and again

We were talking about Sri Lanka today and the effects of culture on relationships.

The Westerners have a different style of breaking-up. We expect to be friends with the ex, after a decent mourning period, we expect continuity. We expect evaluation, joint post-mortems, some sort of reconciliation before the transformation of the relationship to friendship. We almost always expect friendship unless the break-up was bitter.

During the relationship we are careful. Wary of expressing what is not yet known, or not yet true. We demarcate, draw boundaries and lines of permissiveness. We operate according to the rules within our culture. He said "I love you" already? But he's not playing according to the rules! . To give too much too early is to risk rejection and failure. To express too much is a violation of privacy, violation of self. And we all know to have low expectations in the beginning. We bring baggage too, from all our past relationships (and the exes are still orbiting in our periphery, giving rise to the question, is the past ever past?) and we become more brittle with each passing relationship. We do not expect any relationship to be the final relationship, the odds are against it. We do not expect marriage; indeed we do not even know what marriage is, and view it with a faint sense of foreboding. The expected timeline of a relationship is a lot less than forever.

The locals do it differently.

At play is a confluence of tradition, culture and history. For the migrant Westerners, whose lives are marked by relocation, to come to a culture where a family's ancestors lived in the same square mile 300 years ago as today, is to experience 'deep culture'. Where the expectations and behaviours in relationships lead to marriage instantly, where the combination is evaluated pragmatically, with a view towards propagating children, where the element of the religious and matching horoscopes (and thus of a match preordained in heaven) rules. And 300 years hence, we are still overwhelmingly rural, with collective rural memories, with unconscious tribal expectations of unity and relationships. Love is not what is so important as is stability. And so every relationship begins with the expression of love, for there is no proper word in the local vernacular for the Western conception of love, but instead different words to distinguish different manifestations of affection, lust, romantic love, filial piety, and even love born out of duty. It is the latter that holds sway over the imagination here, the fulfilment of duty to parents (thus getting married to someone of their choice to propage the line), duty to one's wife and children, duty to God. And this carries over, with sometimes alarming effects into modern day love and relationships. One is ill-equipped to combine the two, to combine the almost wary, rational, equalizing, constantly-evaluated love of the Westerner/Modernist with the traditional, society-mandated love rooted in one-sided power relationships (based on traditional gender roles) of the Local.

And when East meets West, though never the twain should meet (wrote the Twain himself) then the consequences are disturbing especially in a country where gender roles are shifting. A local youth yesterday blew himself up with a hand grenade purchased from the black market, killing himself and critically injuring the girl with him (an ex girlfriend who had jilted him). Love suicides are very popular here (and to a certain extent are romanticized in local literature). It is fashionable to risk everything for love. And people who have multiple relationships are stigmatized (not held up as the benchmark as they are in the West and people who have sexual relationships are almost completely dishonored in the wider society. (People who have multiple sexual relationships are completely beyond the pale). There is a very confusing map to navigate for the young local male, who holds the most power. What he says dictates roles. The young local female can jilt him and move on, but at considerable risk to her reputation and to her chances of garnering another suitable young local male (since no one wants what someone else has already had). Notwithstanding that, amongst the Colombo elite, the rules of the West play, with the naked emotions of the East and if you don't know where you are, the combination can be heady.

Because the other thing, is that due to the giant collective trauma engendered by a 20 year war, people have come to accept loss far more readily. And live far more intensely. So they say I love you instantly and throw themselves into a relationship and when it doesn't work out, they walk cleanly away, meaning they make a clean break and cut off communication because they can deal with loss a lot better than the unsuspecting Westerner, caught in this bewildering emotional web. And it is astonishing because in the end, it is they, it is they who in fact experience greater total net pain than the Westerner, who is cautious with his affection, and who has not learned to let go.