The Making and Meaning of Relationships in Sri Lanka

An Ethnography on University Students in Colombo

Mihirini Sirisena

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319763354
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319763361
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Personnalité en psychologie

This book proposes that romantic relationships—filtered through various socio-cultural sieves—can lead to the development of affective kin bonds, which underlie our sense of personhood and belonging. Sirisena argues that the process resembles an attempt to make strangers into kin, and that sort of affective relating is a form of self-conscious relationality, in which the inhabitants reflect on their individual and collective needs, as well as their expectations and dreams in the future of their relationships. University students' romantic relationships, which they gloss as 'serious,' appear to be processual and non-linear, and are considered to be stabilising forces which are pitched against the inherent uncertainty in young people's lives.

© The Author(s) 2018

Mihirini SirisenaThe Making and Meaning of Relationships in Sri LankaCulture, Mind, and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76336-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Mihirini Sirisena¹

(1)

Durham University, Durham, UK

Mihirini Sirisena

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

I met Amali just before the lunchtime chaos began to unleash in the gym canteen. It was our first meeting. She was one of those who sought me out, she later told me, because she needed someone to talk to. Wrapped in a denim skirt that hung loose over her knees and an oversized, floral shirt, Amali looked tired, her cheeks drawn in and dark circles highlighting her sunken, tired eyes. They made her look older than she was, and weary, as if she bore the brunt of the world on her shoulders. By then, it had been seven months since the day she found out that the man she loves had married another woman.

We found a quiet corner by the badminton courts, where we were least likely to be disturbed. Once she started her story, she did not hold herself back, and in about two and half hours, she made me privy to all the twists and turns of her relationship . Her descriptions were detailed. She spoke fast, moving from one incident to another, a melange of the happy and the painful, dotting the landscape of her relationship , linking all the events leading to its eventual break-up. She didn’t try to hide the tears streaming down her cheeks, from this stranger whom she had met only a few hours back.

Amali was the eldest daughter of a family of five. Growing up in a rather conservative, Sinhala-Buddhist suburban household, she strongly believed that romantic relationships are not things that should concern school-going children. Therefore, she did not find herself in one until after she had completed her school education. She met Erantha at the garment factory she worked at against her parents’ wishes, after finishing her Advance Level exams. Though her parents had made it clear to her that they did not want her to be associated with ‘garment’ girls, she followed her friends to work at the factory because she wanted to hang out with her friends. So, it was no surprise that her parents disapproved of it when they found out about her relationship with Erantha. For her parents, Amali and Erantha were an incompatible match. For them, Amali was more educated and from a social background different to Erantha’s. Besides, and maybe more importantly, their temperaments clashed. Amali told me that her parents often suggested that she needed a partner who is stronger, someone assertive, a strong personality. Amali admitted that she is stubborn and is used to having things her way. So, she needed someone who could keep her stubborn tendencies in check and balance her strong personality. Erantha did not fit this description. But, Amali persisted and eventually managed to win her parents’ blessings.

Four years later, she found herself facing a grim reality. “It was not like we talked about breaking up and then ended the relationship ”, she told me. “I used to fight with him often. I argue over little things. I get angry easily. That’s the way I am. … Since about last May, there was a change in him. He treated me indifferently … He stopped asking after me.¹ Calling reduced. … Even if we were to meet, he would not make the same effort anymore”. The uncertainty ended when she found out that he had married another woman. With that began a period of bewilderment, she told me. Despite the frequent quarrels and the lapses in caring , she had not imagined that her relationship would end this way. She tried as hard as she could to understand what brought it on. Her words fell out like a waterfall, rapid and charged with pain and anger. Suddenly she stopped, stared at me for a few seconds and told me, “I even took Panadol because of this”.²

Years later, I am still haunted by vivid recollections of Amali’s words, posture and the sense of loss that hung over her when she spoke. Amali’s struggle to cope with the end of her relationship still unsettles me. The helplessness I felt as I listened to her annoys me. What is it about these relationships that they mattered so much? That we devote so much time and effort to them? What is it that mattered so much that some of us were driven to seek solace in self-harm when a couple relationship has ended? It was similar questions that befuddled me when I set off to do ethnographic fieldwork at University of Colombo in September 2007. I was enraptured in the idea of finding out about the meaning of couple relationships at the time and chose University of Colombo as my field site for a few key reasons. My previous experience at the same university had alerted me to some interesting aspects about its student population. When they begin their university lives, most students would have moved out of their parental nests for the first time in their lives. Living on their own or having no parental figure watching over them, the university allowed them a certain freedom to interact with members of the opposite sex without adult surveillance . Moreover, by the time they entered into the university, most of them would be in their early twenties and would have begun to think about marriage , preferably resulting from a romantic relationship . Being the preferred channel to marriage , ‘love ’ holds a special place in the hearts and minds of these young people, thus making them keen to talk about it. I intended to capitalise on these circumstantial dynamics and engage with the university students on a concern that I thought they found relevant at that juncture in their lives as I headed to Colombo University to do ethnographic fieldwork in 2007.

Amali’s story of unmaking suggested that the end of her relationship brought on a sense of death of herself, so much so that she contemplated and acted on putting an end to a half-alive life. In so many different words and ways, Amali told me that, when her relationship ended, she felt as if she were losing the sense of who she is and what she should live for. Through her descriptions of losing weight, lacking motivation for work or pleasure , she painted a picture of a young woman who was once happy but now has been stripped off of everything she had known herself to be. She described herself as someone left with nothing but feelings of failure and confusion. She was half-alive. For Amali, who was alive for the sake of being alive (jīvat vena vāle jīvat venava), popping over thirty white caplets in less than half an hour did not seem a drastic act, but an obvious one. For her, by doing so, she was not ending herself because everything that she had once known herself to be had melted away when the relationship ended. The questions and the concerns she brought up boiled down to “whole life is a lie, because [I] was lied to by someone whom [I] deeply trusted” and “how do I face the family and friends who know of us”. Yet, to assume that it is a feeling of being cheated on and/or she could not face the society because she is compromised by the failure of her relationship that drove her to contemplate suicide is to overlook a whole lot of dynamics that are at play in couple relationships. In this book, I argue that, through couple relationships, which are filtered through sociocultural sieves, one forms affective kin bonds at the essence of which belie our sense of personhood and belonging . In this three-part introduction to the book, I present the theoretical context within which the content of this book is located, socio-historical context of my interlocutors, and the methodology and the structure of the book.

Part 1: Belonging , Love and Relationality

Feeling Selves

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (Butler 2009: 389)

In recent works, writers such as Butler (2009), Gay y Blasco (2005), Josephides (2005) and Biddle (2009) have pointed out that it is impossible to speak of self/subjectivity without taking our ‘feeling sides’ into consideration. While recognising ourselves as feeling beings and arguing that it is this that distinguishes us humans from other living, breathing beings, they point out that these structures of feelings and emotions are culturally conditioned. To begin with, emotions are “the means by which social and cultural formations affect us, that is, render us feeling beings in a series of complex, intricate ways” (Harding and Pribram 2009: 13). These intricate ways that emotions affect our sense of being could be clustered into two broad levels: emotions become a demarcator of who we are and, through feeling emotions and responding to them in particular ways, we seek assertion or negation of the persons that we are. It is this approach to the link between emotions and self that inform the argument I make in this book. The crux of this argument is, emotions reflect who we are. Being individuals of a certain kind, we become emotional in certain kind of ways. The categories through which we define ourselves as persons belonging to a certain class, gender and sexuality guide us on how to envision our emotionality: what we feel as well as how to feel what we feel. As Harding and Pribram (2009: 13), explicating the connexion between gender and emotionality, argue:

Gendered subjects are constructed through particular emotion events in which they express or suppress specific emotions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Ruminating on Love and Love Relationships
• 3. Ayyas and Nangis in Love
• 4. Making It Real
• 5. My World in My Pocket: Phones, Relationships and Expectations
• 6. Balancing Between Pleasure and Propriety: Where, What and How
• 7. Sex Games: Pleasures and Penance
• 8.  Magēma kenek: On Future and Certainty
• 9. Serious Relationships: Intersubjective Intermingling, Fuller Lives and Embodied Emotions
• Back Matter