New Rules of Marriage

The matrimony survival guide is being updated by new technology, modern attitudes and an old sex manual

Social media entrepreneur Irshad Daftari and his wife Neeti Babu were living continents apart and it was not going too well. They were constantly snapping over the phone, trying to control each other’s life. To make the marriage work, they realised, something drastic needed to be done. Their solution: stop talking and communicate only by email. “When you email, you think it out,” says Daftari, “It was so much better, and slowly, our issues got sorted out.”

They are both in their thirties and have spent three of their five married years apart. Before their wedding, they had made a pact to never stop the other from anything. “Neeti has travelled almost 19 countries,” says Daftari, “We knew we needed to be individuals and do what we wanted.”

In 2008, soon after the nuptials, Neeti stayed in Mumbai while he went to Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, to get a management degree. The next year, he returned to Mumbai; but in 2011, Neeti went off to London School of Economics for an MSc in Social Policy and Development. Since last October, they have been living in Delhi, where Neeti works as a child rights expert. She still has to travel around the country off and on. Today, when either travels, they talk on Skype.

Sustaining a marriage is hard work, so it is just as well that it has its benefits—starting with there being someone to come home to and be your horrible self with. It is said to be good for health too. One study, published in Clinical Oncology, has even found that your chances of surviving cancer are better if you’re married. But with the balance of power between husband and wife having shifted towards ‘balance’, modern marriages need new rules if they are to survive.

One of these is an occasional break from your partner. That is how Raksha Hegde, 35, and her husband Rahul Narayan spend a few weekends. “He may want to take a Saturday just to read a book and I might want to go to a movie alone with my son. People ask me, ‘Why didn’t Rahul come for the movie?’ and I am like, why does he need to?”

Raksha met her husband when she was 15 and he was 19. They had similar interests and fell in love. They got married when she was 23 and have now been together for almost 12 years. Three years after their son was born, however, they found their lives in a rut. That’s when they decided to pursue divergent interests. “He bought an Enfield and I joined Yoga,” she says, “We both just needed to find ourselves. We were almost turning into the typical couple with a kid.”

Another way to boost the odds of marital success is to raise the kids together—actually together, with every aspect of it shared equally. Shoma Narayanan, a banker and Mills & Boon author, feels that her 13-year marriage has survived the strain of their hectic jobs because she and her spouse split all tasks halfway. Her husband Badri, an HR professional, spent time with their first baby. He did the morning shift while Shoma was at work. Badri took over all the work a few years ago, though, after Shoma developed a brain tumour.

They text each other multiple times a day. The messages range from the functional ‘When will you send the car to pick me up?’ to the sentimental ‘I love you’. If one is travelling, they video chat without the kids.

On their 13th anniversary this year, they revisited a place and moment in time when they used to take long walks in Colaba. “At the last minute, our daughter said she wanted to come [along]. We didn’t have the heart to refuse her. But it was still romantic. But we do make sure we take out ‘our’ time, even if it’s 20 minutes every day just to catch up.”

A common complaint of marital life is the frustration of meeting attractive people of the opposite sex and not being able to do anything about it. There is no fixed rule for this. Evidently, both fidelity and infidelity work.

A 30-year-old copywriter in Mumbai who has been married for eight years says she once had to stop herself from falling in love with someone who ticked all the boxes. She realised in the nick of time that “the happy new feeling would get old as well”. Echoing her, a 33-year-old man married for four years says that while it feels great to be found desirable by someone, what would you do after you’ve scratched the itch? “Now what? That’s what I would say, right? Would I leave my wife and start all over again? Absolutely not,” he says.

Let pragmatism prevail, many advise. A 40-year-old media professional who got married at 22 and divorced in 18 months says the experience of her first marriage helped her take a pragmatic view of her second. She was 27 when she remarried—to a colleague she’d dated for three years. She has no illusions about marriage, she says, because though couples start off like-minded, all that can change.

Leaving romantic notions behind, she believes, is the only way to make a marriage work: “At the end of the day, every relationship pans out the same way. You get bored and stuck in a rut. There are times when you feel like brother and sister. You have to have patience through it all. There is no point rocking the boat for an affair because everything exciting just becomes boring after a while.”

Yet, there are some who believe it’s best to get it out of your system by giving in to temptation—but with your eyes open. A 32-year-old, married for five years, recently met someone she felt attracted to. One evening, he invited her over when his wife was away in another city, and what began as a kiss ended with sex. It has been a while since that incident and she does not regret it at all. “If I hadn’t done it,” she says, “I may have regretted it all my life. But since I went in knowing what I was going to do, I did it and got out without emotional attachment. In life, you need to do something for yourself—and [you should not] overthink it.”

Nandini Krishnan, author of Hitched: The Modern Woman and Arranged Marriage, says she found a whole new set of codes while researching the book. She recounts the story of a former colleague who had a crush on a married man and stalked him online for a bit. She found he never put up family pictures anywhere.

Also, while he followed his wife on Twitter, she didn’t follow him. To Krishnan’s colleague, that meant he was in an unhappy marriage that would break down once she waltzed into his life. “A few years ago, all you had to do to prove your marriage was happy was talk about your spouse and children,” she says, “Now you have to follow each other on Twitter. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying you need out-of-the-box rules if you want to prove to the world that your marriage is happy. If you shut out the world and all the puerile intrusive questions people ask, you’re fine.”

Krishnan has another story of a gay friend who penned a Facebook post on how he and his partner kept their relationship going. ‘One candlelit dinner a week at a fancy restaurant; a long drive along the beach; an evening relaxing at home with country music, cricket and wine; a day at the spa. I do this on Thursdays and Saturdays; he does this on Fridays and Sundays.’

“Then, there’s another couple I know who have separate loos,” says Krishnan, “I didn’t want to know the details of how they got there and what impact that’s had on their marriage, but they seem quite happy. There is one woman I know who tends to have some pretty scary fights with her husband, but they have this standing rule that they won’t go to bed angry. I think they must have a really well-equipped bar. Or they don’t go to bed much. But they stick to that rule.”

When it comes to marital sex, the primary rule is an age-old one: do not ignore it. The spice-it-up rule of modern marriages is also ancient. A 42-year-old TV professional bought a copy of the Kamasutra and claims to have tried all—yes, all—of its positions with his wife. “It was funny as well as lots of fun,” he says. According to him, sex tends to turn routine and so couples end up going without it for months on end. “But if we meet a new person we feel attracted to, don’t we feel like having sex? So why don’t we try the same things with our spouse?”

A 25-year-old banker who just got married says that she and her husband make sure they try out different things in bed even if it’s as elementary as fantasy role-playing. “You need to be interested in each other physically, not just emotionally,” she says, “It won’t work otherwise.”

But the most important rule of marriage is to not give up on it. Swati Vasishtha, 40, feels that is the only reason her marriage has survived frequent thoughts of throwing in the towel. “You got into this with your eyes open and you have to work at it,” she says, “People give up too soon. You need to give it your best shot. There will be problems, there will be other people who excite you, but then we aren’t rabbits—we can choose.”

Vasishtha remembers the second year of her marriage with utmost clarity. She had just moved to Mumbai from Delhi with her husband Siddharth Thakur. They both had new jobs. It was 2004 and the couple, who’d had a love marriage after dating for three years, were looking forward to living together on their own, away from the rest of the family. But the experience unsettled them. “Sometimes living with a family works as a glue for one’s marriage,” she says, “Many things go unnoticed.” He was working with a TV network and she was running an event management firm. Their hours were long and she often returned to an empty house. They had arguments and fights every day and they nearly called it quits several times. But they held on, reminding themselves of “what we first fell in love with”. Says Vasishtha, “You need to keep doing that.”

Having a baby renewed their relationship. “Even though things like sex took a backseat, we bonded over Sia,” she says, “Siddharth was a hands-on father and did everything I wanted.” But then their daughter fell sick with a rare disease of the stomach and the trauma nearly wrenched them apart again. “I became a nurse and mother. Sia clung to me all the time, through blood tests and hospital visits. We were both reacting differently to our pain. I focused only on Sia and forgot everything else. Siddharth started drinking and turned aloof. There was a time when we stopped talking. I asked his family to talk to him because I had no energy to deal with it.”

The family stepped in and he came around. As Sia got better, they slowly revived their relationship. They started going for family vacations, dinners and movies. They were communicative again. Today, ten years later, Swati says that she is still in love with her husband but makes a point of a few things: “I have no shame in saying I am sorry when I am wrong—and sometimes when I am not.”

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Aastha Atray Banan