Love Is About Luck But It Is Also About Courage.

“You are just very lucky,” she said to me, “Not everyone in the world is as lucky as you when it comes to love.”

I don’t disagree. I am not one of those people who takes offense at the idea that love takes a little bit of luck, especially if one’s version of love is esoteric and involves an alternative lifestyle. I truly believe there is some degree of magic to the fact that my spouse and I even met, and that we met at the moment that we did. I mean, what are the odds that two people who are that compatible would run into each other by virtue of a third individual who is halfway across the globe. It’s crazy and there is luck involved in the fact that we met, but that is the point at which it stops being about luck for me, in a few different ways.

A friend of mine has recently started to date a divorced man who is a different religion than her and she loves him but she is also completely certain that she can neither marry him nor cohabitate with him because her family wouldn’t accept it. If she did, she will have to spend her entire life ensuring her family and community never find out. I know several people in the kink-community who are in long-term relationships with a set expiry date because at some point one party is expected to marry, and a few would like to marry their partners, but their families wouldn’t accept the cultural or demographic differences between them. A few know marriage isn’t even an option with their kink partners because those partners won’t even take such a stand, socially, and they understand and accept the structural differences between a kink partner and a life-partner.

Let’s be very clear about a few things. Some of these people would prefer to have their relationships structured this way (and that is a perfectly valid choice) and many others have been trained to think this way by familial structures all their lives at various costs. These problems are systemic and not the fault of any of these individuals. India is a complicated fucking country and marriage is one of those institutions where the intersectionality of the political, social and familial oppression is on microcosmic display. India gives no fucks about love, but the compulsion to marry is alive and well. Even the most progressive of my peers, ones from the most “educated” families, are not exempt from the compulsion, and with the compulsion, there are also conditions. You must marry by so-and-so age. You must marry someone chosen by so-and-so person or, at least, you must choose from a list of prospects vetted by so-and-so person. If you choose your own partner, you must marry someone from so-and-so community. You must not marry someone from such and such community. You must seek approval of such-and-such social authority before you allow yourself to consider a future with someone. We’re all subject to such conditions but the stakes vary and that matters a great deal.

For someone the consequence of making a free choice may be irksome and emotionally traumatic like continued emotional hostage-taking by family members, and for others, it may mean complete social ostracization of them and their families, and for others still, it may mean honour killings. It is a wide range. It’s a function of privilege (and even that is about luck) so it is easier for some of us to subvert the social systems than it is for others, and that is why I insist that when I discuss this it is not to lay blame at the feet of any individual for this, while praising myself, it is not an equal battle for us all, but that doesn’t mean it is easy for those of us who do it either. At eighteen, when I walked out of the home of my parents with a single-suitcase, I did so with knowledge and acceptance of the fact that I was choosing my freedom at the cost of my family. I was going to date whoever I wanted, of whichever gender, from any community, in whatever structure I wanted, and I wasn’t going to hide it and that meant I had to be willing to emancipate.

I spent the last year of my schooling plotting an escape, I saved money all year because I knew the day I stepped out of that house as an adult, I was on my own if I wanted to make my own choices. I secured employment and admission to a college in a city far away, at the same time, without letting anyone know that I had done so. Familial structures, if so inclined, will use any tool at their disposal to bend you to their will, they will use their love and their money as tools to wrangle good, socially-acceptable behaviour out of you and I knew I had to be willing to give up the advantages that came with all of that to be able to be free. When I left, I really left and it was extremely painful, and very difficult. I didn’t feel like this at the time, at the time, it felt like my only option but when I look back at it now, I feel some measure of respect for the balls of that girl. She had nothing but she had a plan and a goal, and she would do anything for that.

In some ways love represents the ultimate act of freedom to me, maybe because all my life, like many other people in my country, I was raised with the messaging that who, when and how I loved would be socially-enforced and it had to culminate in marriage. There was some degree of progressive messaging, but for the most part, it was clear that I was expected to fall in line in the right time or more aggressive measures would be enforced and I cannot love under these conditions. I cannot even live under them. I cannot bring myself to apply the (very necessary) hacks that a lot of my peers have learnt to apply in order to walk the line between cultural-acceptability and freedom. I cannot be gay in the big city but be careful to retain my straightness when in my hometown (which is not, at all, to say that I don’t understand why that may be the case for another). I cannot be so beholden to my family for letting me choose my partner that I get married to them instead of moving in with them because the families don’t approve of that. I can’t secretly live with my demographically-different partner but operate in that relationship with the knowledge that it won’t last in the long-term because it is culturally unacceptable. I can’t have a kink partner with an expiration date and live my life for as long as I am allowed. I won’t do the thing where I put on some acts to appease the culture to buy the right to my choices, I would rather die.

I knew that and while I do not believe it should ever be a choice between being free or having a support system, but if it is, I will choose my freedom every single time, at whatever cost and the cost was dire. I was alone, I knew no one, I had no money and I absolutely had to make it work because I left myself nothing on which to fall back. It was extremely lonely and for an eighteen-year old to make enough money to live by themselves in a big city, as well as pay for their own college education was an immense challenge. There were many instances when I used garlic and peanuts to flavour the nightly meal of rice on which I lived, but it was worth it, because it meant that I could make all my own choices without anyone having the ability to influence them or scare me into compliance. By the time I met my spouse, I had truly embraced every aspect of my autonomy, and even though my family worked their way back into my life, they did so on different terms, and with the understanding that they could never hold me hostage via abuse, cultural manipulation and terror again so when I brought home a girlfriend or a divorced man with a child from a different community, they knew their approval was not being sought. By the time I met him, I had become the person who would choose him and make choices of love for love. I will not make a case for my choices. I will not barter my rights for financial, familial or social security. I will not be held hostage by culture, even if that means I have to spend my life alone. I had to make that happen.

And while there is a degree of luck to that, there is also courage. I don’t mean that the people who don’t or cannot do that are lacking courage, but it’s grating when someone looks at my seemingly perfect life now and tells me it was all a function of luck. It’s uncomfortable when they tell me that I haven’t been through their struggle or that I cannot understand it. When I plaster my truth on my face and exercise my freedom with impunity, I know what I have been through to preserve that. I know what I had to do in order to become the person who could be at that date with my spouse as a woman who wore her identity and independence on her skin and that was not sheer luck.

Love is political and I had to bear the (often unfair) consequences of my politics at personal cost in order to build a family where every person is free to love each other and anyone else the way they want and when they want. I will never deny my privileges or that I have been incredibly lucky to find a partner with whom I have a bond so deep and pervasive, but for both of us, coming to a place where we could become the individuals who could make these choices was a long road of active learning and difficult decisions. I have spent years pretending everything was always so easy for me because it feels uncomfortable to laud ones own self, but at this place, after all these years, when I look back through all the years of social exclusion, hate crimes, personal attacks, doxxing, financial emancipation and loneliness, I feel at least a little obligated to give that girl her due of gratitude. She had enormous balls and unshakeable principles, she taught me fearlessness and I owe her my life for that.