If you are friends with me on Facebook, you might have seen my latest update where I shared an ad for a bridal course, on how to be the perfect wife for future brides. For those of you who aren’t here it is:

My gut reaction, when I saw this ad, was my usual feminist ranting: “How dare they trivialize women as just wives, or rather, slaves who should be fully trained in the duties they are to perform the rest of their lives? How funny to have a course teach you how to be the perfect bride…” While on one hand the feminist inside me was infuriated, on the other hand the modern, metropolitan woman in me saw this as immensely funny and ridiculous.
But the rational side of me was just quiet, trying to digest this new information with curiousity and patience. The world we live in today is crammed with ‘learning’ opportunities. If you want to crack a competitive exam or test, there are coaching classes. If you want to ace a job interview, there are personality development classes. When you actually get the job, you have OTJ training. If you are an expecting mother/father, you’ve got your pre/post natal classes. So is it really so wrong or so outrageous to have bridal classes?
As I begin to put the words down on paper, I realize that perhaps my beef is less with the concept of training one for marriage, but more with the content of this course and the fact that there nothing reciprocal for men.
I actually think that the concept of a course or training to deal with getting married is a great idea, for both men and women. Many of the young women today are as independent and fierce as their male counterparts, perhaps some even more. With our cities full of young, independent singletons living on their own, many of us (both men and women) have forgotten how to accommodate new people in our personal spaces or learn how to adjust ourselves in a new space. As my friend’s mother kept telling her for the two years before she got married, we get too set in our ways after living alone for a while and find it difficult to compromise with others after a certain point. And if there is someone out there who understands these problems and is capable and qualified to deal with them properly, I’ll be the first to sign up.
But no.
This course has taken the age-old adage quite literally : A Lady Should Be A Chef In The Kitchen, A Maid In The Living Room And A Whore In The Bed Room.
So even in the 21st century, when many women support themselves and their families, have successful careers and play a large role in the social, professional and economic fabric of society, being a good wife boils down to the following: Can you cook? Can you clean? Can you f@%k? Who cares if you head the finance department of a large multinational company. Who cares if you can travel to remote parts of the world and report live news stories from inhumane conditions. Who gives a shit if you earn enough to chip in for your monthly EMI for a house. Can you cook? Can you clean? Can you f@%k? Say no to any of these and you suck as a wife. Grab an enrollment form, sistah!
But hang on a sec…if we’re sticking to traditional values of a good wife, they’ve missed out on a couple of aspects. They took care of the cook and clean part…but what about the last one? Isn’t anyone going to help me polish my between-the-sheets moves to help please my husband? No practice on that front? No theoretical lessons there? Not even diagrams? You’ve got to be joking! I can’t afford not to be a perfect wife! My life will be worthless without the approval of a man! Surprisingly, there isn’t yet a course for sexual satisfaction in India (or at least not to my knowledge). And I do wonder how many parents would send their daughters to THAT course 😉
And how could I forget handling the in-laws? Surely we all need classes on that front. Unless you already belong to the ‘Komolika’ brand of women, you will probably need to master the art of cunningness and deception. These are, apparently, key ingredients to pleasing the in-laws while holding your own. Like the wise and extremely hot Robert Downey Junior has said (he probably learnt it from my mother), “Listen, smile, agree, and then do whatever the fuck you were gonna do anyway.” And for some of us, that doesn’t come naturally. We need to be trained to suppress the impulse to skip to the end of Downey’s gems of wisdom and just ‘do whatever the fuck we were going to’ without appeasing the masses first. Oh and just for good measure, throw in a pinch of schizophrenia too, especially if you’re constantly courting the Dr.Jekyll & Mr. Hyde syndrome: saree, ghoonghat, choolha chauka at the beloved sasural and daaru, dhuan and disco with the pati parmeshwar.
But enough about women’s enlightenment. It’s time we talked about the men folk, the recipients who could, would and should truly benefit from being house-broken and marriage –trained. And coming to think of it, men need training in almost exactly the same things as women do: cooking, cleaning and of course… hehehehe…(bolne me sharam aa rahi hai, wink wink). Thanks to over-protective and molly-coddling mommies, many men are incapable of doing the first two and barely get any practice (apart from on themselves) on the last. Perfect candidates for this course.
Now my mind is in over-drive, churning out great learning opportunities for men such as the “Move your ass and do it yourself, you lazy bum” course…
Or the “Don’t wake up your wife on a Sunday morning by saying ‘Get up I’m hungry’…” class
Or how about a “Don’t please your mother at the cost of your wife” session?
I could go on and on…and I’m sure many of you can think of a million more to add to my list.
Clearly, the men we marry aren’t exactly creatures of perfection and virtue, right? They are an imperfect product of the environments they were raised in. Fair enough. Then why are we trying to create the ideal breed of wives for them through these courses? Are we not a product of our environments too? Are we not allowed to get away with being slobs or a no-show in the kitchen?
The makers of these courses (and possibly the participants too) forget that a marriage is made up of two people, not one. And both of those people are equally responsible of making it work, whether it’s in the kitchen, the bedroom or elsewhere. And in the current times, both need to be taught how to do that. Trying to guide one side and not the other can and will be disastrous in today’s time when women everywhere are starting to fight for their rights. Trying to teach one and not the other sends two messages: 1.) the men are perfect husband material as they are, 2.) women need to work on and educate themselves to be good wives. Untrue. Unfair. Unacceptable.