Dear gj:

1) It is reasonable and a good idea to let your husband “know everything abut my family and how I feel about them…”- if you find out before you marry him that he appreciates and respects your thoughts and feelings, that he doesn’t tell you that you shouldn’t feel the way you feel, if he doesn’t encourage you to hide your feelings and pretend to feel what you don’t.

Your mother and best friend suggest that by “exposing the ‘flaws'”, you will be “bringing down the standard of the guys I might find”- what you need is not a guy who will see your value in your family of origin and judge you according to other people’s lives. You need a guy who  will see your value in you as an individual.

You are living in a society where the individual is discouraged. This is the problem. You need a man who will be a rebel, like you, seeing the individual, not seeing the group where the individual is blurred, not really there.

You need a man who doesn’t allow or invite his mother to terrorize his wife. You need a man who acts like an individual and a team member of two with you, not with his mother or his sister. “I basically need us to be a team”- yes, this is what makes a relationship and marriage a healthy union, a team of two.

Problem is you live in a society with different rules. You know from your own experience of your parents’ marriage, how a marriage looks like according to those societal rules. You want  something way better.

2) Your sister’s advice to “be more satisfied with your life”- she has the group mentality, where the individual should almost… not exist, and she advises you to be satisfied with being an almost non-existent individual, a blurred part of a group.

3) You don’t want to have resentment toward your future husband, and you will, if you accept the almost non-existent, blurred individual status in your future marriage, the same as your mother’s status in her marriage. Maybe your mother’s sister cares about you, but not as an individual. She cares about you as a blurred part of a group.

4) I agree with your statement:  “I should be able to define what my expectations are for a particular role in my life”. Problem is people have problems defining their expectations having grown up in the West, where the Individual concept is more developed and more accepted than elsewhere. Where you live, in a very conservative society within India, you are surrounded by people who promote the group at the expense of the Individual.

This is why moving may be a good choice for you, someplace where the concept of the Individual is practiced adequately.

In summary: no, I don’t see you as dramatic or too sensitive. I think that you do  have unreasonable expectations that in your current society, you can live as an individual defining your own expectations and living your own life the way you see fit.

anita