Vijay Nagaswami - 3’s a Crowd

westland ltd

3S A CROWD

Vijay Nagaswami is a Chennai-based psychiatrist and hasworked closely with relationships for over twenty-fiveyears. Innumerable couples from all over the countryhave benefitted from his marital intervention and hiswriting. He has written three books, including thebestselling The 24 x 7 Marriage and The Fifty-50 Marriage,these two as part of a series called The New IndianMarriage. 3s a Crowd, the third in this series, deals withinfidelity and how to survive it.

He also writes a column for The Hindu called TheShrinking Universe and is featured in other national andregional publications too. He regularly conducts workshopsfor couples and corporates on relationship management.

He draws inspiration for his work from Usha, hiswife, and their twenty-two-year-old marriage.

He can be contacted at vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com

3S A CROWD

UNDERSTANDING AND SURVIVING INFIDELITY

VIJAY NAGASWAMI

westland ltd

61, II Floor, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600095

93, I Floor, Sham Lal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002

First published by westland ltd 2011

First e-book edition: 2015

Copyright Vijay Nagaswami

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-93-85724-96-1

Typeset by Arun Bisht

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

Millions of people all over the world

have struggled with the pain of infidelity,

have survived it and have gone on to find

the inner strength to make their worlds

a better place.

To them this book is dedicated

... The best laid schemes o mice an men

Gang aft agley,

An leae us nought but grief an pain

For promisd joy!

Robert Burns, 1785

Contents

A Note from the Author

It might seem extraordinary to you, but about a thirdof the couples who come to see me for couples therapydo so because one of them is having an extramaritalrelationship. Or sometimes because one of them is positivethat the other is involved with someone else and has noway of proving this. And every time I work with a couplethat is dealing with infidelity and see the emotional painand distress that both partners struggle with, I marvel atthe amazing capacity of human beings to mess up theirlives.

For, affairs are not like illnesses. They dont justhappen. We make them happen. And whats more, despiteknowing the consequences, we actually go out of our wayto make them happen.

When people ask me whether marital infidelity is arecent phenomenon, I am hard pressed to give them aclear answer. On the one hand, I know that I dont haveany hard data, for this is not the sort of information theCensus Board collects (although sometimes I wish they would). However, I do know that when I startedpsychiatric practice over twenty-seven years ago, peoplewere blithely having affairs even then. The most unlikelyof people, really. People who, if you passed them on thestreet, would give you absolutely no indication of thepassion that lurked in their hearts and minds. Youraverage, conservative, middle-class men and, hold yourbreath, women, were breaking their marital vows withthe same alacrity that their children and perhaps,grandchildren, are doing today.

However, the one key difference is that people used tobe much more discreet in those days and many have gonethrough lifetimes without their dalliances being discovered.

Today, people engage in infidelity much morebrazenly, and affairs are more in-your-face than everbefore. Technology has contributed its bit, for people canand do conduct extramarital engagements through mobilephones, the Internet and so forth. However, the sametechnology that abets such relationships also exposesthem more readily, for the commonest method ofdiscovery of affairs is a poorly-timed text message (likethe one that comes from the paramour when the intendedrecipient is having a shower and the spouse accidentallyreads the text) or an undeleted chat transcript (its veryhard conducting an affair if youre not tech-savvy). Inother words, affairs are being detected much more easilythan before.

This is probably why the general opinion is that morepeople are having affairs nowadays. I dont think this isan accurate perception. Its just that since affairs wereconducted more surreptitiously in the past, unless you hireda detectivewhich most people never even considereddoingit was hard to find out if your spouse was having itoff with your neighbour. Of course, suspicious spouses havebeen known to come home unexpectedly and catch their unfaithful partners in flagrante delicto, but its hard to tellhow commonly this happened.

Another thing. Theres also a general perceptionthat women today have become more licentious thanwere women of earlier generations and this wholeWesternisation thing is driving them to promiscuity. Itis, of course, true that contemporary women haveempowered themselves to be more expressive when itcomes to the gratification of their need for emotional andsexual intimacy, but women of their parents generationswere also in touch with these needs. They just didnt havethe space to express them. There were no glossies thatexhorted them to be superwomen, or told them howprecisely affairs could be conducted; they had to becontent with being referred to (though not necessarilytreated) as the goddesses who held the Indian familytogether, and so on. Whatever needs they experiencedhad to be either repressed or expressed clandestinely.So lets not put the blame on the West for extramaritalrelationships. Weve obviously been quite busy on thatfront ourselves, considering how hard that ancient textManusmriti, written by the lawgiver Manu (presumablyin the words of the Creator himself), comes down onadulterous women.

So, where does that leave us? We know that manypeople engage in extramarital relationships. We alsoknow that both partners are traumatised when affairs arediscovered. In addition, its abundantly clear that affairsare easier to discover today. And that many contemporarycouples are aggressively seeking to stretch the boundariesof marriage to, perhaps, even include extramaritalrelationships within its ambit. Does this then mean thatinfidelity is here to stay and that we should just factor itinto our marriages and be blas about it instead of makingsuch a big deal of it? Should we just provide for the fact that our partners are going to stray and that we shouldeither ignore this or stray ourselves? Or should wejust learn to accept infidelity as part of modern life like,say, the Internet, and learn to enjoy it rather than railagainst it?

The way I see it, any experience that produces thekind of emotional distressand indeed devastationthataffairs do in the lives and minds of at least three, if notmore, people, cant be treated merely as collateral damageof contemporary married life. Obviously, distress takesplace because affairs produce unhappiness. And anythingthat causes misery needs to be understood and dealt withrather than being accepted as part and parcel of our lives.Which is why I thought of writing this book as the thirdin Westlands New Indian Marriage Series. My concernin this book is not about the moral aspects of affairs,whether theyre right or wrong, for I believe, as will bediscussed later, that affairs are not necessarily an issue ofmorality. Nor is my concern about the legal aspects ofaffairs. I will stick to my area of experiencethepsychodynamics and emotional aspects of affairs.