Living in the "Grey Zone" (Love, Marriage & More)

Before naming my book Liminal Spaces, it was called The In-Between. To me, both names represent the “grey zone”. I think I’ve been in this grey zone for most of my life. I was never part of one core friend group and even now, my career doesn’t fit into one bucket. Forever floating in the in-between. Being a chameleon can be confusing because I often wonder “where do I belong?”, but I simultaneously love it and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am many things.

Charles Eisenstein, one of my favorite authors, describes this grey zone as the The Space Between Stories. It’s the transition as we leave behind the Old Story of Separation and step into the New Story of Interbeing. He has this quote that I often come back to: “There’s a vast territory between what we’re trying to leave behind and where we’re trying to go and we don’t have any maps for that territory”

I think of that all the time as I witness the areas of life my parents have navigated leaving one country and migrating to another, and the areas of life our generation is navigating. Love, marriage, parenting, career, meaning, religion/spirituality.

With so many of these questions there never really is an “arrival point” unless we’re required to make a decision (like who we decide to marry).

Last year I was in a session with my therapist and I shared my own questions around love with her. “What even is love? And why doesn’t it feel certain?”, I asked. “Where does this notion of certainty in love come from?”, she asked me back. 

I told her I guessed it was conditioning, that it’s from years of thinking that I should know when someone is “the one”, that it is cultural and there is a time, place, and certain person it should happen with. That love and partnership is, according to my culture, something I should have found by a certain time.

She pointed out to me that the notion of love I am putting forth seems predetermined, fixed, as are so many other aspects of life - notions around one’s spouse, caste, class, profession - among my parent’s generation. It is limiting to say this was the perspective of my entire parent’s, or even grandparent’s generation. These are customs specific to my family’s villages of that time and in some cases, even today. Many youth in the villages my parents are from still marry within our caste and our samaj, community. 

Love for my generation is about intimacy, growth, and connection. We’re tasked with love as a possibility that can take any shape and form. This thought can be daunting and overwhelming because we have a choice, and sometimes, when we’ve held on to predetermined notions of what something is, freedom can feel paralyzing.

For the first time, we have the privilege of choice, as we have in so many other areas in our lives. It is a task our parents and grandparents never had to experience because marriage was a ritual, a tradition, with its own fixed system and structure.

The notions of love that still exist in my home and extended family mirror the India that was replicated and brought to the United States. Much like the food, language, and traditions that my parents brought from India, the concepts of love, marriage, and partnership were also recreated in our homes and communities. 

Above all else, marriage is believed to be the greatest form of preservation. If two people are from the same caste, community, religious belief, and value system, it is believed they are able to create the next generation who will pass the very same traditions and way of life forward. However, preservation to me is not about replicating the past into the present and future, it is a reinvention of our definition of preservation. It is about gradually changing one’s focus of what needs to be preserved and why. 

Some of us spend our lives straddling the line between purpose vs a j.o.b., safety vs stability, tradition vs new customs, expectation vs heart’s desires, shoulds vs musts...Many of these questions require a slow unraveling, a reconciling of lives lived before us and the lives we feel called to live.

I’m personally still discovering the language to redefine love as being in service of others AND myself (not to be confused with being selfish). It is beyond being a good wife, husband, partner, daughter, lover, mother, beyond doing something because it’s what everyone is asking you to do. I’m learning to include the language of being a partner to myself first, that there is no way I can be in service to others when I have lost myself. The saying “losing oneself in the service of others” is no longer in my narrative because how can I make healthy decisions for others when I haven’t learned to make them for myself? I’ve learned being in service to others and being in service to oneself are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps they go together, are symbiotic, and we can’t thrive without the other. The time to heal and be in service to myself is what I feel to be the greatest privilege given to me by my parents. So when I think about love, any form of love whether it is romantic or not, these questions come back to me:

What is love when it is in service of self-actualization instead? 

What is love when it means liberation of the self? 

Love,

Rina

P.S. I love this this quote on Liminal Spaces by Heather Platt:

“The space in between stories is the liminal space. In anthropology, a liminal space is a threshold, an interim space of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet transitioned to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. In liminal space we are between identities, between who we once were and who we are becoming, like the chrysalis stage between caterpillar and butterfly” 

Grief, transition, loss, birth, divorce, trauma, job loss, bankruptcy, marriage, betrayal, relocation, graduation, conflict – nearly every human experience has within it some element of liminal space. The liminal space is a space of open heartedness, when we are raw, vulnerable, and exposed. In order to survive without further wounding, we need a container that will hold us with gentleness and strength, without short-circuiting the process or forcing us into the wrong outcome”.