Insights: Disabled and chronically ill on the marriage market
What is the marriage market doing to people who don’t conform to standards of health, beauty, ability, and of course, vigour?
Very few institutions play with the word ‘choice’ as marriage does. This choice needs you to ultimately, almost inevitably, ‘choose’ marriage. This ‘choice' also demands that you spend your years, if not life, before marriage, learning how to perform marriage (just in case you do get married — you will!). Learning how to make yourself marriage-able. Learning how to stand out in how you fit in into the conventions of the Great Indian Marriage Market.
Over the years, my preoccupations have evolved from preparing for this Market to writing about it, critiquing it, and, why deny it, spitting at it. To be put on the Market without being formally put on it is a unique experience in itself— you do not need to announce your marriageability for your marriageability to be presumed. On the flip side, you don’t have to announce your un-marriageability for your un-marriageability to be assumed. Like all markets, this Market too has its traders' tricks, assumptions and practices that, you believe, should merit the government getting involved and putting an end to its existence once and for all.
When I set out to write this piece, I wanted to know: What is the Market doing to people who don’t conform to its standards of health, beauty, ability, and of course, vigour? To an extent, I knew what I was going to hear: after all, as a chronically ill person, I too am on the Market in ways I don’t be. But people’s stories have a way of revealing more than what we expect, and what emerged out of my interviews were, in fact, more questions than I had set out to grapple with.
Who will take care of your husband if you are disabled?
Here is what I find is most insidious about marriage in our society: it is supposed to be inevitable. Its inevitability then makes it a reference point. This is what a close friend from Srinagar told me when she spoke of her ailing mental health in light of how ADHD supposedly made her unfit for marriage: since marriage for women is still very much about taking care of their husbands and of course, the much-feared extended families.
“My mother asks me: ‘If you can’t cook for yourself, how will you cook for seven others?’ But I am simply incapable of doing that. This is where my reservations to marriage come from. Marriage is purely a sort of religious or societal obligation. It’s not something I can have for myself, because I don’t think that in a Kashmiri society, my husband will take care of me. I just wish that I could get married to a man who loves me for who I am. But as a wife, to say that I want my husband to take care of me more than I can take care of him— it’s impossible.”
As women with disabilities who sometimes cannot perform traditionally gendered caregiving roles, we witness the veil of societal sympathy slipping away to reveal that, actually, the sympathy is for your poor hypothetical husband. And in case you are unable (what do you mean ‘unwilling’) to find a husband, then all sympathies are for your ageing parents who must, ahem, parent you through your difficult times.
I also spoke to Neha*, who recently quit her job and moved back in with her parents in Delhi, because managing her chronic pancreatitis alone was proving to be too much of a challenge. An incident she shared with me made her weep over our Zoom call. Neha’s story did not involve her parents chastising her, but instead a fellow patient in a hospital — plus his wife, his sister-in-law, and another patient too: all of them women.
“Their exact remark was that I shouldn't be a burden on my family, because I'm 30 now, and my parents shouldn't be responsible. [Instead], I should get married so that my husband can take me to the hospital and take care of me rather than my mom, because my parents are getting old and it's not fair.”
It seems that every need — be it of a non-existent husband or a potentially-aging parent —outweighs the present-day needs of women with disabilities and chronic illnesses. That a woman would need care is unheard of. And when heard of and acceded to, absolutely blasphemous for what such care must be taking away from the lazy husbands, hungry children and aging parents of the world.
Do husbands with disabilities deserve wives?
Short answer, yes. Here is what I figured out the criteria are:
The husband’s professional and educational successes must override his disability.
The wife must be able to care for him.
This is also what Rahul*, a government employee who lives in Madhya Pradesh, told me. Rahul acquired a disability after a bike accident, but was able to cope with his new reality with the crucial support his parents offered him during his recovery and adjustment, helping him maintain a sense of normalcy.
Also a PhD scholar studying disability, Rahul spoke to me at length about how society’s perception of him as someone lacking ability and requiring care invited suggestions for him to marry someone who could assist him in doing all the things he couldn’t do himself. This agitates Rahul to no end, since he is still coping with internalised stigma, and has taken to hyper-independence as a mechanism to challenge barriers and perceptions.
Regardless, his job, it seems, makes him suitable for the Marriage Market. In India, to bag a government job is to bag a deal, and, unsurprisingly, a devoted wife is part of that deal. Marriage requires that a woman caters to her husband and her husband, in turn, provides for her. With disability disrupting this traditional understanding of marital bliss — by either complicating gendered caregiving or money-making roles — the deal becomes less appealing.
When markets fail to regulate themselves efficiently, governments often intervene to restore balance. In this case, they did so by trying to rescue us from the grim realities of unmarried life as people with disabilities. In Madhya Pradesh, where Rahul lives, the Chief Minister’s Disabled Marriage Incentive Scheme incentivises “normal people” (a direct quote from the initiative) to marry those with disabilities, by offering them 2 lakh rupees. Marriages where both partners have disabilities receive 1 lakh jointly.
It is no surprise that Rahul found this scheme “dehumanising" — after all, what makes one person normal and the other not? More importantly, what makes people with disabilities a twisted version of some scratch-and-win lottery card? And here's a pestering thought: why? Really, why?
What are unmarried disabled people doing to the planet that makes their marriageability such a pressing concern for the state? What crisis is being averted here? And most importantly, where is the data for how these marriages are faring? Will we ever know the success of these state-incentivised marriages? Or maybe the shoddy varnish of 'normal' (read married) is the afterstory to an otherwise unacceptable story of disabled people deserving and finding love on their own merit.
Who are you going to trust with your ‘secret’?
What I hear is true: it’s brutal out there. Any information that can be used against you must be kept a secret. Including your disability. First, let’s get this out of the way— your own family would never do that to you. So it is absolutely okay for your parents and siblings to know about your disability and/or illness.
Or…not.
Rahul spoke to me with great joy about how his parents’ care comforted him: “It could have been very dark after my accident, but with family support, it never really felt that way.”
However, many other folks could never hope for similar understanding from their parents, and still struggle to get them to believe that this is not ‘temporary'. We are, after all, living in the age of WhatsApp claims of how turmeric milk can cure Covid; is it really surprising that parents are praying hard and micromanaging their children’s ‘recoveries’ frantically, especially as they approach marriageability?
As for sharing your diagnosis (if it is invisible) with your potential partner and their family, it is "a big no.” Neha spoke to me at length about this, explaining how not everyone was half as understanding as her parents. She had disclosed her diagnosis of pancreatitis to her partner, who abandoned her as soon as his family googled her condition: a rabbit hole that predicted she might face issues with childbirth, develop diabetes or even cancer, and of course, die in her forties or fifties. “When I was diagnosed in 2021, it felt like a blow,” she told me. “But the real pain came from the rejection I faced when my partner's family refused to accept me due to my health condition. I felt like a burden, unworthy of love or companionship.”
The Marriage Market is undeniably a terrible place to be with disabilities or chronic illnesses, and most of my interviewees felt “very confused”, “hopeless” or “anxious" at the prospect of being reduced down to their disabled or chronically ill parts. The fact that they needed to be taken care of brought them back home to their parents, restricting their independence. As the unfortunate joke goes, several of them ‘paid rent with their mental health’.
What is life without marriage? (Spoiler alert: not miserable)
That said, a market is still only a market, and there are always other places to shop when you’re being offered a bad deal. My interviewees, too, were able to look past the Market and live life purposefully. When I asked them clichéd questions around hope and resilience, they responded with equally clichéd answers about friendship and building relationships with other disabled people and understanding allies. With each rejected rishta, the oversold promise of marriage as an everlasting union of equals seems to be losing its shine.
For now, my interviewees and I are having a (sort of — let’s not oversell this either!) good time being with our friends, trotting across new cities, and even immersing ourselves in life-changing spiritual retreats. What this will do to the Great Indian Marriage Market, I don’t know. Perhaps we are at the brink of a Marriage Apocalypse where women are no longer happy mumbling to themselves while making chapatis for their care-intensive sofa-stuck husbands. Instead, people are looking towards mutual care that flows from a radical transparency about who they are and what they need as people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. My interviewees have often gotten their parents on board too, and they are not going to conceal their disabilities just to be seen as ‘normal’ goods on the Market.
Like it or not, embracing ourselves beyond ableist ideals of wellness, health and fullness is in for this season, and hopefully for many more seasons to come. Maybe marrying-for-equality is the marrying-for-security of the 21st Century. Or not marrying is the new marrying-for-security. Or maybe this is an essay about an emerging underground black market where you get all the things you wouldn’t otherwise get so easily in the Marriage Market: equality, respect, understanding. For a people who pride themselves on saving ten rupees after winning an utterly unnecessary but ritually sacred argument with every vendor on the street and every autowallah who has dared to ask where we are going, we simply cannot be trusted to settle for a bad deal in a Market as big as Marriage. I take my cultural imperatives quite seriously: I will only step into a market if I know I am going to secure a good deal.
And how the Great Indian Marriage Market will survive this wave of (disabled) consumer awakening, I really don’t care to know.
* names changed
Afrah is a New Delhi based feminist organiser and researcher with experience working around labour, disability, technology, and criminal justice.
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