Pandemic- Relationship dynamics: From Role-based to Soul-based

By Lipa Rath

Jun 05 2020

People used to live together and worked outside. Home was a place to eat and sleep. Waking hours were spent outside, so that they could sail through what was uncomfortable at home.

Pandemic came and changed it all. They were refreshing stories about how children were looked after better, how the families played board-games, cooked and did their chores together. While sharing responsibilities they felt a deeper connection with one another.

Yet many brought to themselves a lot of violence and bitterness which was otherwise dormant and benign.

It was easy to role play while spending most of the time away from one another. Much about our role-playing has been conditioned by what roles our parents played many decades ago. But the dynamics of man-woman relationship have changed a lot over these years. Women are far more educated and financially self-sufficient. Earlier most women endured suffocation and indignity mainly for 3 reasons:

1.They didn’t have financial support.
2. It was far unsafe for women to live on their own.
3. Social unacceptability.

Things have changed a lot since. There are lot more safer options for women to stay either alone, or in partnerships or in groups.

With social media platforms people are able to use their voices to bring social acceptability and support for one another.

However, there’s one serious conditioning that goes far deeper: we are told that our mothers and grandmothers “suffered” a lot and we must all endure “suffering” in some form or the other. There’s a somber, silent overlay of “virtuousness” to that suffering as if it’s something divine and we all must endure and not cure!

It brings us right back to this important introspection: What value do we give our soul, our spirit? Am I worthy and deserving of peace, harmony, self-respect and creativity? Or, I’m doomed to suffer like the earlier generation- playing a role perfectly? What I’m most scared of? Who I’m really answerable to?

 

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