Does one need to get married to live with one’s lover?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Why do I need to get married? Why do I need to take a certificate from somebody regarding my love, regarding my decision to live with someone? Why does it need to be certified by someone?”

Acharya Prashant (AP): It’s a very good question that you are asking. But how can you raise this question as a fragment? We have made it our life to seek certification regarding everything. And if you don’t have those certifications, you collapse. Marriage is one of those certifications.

Even if I say that that certification is not required, would you be fearless enough to suddenly transform a mind that lives in certifications?

Do you know what certification is? The certification means: “I do not know, and I am depending on somebody else to tell me my worth.” That is what a ‘certificate’ means.

What about engineering then? (The questioner is a student of engineering college) Are you here for the love of engineering? Were that the case, you wouldn’t have bothered whether you get a degree or not. But today, if we come to know that there are no degrees to be offered, we won’t be found here, right? You would say, “Why to spend four years when ultimately there would be no certification?”

Certification has become a way of life with us.

When you get an offer letter from a prestigious company, it is a certification that you have arrived in life, that now you are somebody. And how glad do we feel! When you wear that identity card and walk around, you’re somebody. You get all puffed up. You write very proudly in your CV: I am with such and such person. Certification is so deeply entrenched in our psyche, that it is very very difficult, to get rid of it. Is there anything that we do without the hope of a certificate? And a certificate means, actually — a result.

“If I do this, I’ll get that; if I do this, I’ll get that.” That ‘that’ that you are hoping to get, is always provided by somebody else. Is there anything we ever do without the hope of a result as a certificate? Anything?

If any of us have ever done anything without the motivation of getting something…