27 January 2001

BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL MAN
S. Sivasubramanian

I usually greet anyone who is getting married with a statement “Everybody should get married after all happiness is not the only thing in life”.  Before my own marriage I used to say it out of perception and after my marriage I say it with conviction born out of experience.

I wanted to understand why every married human being advises the unmarried ones to get married.  It is not one of primordial animal instinct of progeny but something beyond that.  A shopkeeper with a roaring business never advises his friend to open a shop next door to him to share in his success, a doctor never advises his best friend to open a surgery next to his.  But when it comes to marriage everyone is generous to a point of fault in advising his or her friends and acquaintances to get married.  The more I thought about the reasons behind this one-off gush of altruism the more I related to the age-old fable about the fox that lost its tail.  -Once upon a time there was a fox had his tail chopped off during one his mischief trips.  The rest of his pack ridiculed him.  So he told everyone that being without tail is bliss and he is able to gain the sixth sense and goaded everyone to have their tails clipped.  Once he got the first few to have their tails cut the pyramid effect took over and the fox was no more alone in its stupidity and stupidity rapidly enrolled more stupidity-.  But humans with their sixth sense, ability to reason and be rational, why still get drawn into marriage like moth to fire?

In a profound sense marriage gives every man a unique exercise to sharpen certain prowess of his intellect.  Marriage brings to the equation a unique role the female human species plays called the wife.  In every other lesser species the role of wife is non-existent and the purpose of the women specie is only to procreate.   But only in the case of human race the wife is a true creator of valor, the energizer.  The mythologies have duly noted the effect of this feminine prowess, the Hindus personifying the cosmic energy (Shakthi) as a woman, and in the Greek mythology the all-powerful Zeus is wrapped in the little finger of Aries. 

The role of wife in a human context is very unique and enriching.  The most important quality the wife brings to the table is her ‘nags’.  The women specie when metamorphosizing through wifehood gets this unique skill set which is noticeably absent in its other stages of existance such as childhood, siblinghood or motherhood.  This nag, the omnipotent force that is brought to the institution of marriage is one that sculpts the raw strengths of otherwise a docile male species into a successful leadership potential.

Nag and wife are two faces of the same coin.  Every wife is a nag and the nags are as unique as fingerprints.  All nags have their unique emotional signatures.  Some wives nag for attention, some for money, some for approval and some because they are wives.  Nag is a low intensity warfare the wives unleash on their hapless husbands.  Nag can be roughly equated to some thing similar to the antics of the female animal species that spurs a male to emerge into an alpha male.

If women have no diversions, the nags intensify into destruction of the edifice ‘home’.  Often, the nagging women gang up children against the husbands.  If she is open to divorce she exits with the complete annihilation of the institution of husband.  If not, she is more lethal like a terminal illness with every day a torture for all the inhabitants of the home.  A reasonable strong male in the institution of marriage has every chance of sustaining this onslaught.

Besides nags, a wife gets into rule making.  The rule making has a simple rule, which is, “I make the rules and you follow”.  It seems very simple and easy to live with but the catch is that the rules are made on the fly and you are wrong regardless of how you respond to it.  For example on a festive day the wife chooses to ignore the festival (snub the frivolity) and serves stale food from the refrigerator and you meekly comply with that, you are more likely to be pummeled for not taking leadership and reminding the lady of the house about the festival and taking charge to bring in the festivity.  Had you done exactly that, you would have been roasted alive for being insensitive to the moods of the lady of the house.  Effectively the role of the husband is exactly like those portrayed in Keeping Up With Appearances, which is ‘wither the storm, use the moments between storms to prepare for the next’.

A wife may nag due to several counts. The notable ones are - the husband’s physique, be it obese or thin, inability to provide her dream home (a beach facing multi-million dollar Malibu mansion next to Tom Cruise’s), inability to lead a life style that is the envy of a Silicon Valley tycoon etc.  When the husband is unmoved by these nags, - usually one becomes stoic as a rock after a sustained battering for a few years - one’s other normal traits become a subject of new nags such as ability to sleep well, ability to get up early, ability to be punctual, ability to get along with neighbors etc.  Depending on which side of the bed a wife gets up she finds one of these reasons to nag the husband. 

When one becomes impervious to nags and even gains character and skill sets out of these nags, like an observant coach, the wife always raises the bar.  Even innocuous banters with children attract her attention and she is there to stamp her authority by putting the husband down and showing his place in the household.  Repeated reasoning of not putting the husband down before children for the children’s own good will only increase the wife’s resolve and the husband will get put down even when he kisses his children goodnight.

The wives have profound impact on the conduct of husbands.  Some husbands turn into health fads jogging their available time on the roads, some turn into avid golfers who golf till dark and sneak in when the wife is asleep and   some pour heart and soul in their office work and rise to prominence – proving the adage ‘behind every successful man there is a woman’.  Why then a wife is such necessity for every man?  What gave rise to the adage that wife is behind a man’s success?  Let us do some critical analysis.

What does it take to be successful; it is being prepared at all times.  How does one get that eternal state of preparedness?  It is through sustained training and practice.  An army in peacetime carries out enormous exercises to stay prepared.  As a matter of fact the army officers, when they go through the military academy, they are subjected to inhuman ragging which is acknowledged as the basic training required to build the psyche of a soldier and a commander.  A professional undergoes humiliating years of his existence as trainee or associate to gain competence and get prepared for his work.  But where does one get training on those psyche related skills that make him truly successful?

At work one faces unfair competition, betrayal by his fellow officers, the staff he leads turn disloyal at the drop of the hat, the environment he operates in changes without warnings and the boss turns vicious for no apparent reasons.  In short the man is in an environment that is out to break his psyche at all times.  In spite of all these, the leader rises above them and conducts the business with profound equanimity.  Where does he get the skills and competence to handle these unpredictable adversities and be successful?   Do the peacetime drills of army or the game sessions of executive MBAs provide these skills?  Never.  It is the institution of marriage and the entity wife that provided this capability by exercising the psyche of the man through her unpredictable mood swings and persistent irrational nags on a steady and sustained basis to bring out the leader in man and toughen it.  Remember those times when your own children that were turned against you, those in-laws who used you and humiliated you with your wife’s blessings, the wife – your life partner – who roasted you alive under the auspices of marital bliss, all those series of little incidents without you realizing it, have toughened you like steel, made you resilient, to expect the unexpected and cope with the impossible. 

A successful professional who spends almost all his day at work and reaches home only for a horizontal existence and thinks that his success is due to his tireless work is nothing but a male chauvinist pig, an ostrich with the head buried in sand, a lesser strain of human specie that does not understand or recognize the true facts.  But the ‘realized one’ is one that understands that the years of training he underwent through the institution of marriage has made the officialdom a breeze and turned him into a resounding success.

So thank thy wife for your success, encourage your fraternity to get married and get trained to be successful.