vyctorious

Before attending the marriage seminar, I had my own image, beliefs and convictions about love and marriage. Like (almost) every other girl out there-and perhaps an occasional male or two-I had my own dreams of love as well. I dreamt of a guy, preferably 6ft tall, strong and tanned with a handsome face, seeing me on the streets or even the bus and magically becoming interested in me-a plain and normal girl. How awesome would that be, right? A guy like that interested in me? He would then approach me and strike up a conversation about… Heck, he could even talk about the weather and I’d still be enthusiastically replying back. We would then exchange numbers and sparks would start to fizzle and hopefully go off with a bang.

Of course, we know these things only happen in the movies. I blame all those romance novels and movies.

But, even after numerous imaginary rejections and disappointments of things that didn’t even have a snowball’s chance in hell of happening, I still held on to my dream of love. I even had (have, actually) a 10-year plan! Well, after graduating from University, I would be happily together with a guy whom I met in Uni or somewhere, and I would enter the working industry. After a few years, we would get married at age 27 and hopefully have our first child before 30. Sounds really idealistic, right?

So yes, I do believe in marriage and having kids. I may not like kids very much right now at my current age (especially when they’re crying and raising havoc), but I would love to have kids of my own. To nurture them, to shape and mold them into useful people of society with morals. So I generally agreed with most of the things that were shared in the seminar.

However, there was something that was shared that I simply cannot fathom. According to the speakers, “All you need is a room to get married.” The moment I heard this, I did a mental double take. What? A room? A room? Does the speaker have any idea how small a room of a HDB flat is in Singapore? That’s not all, they even mentioned that you can get married at 19! I’m not criticizing them or anything, but that was the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Okay, granted, they didn’t say specifically that 19’s the ‘right’ age to get married. However, if I remember correctly, “What’s stopping you from getting married at 19?” were their exact words.

Let me break it down for you. At age 19, let’s just take me for example, I would only be in my 2nd or 3rd year of poly. It’s highly likely that I would not have even started earning my own keep yet. If my boyfriend is in the same state as me at 19, and for some reason we decided to go against all odds to get married, well, I’m sorry to say this but I think it would lead to an early divorce. This is what I think one of the speakers would say, “As long as you love and have a commitment towards each other, I’m sure it would turn out fine.”

Firstly, at that age, do we even have the maturity for a lifelong commitment such as marriage? Putting that aside, in such a practical society like Singapore, it isn’t a sensible decision at all.

Why do I say so? In my own opinion, I believe that the ultimate difference between a normal relationship and a marriage is the children. I also believe that having children should follow soon after one gets married. Isn’t that the point of getting married? Besides the obvious reason of love, isn’t it to give your future children a proper name and status? If not, we can all just not marry and continue with co-habitation.

A marriage without children is just a relationship, but with a certificate and rings to prove it. So, if at age 19, a baby isn’t in your near future, perhaps you should rethink that life changing decision and just remain in a simple boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. After all, isn’t it the same-a regular relationship and a childless marriage? However, I must make myself clear, in my opinion, this only applies to the people who marry young (young meaning really young like at 19).

Also, planning for a baby requires a lot of time, money and effort. At 19, would we be able to invest that much time, money and effort into a baby? This is one thing that I strongly disagree with in the seminar. Marriage is a lifelong commitment that requires careful planning and it’s also a large wager. You may either reap a lot from it, or you may just lose everything. So I believe that marriage is only for those who are mentally and physically prepared for it, and 19 certainly isn’t the right age. If not mentally, then physically.

In the second part of the seminar, we all went our separate ways to our pre-determined workshops. I attended the ‘Sowing the seeds, removing the weeds’ workshop. I learnt a lot from that workshop, although we had to hasten everything due to a shortage of time. The most memorable part of that workshop was the showing of a video of an experiment that was done years ago on 3 groups of young children. Each group was placed in a separate room and they were all treated differently under the same teacher. One group was treated with loving guidance, one with strict discipline and one with total liberation.

With such contrasting teaching methods, the children all turned out very differently. The first group turned out to be confident, well-behaved and very encouraging towards their peers. The second group turned out to be timid, soft-spoken and untrusting towards their peers. The last group turned out to be boisterous, disrespectful and violent towards their peers.

My immediate reaction to this video was horror. Why would the government even allow such an experiment? Do they not know how impressionable young children are? I felt my heart break at the emotional trauma and impact this experiment would have on them, especially when a young girl under the strict discipline said that she wanted to be just like the teacher, even though she hated the teacher. My spirits only elevated when the speaker assured us that the behaviors of the children were corrected immediately after the experiment had ended.

Amidst that emotional roller coaster, I learnt many things about young children. Although some were just affirmations of what I already knew, I learnt that young children are extremely impressionable. Someone once said to me, “Children are just like wet cement, any imprints left on them stays there forever.” This is evidently shown through the video where just within a short span of three months, the children were so greatly influenced, either negatively or positively. So I guess that explains my initial reaction as I already had prior knowledge about this.

I also learnt that because children are very impressionable, the right parenting and teaching method is of paramount importance. With the right method, the child will grow up to be confident, well-behaved and of good character. On the other hand, with the wrong method, the child may easily become timid, untrusting and they may even display violent tendencies.

All in all, it was an interesting experience and it helped me to see things from a different perspective.

Argh. Totally ruined my mood.

Posted

3 days ago