My temporary bachelorhood!
I am experiencing a temporary bachelorhood right now with my wife and kid in India.. My friends invite me to spend my weekends with them. So here is an email I sent to them as a Thank You.. Thought it might be worth a read:
Thanks for inviting a lonely married man, to nice homemade-food-filled weekends and a little bit of much-needed noise… both of which I terribly miss now, due to the bad habits I have cultivated, over years of married life! 
I look at a strange world these days.. a world where:
When you are at home, the silence gets deafening and the almost unreal peace disturbs you..
Your freedom can’t break free of the chains of bondage you have been celebrating each year on your anniversary..!
And you live as if you are a criminal just because nobody is punishing you anymore!
You go home and nobody gives you a cup of tea with storms of demands, complaints and questions in it.
You go for grocery shopping and the items in your cart exactly match those on your list.. to hell with consumer economy you say!
You eat in front of a strangely uninterrupted Television and you are the master of all the remotes instead of being manipulated like one for a change..
You surf those internet waves and nobody is counting the minutes allocated to you..!
And then you go to bed, but lie there on the edge, in your 1 foot wide space, as usual… just out of habit……
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….at 2am, all hell breaks loose….! Landlines, mobile lines all come alive.. alarms and sirens sound through them.. you think you are in some nightmare and then you wake up with a jolt and pick up that phone.. the voice on the other end says, “wake up you nice-n-cozy worry-free miserable married-man-turned-bachelor, I am your wife and I have something to tell you and it must be heard NOW…….”
Like a zombie, you listen to all that’s happening there, from outlaws to in-laws, from movies to curry! There you are, half asleep, half dead, approving all requests, accepting all complaints, laughing where you have to laugh, appreciating where you have to appreciate, disapproving where you have to disapprove, sounding interested and attentive…. like a robot… programmed for life!
I know a lot of you have been through this surreal world… A world that promises but never delivers, a world that’s free but in prison, a world that’s peaceful but never is………………..
That reminds me of one of my favorite songs about marriage – “Being Alive,” from the musical “Company.” The song starts out by complaining all the problems with marriage – you have someone to ruin your sleep, to sit in your chair, to cause you endless problems. And it ends up concluding that those are the wonderful things about marriage – that it all makes you feel so alive. It finishes with the singer, a single guy in the show, begging someone to ruin his sleep, sit in his chair, need him too much, etc.