It’s time we stopped treating marriage as a community project

Long after public rituals of the past faded away, the instinct to scrutinize a couple's private life remains stubbornly alive. For many couples today, the biggest challenge isn't finding love—it's keeping the rest of the world out of it.

The morning after a wedding, a blood-stained bedsheet is carried out from a balcony like a flag, held aloft for an audience waiting below. Heads turn upwards. Eyes remain fixed on the balcony. And when the white sheet, marked by a generous stain of blood, is finally put on display, the crowd erupts in cheers. The marriage has been consummated; its most private moment has become a public spectacle.

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The night before, when the husband asks his wife what she actually hopes to gain from the marriage, her answer is telling: she is looking forward to showing the world that she is no longer a virgin bride.

The sequence appears in the Netflix series Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, a dramatised retelling of the 19th-century Lizzie Borden case. Watching it today, the ritual feels almost impossible to imagine. Few people, after all, would think of carrying a bloodied bedsheet out into the neighbourhood and putting it on display.

But perhaps the more uncomfortable question is not how much we have changed, but how much we have not. The ritual may have disappeared, yet the larger idea behind it that a marriage is not quite the private business of two people remains familiar.

Historically, marriage determined inheritance, property, social alliances, family status and the continuation of a lineage. Modern marriage, however, is increasingly associated with companionship, emotional compatibility, personal choice and intimacy.

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Yet older social expectations have not disappeared. The result is a curious hybrid: we expect people to choose their partners for themselves, but we still reserve the right to comment on the choice.

Marriage may be entered into by two people, but in most (almost all) Bangladeshi families, it is rarely allowed to remain private. Before the wedding, everyone has an opinion on who you should marry, what he should earn, and what family she should come from. Is he too old? Is she too career-focused? Is the family respectable enough? What religion, profession, education and social background do they have?

Then comes the wedding, and the questions do not stop: When are you having children? Why are you living separately? Why does your wife work so late? Why does your husband not visit his in-laws enough? Why don't you buy a flat?

Some questions are asked out of affection while some are asked out of curiosity. Some are expressions of genuine concern, but somewhere along the way, concern can become entitlement.

The moment a person reaches a certain age, marriage can become a community project. Parents ask. Aunts investigate. Family friends recommend candidates. Colleagues make introductions. Matchmaking happens through Facebook groups, dating apps, and social media. These days some matchmakers are even turning to AI-powered tools to suggest potential matches.

There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking advice or involving trusted people in an important life decision. The question is: when does advice become interference?

Anthropologist Fatama Sultana Suvra says, “In the new capitalist society, everything is sellable. We once had the narrative that it takes an entire village to raise a child, but now even marriage has become something that can be sold and marketed. We are neither fully individualistic nor fully community oriented.

“Marriage is also sold as a symbol of status and dignity. Through social media, however, it has increasingly become light, almost trivialised. People sometimes seem less interested in the reality of marriage than in consuming the idea of marriage,” says Suvra, associate professor, Jagannath University.

“We look at marriage like a picture we want to paint in a particular way, rather than asking what the reality of that marriage looks like. It is still not fully individualistic. Just as we see with many of our other social systems, we have not quite figured out how to move from the old structure to the new one.”

A disagreement between two people can quickly become an argument involving parents. A quarrel can become a conversation between siblings. A private complaint can travel through family WhatsApp groups. A separation can produce competing versions of events, with relatives taking sides.

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There are, of course, situations in which family intervention is necessary. Abuse, violence, coercion, serious financial exploitation or other forms of harm should not be romanticised as matters that couples must simply resolve behind closed doors.

However, there is a difference between supporting someone in a difficult marriage and taking ownership of the marriage's decisions.

Mehadi Mobarak Aman, senior psychosocial counsellor at Moner Bondhu, says, “Whether outside interference is helpful or harmful depends on the situation. In an arranged marriage, involving the families can sometimes be positive, but in a love marriage, it may not have the same impact.

“It is best to try to resolve conflicts between the couple first. If they need outside support, they can turn to someone reliable in the family. If there is no such person, they should seek help from a professional counsellor,” he adds.

For some couples, the problem is not that their families care too much. It is that the couple has never been given enough space to become a separate unit.

Sreshtha Habib (pseudonym), a woman in her early 40s going through a bit of a rough patch in her marriage, says, “Professional mediators can certainly help, but I think friends and the wider community can sometimes be better than families because families are generally biased.

“A husband will naturally want his family to take his side, just as a wife will want hers to do the same. Friends, on the other hand, can offer more objective perspectives and advice. Ultimately, though, it depends on the couple and whether they genuinely want to find a solution,” she says.

Marriage is no longer simply discussed within the neighbourhood. It can be displayed online.

Engagement photographs, wedding albums, anniversary posts, pregnancy announcements and family celebrations can turn private milestones into public content. And the public interest does not always end with the happy photographs. People notice when couples stop posting together. They notice when one person disappears from another's photographs. They ask mutual friends what happened. They speculate.

“Today, we have a very specific picture of what a marriage is supposed to look like — the dancing, the groom lifting the bride into his arms, the elaborate celebrations. Social media then becomes a form of surveillance, constantly showing how other people's marriages look and, in turn, shaping what we think ours should look like,” says Fatama Sultana Suvra.

Perhaps the most persistent form of interference is also the most casually delivered. “Adjust” — the word is often presented as wisdom.

Every long-term relationship requires compromise. Two people cannot live together without accommodating each other's habits, expectations and imperfections. But adjustment can mean very different things depending on who is being asked to do it.

For generations, women in particular have been told to adjust to their husband's family, household expectations, financial limitations, unequal domestic responsibilities or even mistreatment. At other times, men may be pressured to remain in marriages because leaving would embarrass the family or damage social standing.

“With our clients, we do not approach marriage as a matter of making or breaking it, or of rescuing the relationship. Generally, however, friends and family will tell couples to adjust, especially women. Rarely will anyone suggest divorce; that is the usual practice,” says Mehadi Mobarak Aman.

The problem is when society decides, from the outside, what a person should tolerate inside their marriage.

We have moved far from a world in which a bride's virginity could be publicly established through a bedsheet displayed before her community. We have changed our laws, our ideas of consent and our understanding of individual rights. For many people, marriage is now fundamentally about companionship and personal choice.

But the social instinct to treat marriage as a collective affair has proved much harder to leave behind. Perhaps the real measure of how modern our understanding of marriage is does not lie in how elaborate our weddings have become, or how freely couples choose their partners.

Marriage may involve two families, communities and, often, a much wider social circle. But the life being lived inside it belongs to the two people who chose to enter it.

Sometimes, care means offering a hand when someone asks for it. Sometimes, it means speaking up when there is harm. And sometimes, it means resisting the urge to turn someone else's marriage into a matter for public discussion. The blood-stained bedsheet may have disappeared. Perhaps it is time the audience did too.