Assumptions about married women

That's me. And I prefer doing whatever I like be it going on trips or hitting the gym or doing my office work or cooking.

1. Cooking - Assumption that women must cook despite having busy careers.

Dont get me wrong. Infact, I love trying out new dishes occasionally. But the phone call I had received from my relative the other day made me question this. They were constantly interested in what Im cooking or if I learnt to cook the dal gravy.

I faced a similar incident at the gym. Our trainer asked me to cook more protein rich food for my husband and feed him regularly.

Though meant in a humorous way, the underlying meaning kind of made me feel sad. The fact that nobody would say this to a husband made me question.

Cooking is a life skill. It is a choice. We can always hire someone. We might develop interest in cooking once we start living on our own. We must also stop judging someone for their food choices.

When I say I make protein pancakes or wheat semiya or masala oats I know how my relatives might react.

2. Bring stuff only from your parents home - This is also a sad expectation people have from women. Everything she brings to a new house she moves in with her husband must be from her parents money or their home. It is a sick mentality. Some relatives are also proud that they got a car or a house or stuff for their daughters wedding promoting this materialism further.

Curating a house where two people live must be their choice. Pieces they collect and the stuff they buy must adhere to their lifestyle. My mom also got a lot of things before my wedding. But I preferred to leave most of it behind and bring the bare minimum. My husband also collected stuff from his house when we moved to Bangalore.

Vehicles, vessels and other things are just items. Never let any person attach your worth with the stuff you possess. In fact most of the items I bought here were old ones.

Other wedding gifts are actually lying in the cupboards in our hometowns. My mother finally realised that it was a mistake that she bought all that just because I was getting married. Peer pressure made her acquire materialistic possession so that nobody questions my worth.

I urge we move more towards no materialistic marriages with no stuff involved. The girl and guy can get their own stuff after they move alone.

3. Women is responsible for keeping the house tidy - House is a space where an entire family resides. It not a womens sole responsibility to constantly clean the house and keep it tidy. Men must be taught basic etiquette to keep their surroundings clean. Only then the children growing up in such environment will learn.

4. Kids are womens responsibility - Feeding a kid, putting him/her to sleep and cleaning the babies poop is not only a women's job. Parenting is a two person job and sometimes also involves help from the kids grandparents. So it's really important women are not forced into constantly taking care of an infant when they themselves need someone to take care of them because they spend 10 months of their life raising a baby within them.

I hope when we meet a women we see her more than a wife/daughter/mother and more as a person with dreams and aspirations who can have her own free time, who deserves her own trips, who deserves her own social circle and me time.

And girls next time you meet someone who questions you about these silly things prefer to either ignore them or give the answer they deserve. I usually laugh when I get questioned about these things because I don't think its worth spending energy making them understand because even if I do they pull me into long unhealthy conversations which I prefer to stay away from.

Avoid these things to get people to like talking to you💞

We meet a lot of people in our lives. Some like us while some hate us.
But we must have met someone whom we despise and would do whatever it takes to avoid talking to that person.
If we see them somewhere in public or in family functions we hide and wait for them to leave. I have had these people in my life and continue to meet such people in the present as well.

Some reasons that I find very unattractive in a conversation

1. Asking too much personal information - We randomly meet a person in some event or function and they start asking everything that is there about you. This really puts things off and we tend to view that person as nosy and annoying. I'm sure we will meet these people atleast once in our lifetime.

2. Advising people we just met - I have been there and done that. Now I cringe when I think about it. Because of social media we have an illusion that we know someone even without meeting them a single time in real life.
Eg: I have never met some of my husbands friends or my sisters friends or certain friends friend. But we follow each other on instagram. When we meet such people for the first time we sometimes get excited and act like we know them. I once tried talking about wedding to my husbands friend and adviced him to get married. This incident still haunts me because I acted like those forcible aunties in family weddings😓

3. Show offs/ Price tags - Something like Kareena kapoor's fiance from 3 Idiots movie. This is that person who often puts a slight hint of the price of items they own during a normal conversation. We sometimes do it without realising it and when I think hard I might have did it sometimes but not to put other persons possession down but to just let them know that its costly and we they have to be careful while using it.
When I think about it I feels cheap. When someone else did the same thing to me I realised how awkward the conversation can become and how the other person might feel. So never ever talk in terms of money.
You can talk about it only when the person your talking to is genuinely interested in the price of the item. Otherwise keep your mouth shut.

4. Giving skin care/ hair care advise unnecessarily - I have faced this and even my sister has faced this when we were in school during our teen years. Pimple is a common thing but people made sure to make us feel insecure about it. We have access to all the resources and can get ourselves a doctor to fix it but people make it a point to spit it out whenever they used to meet us. We never know the underlying situation why this happened to a specific person. It faded away for me with home remedies but my sis needed a dermatologist to get it treated. I still get pimples while I travel or when weather changes but it goes away eventually.

5. Body shaming - I did this to my sister and used to tell her its for fun but little did I realize how much that hurt her. One day she came to me and said "I feel less confident because of you". I realized my mistake. Still sometimes I forget it but I decided not to say anything mean to her even as a fun fact.

6. Making other person feel cheap - Sometimes we get soo obsessed with what materials we possess we start making the other person feel cheap saying that he/she has a cheap phone or laptop or sunglass or slippers.
It is not right to boast about what you own and make other person feel bad. This is happening not just by a person but the entire social media influencer community these days. The unboxing videos make us feel we are left out and we need to buy that to feel good. Try and avoid the videos that make you feel you don't have enough.
Eg: I got my sister a tablet to take notes and read her ebooks. She was soo happy with it until she saw these aesthetic videos of iPad unboxing. I dint get her an iPad because she has android phone and it would we easier to transfer files for her using android tablet. 
After explain her about this she was okay with the tablet. But still the iPad spark is within her.

7. Praising your family members too much - Never praise your family members too much before other people because this is not very attractive. People often think your trying to show off and make them feel less about themselves. I have had relatives who praise their husbands and show off their kids achievements and beyond a point it becomes cringy and show off. 

8. Talking ill about your family or others too much - This makes the opposite person create a persona of your family member as a bad person even without meeting them. We have fights with our parents on random things. And we also resolve it. But the person whom we share too much to might not erase that initial image of our family member. So be careful before you speak out.

9. Sharing your health condition - Don't share a list of health problems you have with the person you just met or someone who is not very close to you. It makes the conversation uncomfortable. I have met people who just start off by saying they have knee pain and this and that and go on to talk about the various diseases each member of their family has.
People run away from these type of conversations. Nobody wants to talk about diseases and bad health. This mostly happens to doctors when they visit people outside their hospital. Their relatives do it to get some free advice maybe.
Nevertheless, don't share about your ill health randomly. 

Conclusion:

Sometimes we don't know what we talk might offend others. It's also not possible to make people happy all the time. 

Without our knowledge we speak stuff that we don't mean to people we care about and we must try to avoid that. So make sure to talk to people and understand what kind of communicator you are. Ask your sibling or partner or parents about your personality and understand about yourself.
Make sure to avoid the points above to become a more likeable person so that people don't hide away from you and start running to you💖