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Reality Check: The DINK Way
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 Is having a child always the next step in a marriage?
A decade ago in India, marriage, children and family were inextricably linked. Many women married since then may recollect being nudged and winked at, during their marriage, about the intimacy they were about to indulge in. Not-so-subtle hints about the bundle of joy that would come their way before long (read 'a year hence') were also not far behind!
But times have changed, and perhaps one of the most salient aspects of this change is the emergence of couples going the DINK way across major metros.
DINK - what's that?
DINK, an acronym for Double Income No Kids, first appeared in Pat Buchanan's best-selling book The Death of the West. Now interestingly, the subtitle of this book, How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, and his chastising DINK couples as persons who shirk a social responsibility (having children) in favour of a shallow self-cantered lifestyle suggest that Buchanan's message was strongly nationalistic in intent.
We'll give the latter part of that argument a miss, in favour of asking a more pertinent question - do a husband and wife constitute a family or only a couple? In other words, are children essential to complete a family?
Why choose to be a DINK couple?
A step further, by choosing a DINK lifestyle, is a couple jeopardizing their future happiness in lieu of present opulence?
Let's get this straight - the reasons for couples choosing a DINK lifestyle are pretty much the same in India as in the West. The freedom to do as they please, when they please, live a footloose and fancy free life, party hard and sleep in, chase careers and indulge in branded luxury goods, and so on - attracts couples not to have children.
Of course, there are also women who fear being pregnant or the process of childbirth, or couples who genuinely dislike children or feel the country is over-populated as it is! What emanates is that unlike childless couples who desire children but can't have them, DINK couples opt to be childfree.
Exercise your freedom to choose wisely
Although the reasons are many, and sure, every couple has the freedom to choose whether and when they want children, the right reason will ensure a couple does not repent too late in the day.
It is essential for a couple to define what constitutes family to them. If a man and woman marry and feel content with themselves, or like Rohit and Smita with the orphaned children they work with every weekend at a local NGO, they're unlikely to ever experience a sense of being incomplete even if they don't have kids. Among celebrities, consider that talk show queen Oprah Winfrey doesn't have children of her own but devotes her time and financial resources to help build schools for underprivileged girls in Africa. She neither misses nor is likely to miss having children.
However, if like Somesh and Meena, a couple has chosen to remain childfree because they feel having children would not allow them to 'enjoy' their life, they may well find themselves hankering for 'fulfilment' two decades down the line.
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