Take a long walk before decising to marry

 In the year 1988, a Serbian artist named Marina Abramovic and her German partner named Ulay, much in love and looking forward to marriage, egged on by the unfaltering command of mutual infatuation, fully enamored with each other and eager to share the paradisiacal joy of matrimony, decided to walk from the opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. They planned to marry at the point they met on the historic wall, considering it an aesthetical and classical culmination of a journey to mingle into each other at many levels. It was a nice trekking from both ends. They walked pleasantly and finally met at some point. But they met with the realization—airlifted into the momentum of newer truths—that they didn’t want to marry and returned to their places separately.

Seeing the life through a fresh kaleidoscope, after going through multitudes of dew-fresh experiences, you turn a stranger to your old self. You are no longer held at ransom by the beliefs and emotions that defined your former sense of being. Maybe walking on open paths, with their daring allurement, with their untrampled and wild prospects, makes you see the truth better. The long-eyelashed coquetry of flimsy, skidding emotions gives way to a healthy pragmatism. Inhibited and repressed truths about the self and the others sneak out as you lose your grip on them. The bindweed and wild clover on unpaved ways, which you dismissed earlier as inconsequential clumps of weed, guide you to a mysterious unearthly splendor which any well-planned, properly paved and designed rosebed, properly gated and guarded with the grills and railings of our fears and insecurities, would fail to accomplish. The floating façade made of large-scale assumptions crumbles down. And the absurdly overstretched, congested self opens to glorious scenarios.

So all the couples who are in a dilemma about marriage must walk for a few hundred kilometers from opposite directions and meet on the way. Walking on earth gets us grounded and makes us realize the futility of staying on cloud nine forever. As you walk and see the naked realities of life, without pretentions and hypocrisies, with each kilometer walked you get better like wine with age. Your vociferous ideologies melt down and the smart, savvy, lionized self reshapes to acquire more realistic outlines.