‘Good heavens! Why did I marry?’
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
You wake up one morning and sleeping next to you is a man who does not invoke any emotion in you. There is nothing stirring or magical about sex with him. There is no real experience in it except, perhaps, as a part of a routine, a mechanistic habit. If anything, it leaves you feeling ragged and frayed. It is just another set of physical activity you attend to, the last of the chores to be done. Surely, this is not the place you had ever imagined you would end up in! Neither do you know how you landed up in such a situation nor do you know where you are to go from here.
‘Entrapped’ and ‘enchained’ start seeming like appropriate synonyms for marriage. You feel more like a prisoner than the mistress of the house. You want out, away from it all. You are fed up of playing the various roles that have been imposed on you. You just want to be yourself.
Dismal as it may sound, many marriages reach a point where you want to scream your lungs out, not at anything or anyone in particular but at the paradox between a sense of disorientation you feel in spite of the familiarity and predictability of your situation. After years of living together, you practically become each other’s mind readers; the sense of exuberance, the mushy feeling of togetherness, the animated conversations—everything dissipates. When did the flame of love that you started out with extinguish? You are settled and secure now, but that feeling of love is lost in the process.
We can all take comfort in the thought that it is not entirely unusual to feel this way, and a majority of couples, too, go through this phase. It is just a phase, and it will pass. While every marriage has its uniqueness and every couple has an equation, the common denominator is the different phases that each marriage goes through.
This phase is dominated by a sense of discovering each other, of physically and emotionally connecting with each other. You enjoy sharing the minutest details of your life, the school days, the college days, your friends, and about how you felt for each other before the declaration of love. You seem to remember every word that your partner spoke, what they wore, where you went, and that Zsa Zsa Zsu feeling as Carrie Bradshaw from the Sex and the City TV show puts it—the feeling you get when you meet someone you really like. The sort of lovey, stomach-full-of-butterflies feeling when you just want to be with that someone. No matter how the future turns out, you always manage to spare a smile for your love story.
In this phase, you can’t seem to have enough of each other. The both of you are on a love high!
You come out of that intoxicated zone and become more responsible to the demands that you are entrusted with. You try to carry out your responsibilities and enjoy this new role. You learn to get along with each other’s family and friends. By this time, you start your family and they rule your world. It is a taxing phase, especially for women; their bodies and their emotions play havoc, they find it tough to cope with the demands of the infant and the husband. The child changes the entire dynamics of the relationship, and for some couples it can be a very trying phase. Despite the joys of becoming a parent, the demands of parenthood become the first reality check. The division of labour, the erratic sleeping schedule, the rise in expenses, and the lack of free time and freedom—everything weighs you down. Social life, entertainment, and personal space, all seem to be things of the past.
This phase may seem never-ending.
The kids have become more independent now and you can breathe once again. Your life seems close to normal, but the husband is relegated to a secondary position as the kids come first; it is because of the small yet endless household chores that keep you on your toes. You find it hard to imagine that you once had a life beyond nitpicking at the help for their shoddy work. Your degree, in whatever discipline you opted for, seems to mock you. Your interests and hobbies that you once felt so passionately about have taken a back seat to make room for your children’s interests. You wonder if you are even the same person anymore.
The whole grind of bringing up children without any room for romance makes you listless. Boredom in the bedroom makes you feel old and worn out. You and your partner feel lost but cling to each other more like Hansel and Gretel than Romeo and Juliet. You start looking for affirmations of your worth as a woman. You question yourself whether you can still attract a person of the opposite sex or not.
This is probably your last chance to enact your fantasies, to enjoy the thrill of the chase, and, most importantly, to get that rush you haven’t experienced in a long, long time. This is that dangerous phase where there is enough room for a third person to share the burden of marriage!