This blog post is for single Indian men from dysfunctional families. As the single Indian male having traveled to different places and met a lot of people, I would like to share the experiences of different men coming from dysfunctional families. The entire blog post will be a collective narration of the such men and will be their statements.
Dysfunctional families, a term that we (single Indian men from dysfunctional families) realized at a later stage of life. Anyone reading this post will realize what a dysfunctional family is. A family which failed to be a family in the first place. It is not just a failure of a relation but of an institution as a whole.
We don't know what happened. Growing up in the Indian society, we were constantly reminded of the happy Indian family. School , neighborhood and cinema showed us this. But at our homes we realized that something was amiss. Our families were not normal, there was no happiness.Fights, misunderstandings, strained relations was constant. For our parents it was just normal.
You see, our parents were the types who just went into a marriage without realizing what responsibilities came along with it. They brought us in this world just to conform to the norms of the society or make their respective parents happy.
So here we have a scenario of a dysfunctional Indian family in front of you: An unhappy father, abusive, alcoholic, frustrated with his career, a bad parent, miserable father, a mother who has been suffering all her life, some of our mothers maintained a stoic silence, the others reacted, often violently, fights would be heard in the entire neighborhood, a painful childhood, bitter divorcees, regular visits to courts for the fight of a child's custody, toxic grandparents on both sides, some of our families have had criminal records and have been social outcasts, some of our parents are overly religious having an intolerant attitude towards minorities, some have been extremely traditional never having able to keep up to the changing times, a parent with some sort of mental/psychiatric disorder. There is a lot more that constitutes a dysfucntional family, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Things never changed even after growing up. For some of us families became dysfunctional in the later years.Parents who refused to change their mindsets, a brother who failed to settle down in his career, a sister who never married, a joint family that failed to understand our choice of career or profession, often taunting or criticizing us.
But in-spite of all the above problems we were able to make our way and became successful in our careers. Professionally we are doing very well. A good job, some of us have relocated to different cities away from our dysfunctional families. But at the end of the day we ask ourselves that are we happy??? The answer is NO!!!!.
Not a day goes by that we don't face a struggle. A struggle to be calm and make peace with ourselves. Everywhere we see happy go lucky families and we are the one who never had or even have the privilege to have one. We fight our internal demons of anger, sadness, depression, loneliness and god knows what.
We miss, miss a family, miss a social life, family festivals, short family vacations and many things that we can do with a family. All around we see people indulging in the same and we feel left out. What can we say when someone asks us about our families???? Yaaa, just the formality sentence that there is a father, mother, brother,sister living in our hometowns and end it there. We never feel like going back to our families because meeting them happens to be toxic. We are better of being left alone.
Growing up in such families have negative effects on our personalities. We tend to be emotionally paralysed, finding it difficult to associate with someone. And how can we??? When our basic relations with our parents have been flawed!!! Our idea of love, our idea of a home is so perfect that we tend be unlucky in matters of the heart. We are just left alone as the single brooding lot.
As we get older everyone around us is getting married and once again we are left alone. Its not that we don't try, its just that no one wants to associate with a person from a dysfunctional family. What family do we represent??? Our dysfunctional family??? No, never. No normal decent cultured person can tolerate our dysfunctional family. And when we stand all by ourselves, we are questioned, questioned that "Why we have no family?"" Why did we cut ties with our family?"
And so what do we do? We accept a solitary life as our destiny. A life of miserable loneliness. We have families but its just like not having one. We cry, cry internally with no one to listen to us and who is there to listen to us??
Some of us have found solace in creative pursuits, some in fitness and some in social work. We try to engage ourselves, trying to remove our minds of our painful past and strained relations and yet we hope, we hope that one day we will come across someone who understand us, who accepts us for what we are and will not see our family background. We never loose faith because one day a soul mate will come along and male our lives better.
And we have promised ourselves one thing, the most important thing, that if we ever had our own families , we would never turn them into dysfunctional, we would do our best to maintain social harmony.
This is as per the statement given by single Indian men from dysfunctional families to Bhaveen Sheth
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