day, I felt like a giant pygmy elephant (that’s oxymoron for you) took a big dump on my head and I can’t move when I go to sleep every night. So if you people ask me whether I want to get married and become a housewife, I’ll put my hands up in the air and surrender to the invitation.

Plus, when people next to me talk about their marital woes and from what I read and observe in my daily life, having a scumbag as a spouse does not help either. In addition to sluts and male whores who love to wreck marriages, I felt like nothing is permanent in this life. Like the ‘akad’ (sort of like marital vows) that you pronounce during ‘ijab kabul’ (solemnization) means nothing and marriage is just another concept that has been institutionalized and become something as common as eating a cup of ice cream.

I knew there are decent males out there that look at marriage seriously and they don’t have the challenge to stay monogamous for as long as they are married with the same person they fall in love with. But boy, a good man is hard to find and even harder to keep. So, the solution to not get your heart broken and in shambles, just don’t fall in love and don’t put any expectations on how your romantic journey would be. Sure, it sounds pessimistic but in this world where illusions hold more concretely than reality, an idealist would not survive. What more in the matters of the hearts.

So what if one day a pessimistic, non-romantic, self-loathing realist like me abandons her principle and runs away to join the joy of marriage and bearing children? That’ll be the day I swallow my own words. But until that happens, let’s just say, I’m trying to be happy and show a smile on my face just to look normal and acceptable in the immediate community that I am in. A community that loves a fairy-tale ending to every Nor, Bah and Ira; a damsel in distress saved by her knight in shining armour.