Why Are All Popular Couples Unmarried?

Radha and Krishna, Romeo and Juliet, Laila and Majnu, Heer and Ranjha, Shree and Farhad — these couples did not or could not marry and yet they were all popular and inspirational through the centuries. Some are actually worshipped today.

Let’s suppose that society in general and their village in particular had become very liberal, taking cue from their gods, and had agreed to tie Laila and Majnu into matrimonial bliss. Do you think we would have known who they were and how great their desire was to come close to each other? I am sure that after a few years, people would have spotted a stressed out Majnu with his four year old son on his shoulder filing a complaint with the village panchayat about the irreconcilable differences with Laila. Or else Laila would have been confiding in her friends that Majnu is having extra marital relationships and she is left to take care of the home by herself.

Today, married couples throng the temples and bow down to the pure love of the Radha and Krishna relationship. What is it that we admire about Radha and Krishna? Is it the fact that they loved and were able to sustain their love ? Or do we admire that all these famous couples were able to sustain their love because they did not cave in to society’s pressure to get married?

Maybe they knew that the first victim to go down in the matrimonial battlefield is love?

When today’s lovers, inspired by the divine intoxication of romance, are sitting in public places, holding hands and basking in love, it is a pity that they do not realize what easy bait they are for the eagle-eyed moral police. The self-appointed moral police — usually two repressed ladies reminding us of ’88′ in game of housie and 3 portly gentlemen, who have not seen their feet in years, are eager to pounce on them and then sentence them to a lifetime of…… matrimony!

It’s surprising that we respect and yearn for the pure, unending love of Radha and Krishna but when we encounter a similar kind of relationship around us, we leave no stone unturned to demonise it, crush it or distance ourselves from the lovers.

The unmarried lovers of legend and history are popular because our imagination makes them so. It’s the resistance they faced, the confrontations around them and the incompleteness in their relationships which allow us to create and colour the conclusions according to our own hopes and imagination. We can make their story our own without the constraints imposed by mundane matrimony.