Of Stable Marriages and Unhappy Relationships

I have serious issues with a movie like Tanu weds Manu Returns. It shows a girl of the present times( read : smoking , drinking and playing the field) married for four years, certifying that her husband is a nut case and packing him off to a mental asylum. (If it were so easy I am sure most of us would have banished our husbands to a similar fate by now!!). The story doesn't end here( infact it begins ). She moons around in sarees in some location in England but then decides to come back to Bharat and immediately slips into dresses and towels as dresses. Her husband is bailed out of the asylum and also comes back to India only to fall in love with a ditto same copy of his wife. The movie ends with the original twosome acknowledging their love for each other.

We wondered at the naivety of the director. How did he convince the husband( a vapid Madhavan) to go back to a wife( a neurotic Kangana) who had told the world that he was mad? Would this have happened in real life? Didn't real marriages  have more substance in them? Did moments like those showing Kangana cosying up to different men actually happen ? Actually?

It was precisely when the post movie discussion was taking place that  the landline rang. Since I knew that no one else would move I stretched my hand to take the call. Two minutes into the conversation I wished I hadn't. Not because I don't like the people who had made the call. On the contrary , it was because I like them immensely it saddened me that they were in the midst of a huge row. The reason for the row: the husband's supposed 'interest' in women. That a picture perfect marriage of more than thirty years could descend to accusations, allegations, shouting and screaming left us in no mood to continue our dissection. We wandered  off to differents tasks.

Two days later another phone call, another conversation. This marriage also has everything , on the surface, going for it . The couple celebrated its twenty fifth anniversary last year but though the facade of happiness is being maintained  the cracks are not going anywhere. The two conversations left me shaken ( and stirred) to the core. For people of our generation, brought up to act out the 'happily ever after' ,to confess that while they have stayed put in their marriage but happiness has not is a big deal.

I am sure the two instances mentioned above are not isolated ones. If that is the case we need to ask ourselves why this is so. What are the reasons that the moral and social fabric protecting institutions like marriage is being ripped apart. I know there are no easy answers but then it's not a easy question.