“After marriage, you have to adjust a bit.”
Most Indian girls grow up hearing this sentence so often that it almost feels like a rule of life. It’s passed down casually by relatives, neighbours, elders, and sometimes even parents with the intention of preparing a woman for her married life. Adjustment is presented as the key to keeping peace, maintaining the “sanity of the house,” and making a marriage work.
But the question we rarely ask is: adjustment by whom, and at what cost?
Why only new bride needs to adjust?
When a woman gets married, she is expected to leave behind her home, her parents, her comfort zone, and often her identity. She steps into an entirely new household with unfamiliar routines, traditions, expectations, and people. Despite this massive transition, society assumes that it is only her responsibility to adapt.
Why is it taken for granted that the bride must adjust, while the groom and his family’s routine remains unchanged?
Isn’t marriage supposed to be a union of two people and two families?
The Responsibility of the Groom’s Family
A new bride is not an outsider invading a household she is a person who has chosen to become part of it. If a family expects her to adjust to their ways, it is equally their responsibility to adjust to hers.
Keeping a woman happy in her new home should not be seen as a favor; it should be seen as basic human decency.
Small acts of adjustment from the groom’s family respecting her choices, allowing her to eat what she likes, acknowledging her emotions, can make a world of difference. These gestures tell her: You belong here, just as you are. If the said words are expressed then she will be the happiest women in the world.
When Adjustment Is Necessary
This does not mean that a woman should never adjust at all. Every relationship requires compromise. If a person regardless of gender is being unreasonable, disrespectful, or deliberately making others uncomfortable, then yes, some moulding is necessary.
But there is a crucial difference between adjustment and disrupting ones self- respect.
Redefining Adjustment
We need to redefine what adjustment means in marriage.
Adjustment should look like:
- Mutual respect, not one-sided sacrifice
- Conversations, not commands
- Flexibility, not control
- Inclusion, not domination
Marriage should not be a test of how much a woman can sacrifice. It should be a partnership where adjustment flows both ways, where love does not demand disappearance, and where self-respect is non-negotiable.
Because a woman doesn’t enter marriage to lose herself, she enters it to build a life. And that life should have space for who she truly is.
