‘A fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from
love. Needs from feelings.’
— Arundhati Roy,
The God of Small Things
When your partner falls in love with another person and decides to call it quits with you, it shatters your heart and your world comes crumbling down, to put it mildly. You may not have been the doting happy couple for the majority of your relationship, but you thought that at least you two were comfortable with each other. And when your trust is broken, it comes as a bolt from the blue and it stings like no other pain in the world.
While it is only fair and wise to sit and talk things over with your spouse, to see if it can be avoided, it is wiser to know when to let go. Sometimes, no matter what you do and how many ways you try to stop them, if the partner is determined to leave, they will. And even if things do mellow down after a bit, it is only a matter of time when they will make a move and try to leave once again.
A man is an easy prey to extramarital affairs, but it is heart-rending when he decides to break his family for it. The woman he leaves his family for seems like a breath of fresh air to him; she is mostly younger to the wife and does not carry the baggage of responsibilities. And he loves being his carefree young self with her. There is no one to nag him with a to-do list anymore.
With wings on his shoulders instead of stress and responsibilities, he perfectly escapes from reality in this Garden of Eden he has created with the new woman on the block. He feels young and starts thinking of his wife as a mistake committed out of various reasons.
What he does not realise is that eventually this other woman would also metamorphose into his wife. Such is the path of the householder. She would want the same things as his first wife—home, children, and security. It may sound clichéd, but youth and beauty eventually fade. If she can break a family to start her own, it doesn’t speak much of her character; it is the most immoral thing to do. The man can shout from the rooftop that his marriage is over, but it isn’t till it is really over, that is, on paper. If he claims that the marriage is over without the paperwork, then chances are that he will go back to his wife. The other woman is and deserves to be scorned for falling for a married man.
Only if the guy is in the market, after being legally separated from his wife, should the woman entertain him. A woman buys a man’s stories that he doles out in order to woo her, because she wants to, not because she has to. It helps her to keep up the facade of a clear conscience. She tells herself that his previous relationship was over even before she had entered his life. Secretly, a woman knows when the catch is good, and if she doesn’t take advantage of it, someone else will. Besides, his story makes for a compelling tale to tell her friends without projecting herself as a home breaker.
At the end of this game, it is the man who is and deserves to be the loser. When he finally comes to his senses, he realises that not only does he have to support two families, but he is emotionally tattered, too. The emotions, of course, are attached to his finances which are depleting due to the constant leak. Somewhere, in the midst of all of this, the former wife sniffs the trouble in paradise and that satisfies her soul a bit.
The man, who thought of himself as the master of the game, realises that he has just been bit by the snake and is back to square one. For him, the constant nagging, the responsibilities, the accountability, and the grovelling and snivelling routine for sex remains the same, only the woman is different. Men are smart, but women are smarter. They know exactly where to bite since the time of Eve, and Adam has had a great fall many a times.
As for women, even when it comes to extramarital affairs, they know exactly what they want out of it. The affair begins in her mind first, she carefully weighs the pros and cons before she decides to enter into one. Men, being foolish and gullible when it comes to women, do not realise that the hunter is the hunted. Women choose their prey with great precision, and only her needs dictate the course of the affair; the outcome was already worked out by her like a mathematics sum!