Bachelorhood

Is life better when it’s singular? I really don’t know! I have never been plural before and I don’t have any complaints except for the fact that like all men I always tend to propagate towards plurality! Either trying to add something that’s fun or family!

It was one of those, designated-driver Friday evenings for me, when few of us were discussing crap over some Miller lites. As we were talking about life and time being monotonously up-yours’ing and the fact that we needed a break from celebrating stupidity, a camping plan was born! In less than few minutes, almost 2 45 am early morning we started driving towards Smoky Mountains in search of camping spots. With neither the motel reservations to cuddle with the few hours of necessary sleep nor the camping reservations, we were driving towards a so-called spontaneous adventure ahead of us! No worries! I am not going to describe the trip here which is of no importance to you! But to provide a closed form, let me take a sentence. We went there, found a motel after a couple of hrs, found a camping spot along with the rain gods, camped in the rain, talked non-sense around the camp fire with dripping water, went for a 60 minute trail along the stream next morning, checked out few artificial rides and were back in 37 hours! We did not do anything different, but yet it was fun spending few hours without thinking about anything else.

As soon as I got back to my abnormal usual, I was thinking if I would ever do this if I was married, this spontaneously at 0245 hrs? I don’t think I could. It’s a different story when you get married. Not that I know anything by experience but just a prediction. When we are married, the fun part will be doing this whole thing spontaneously and may be making it more on a romantic plane. But this is different! Comparing these two and commenting on what’s better is like talking about apples and air! No connection whatsoever!

The part I was thinking is, what is that we enjoy being single or romantically challenged, as the Orkut people call it. I might miss a few, disregard the ignorance and enlighten me!

As I thought about it a little loud, Mr.G suggested a few earlier overlapping thoughts on this. One of which I want to use. As such, let’s stick on to the two types of bachelors, primal (18-30 years old) and advanced (30+). Since most of the readership is from the primal bachelor clan, and I don’t have any clue on the advanced stage and I don’t have any intentions knowing about it either, so let’s see the life from the primal kind’s eyes. These gentlemen, fresh from schooling, are limited by the meager incomes that entry-level positions/ graduate-student salaries provide them. Thus, they sometimes tend to live in primal groups, pooling resources in order to maintain a level of adequate sustenance.

Thought pattern – Most of the time, the thought pattern is associated with the people around the visible and invisible friends. Family members do pop-up now and then depending upon how far you stay away from them. Anyways, the life steps are taken with total personal control and none blocking it. It wouldn’t be the case if one is truly married. Even if you are committed, it wouldn’t be the case. Every step you take in almost everything you do will be overtaken by the thoughts on your own family or other half. As such, this covers the whole thing that I want to say, nevertheless it’s better to describe.

Listening – We listen to ourselves and none else. Organized or disorganized. Clean or dirty. Whatever it is, we do it only when we feel like doing it. Regardless of the economic conditions/necessity, it’s the right of the primal bachelor to get what he wants when he wants! According to us, a person who differentiates his luxuries and necessities is someone who doesn’t know that we are ear plugged to those conversations. Things don’t work that way, when you are married.

Kitchen culture - The cooking place is never to stay for more than the cooking time. Daily cleanliness is not what we expect to extract out of the kitchen as long as it can feed us the right way, with reasonable taste and devoid of bugs. The kitchen keeps changing as we approach marriage. Initially, it would be in the impossible-to-clean category for quite a long time, and then it might turn out to the approachable category, then once a month cleaning stage and then once a week. After that you would be married!

Flirtations – You flirt with almost every member of the opposite sex even with a reasonably attractive class, and above all, you accept it! Be it a girl in a grocery store or your common friend whom we just got to know – we flirt and we accept it! If you are married, in most of the cases, you don’t like the consequences of accepting it. Exceptions are not examples!

There are whole lot of other areas we can address, bathroom manners, bedroom ideas, learning to spend, proactive living etc. All these, leads to one thing that bachelorhood is all about freedom and whereas marriage is something which constraints this freedom with some things that we would be convinced to reinvent us with.

Being a bachelor is more different than how an ordinary person, who has no clue about it, personify. “A man is a man until he marries, then he becomes a husband!” is a quote from If a Man Answers that I partially agree with. Because most of us are much different before we get married and we tend to change as we start growing up with someone else after we marry them. Right now all we can claim is that the marriage with the bachelorhood is as amazing as the real one in days to come. So letting it pass as we breathe the days out of it and reasoning it with responsible living is something on the grounds of future regrets!