Breaking up is hard, especially if you’re closing a long, emotional chapter. Leaving the comfort of the familiar and venturing into the unknown is scary for everyone. This is made more difficult by the fact that all the weight of social approval tends to come down on the side of saving an existing relationship, no matter how meaningless it may be, while the one who walks away is often labelled ‘selfish’. But does this mean you settle for unhappiness? DNA meets people stuck in dead-end relationships and asks them some uncomfortable questions.
In Karan Johar’s teary tribute to dysfunctional relationships and extra-marital affairs, KANK (less popularly known as Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna), Rani Mukherji is married to Abhishek Bachchan. But she doesn’t really love Abhishek and feels trapped in the relationship. She wants to break away but does nothing. Until Shah Rukh Khan comes along, and they start an affair, which eventually leads to Rani breaking up with Abhishek and liberating herself from a dead relationship.
In real life, not everyone has the good fortune to be wooed out of a souring relationship by a Shah Rukh Khan or a Preity Zinta. They live on, as Rani did, preferring the security of the familiar over the uncertainties of starting afresh, starting alone.
Comfort of status quo Sara Sheikh, a 25-year-old fashion designer from Hyderabad, is one such unhappy drifter. She had met Sahil, her 27-year-old businessman husband when she was in her teens, dated him for seven years, and married him when she was 21. Now, for the past one year, she’s been “trying” to break up with him.
According to her, things started going downhill when Sahil started to treat her badly. He’d run down her ideas for a new fashion line, not show any interest when she wanted to go on holiday, and quell her enthusiasm on every front. Initially, Sara didn’t mind.
However, as the years passed, his nasty comments began to take their toll. He would tell her things like, “you’re ugly”, “you’re a failure”, and so on. Such remarks began to affect her self-esteem. She couldn’t shake off his words even when her friends tried to boost her morale with comforting words.
Despite all this, Sara, though she keeps agonising about breaking up and striking out on her own, can’t bring herself to do the deed. “Deciding whether to stay with my husband as just a roommate, or to find a relationship that would keep me happy is not easy,” says Sara. “Right now, I have a comfortable routine and lifestyle. While I don’t care about my husband anymore, he doesn’t question me either.” And so she is sort of okay (though not okay) with the status quo.
Short-term relief
Similarly dissatisfied with his marriage and unable to take the ‘extreme’ step of breaking up, is Suraj Singh, a 33-year-old Mumbai-based filmmaker. Suraj simply could not bear the thought of hurting his wife, Pragya, 26, a freelance writer, by telling her he wasn’t happy. In the course of their two-year-old marriage, the one thing they agreed on was that they had nothing in common. And they had convinced themselves that this was good because they could then, in the words of Pragya, “get to try out new things.” But after months of fighting, yelling and sullen silences, Suraj desperately wanted a change.
At an out-of-town shoot, after an entire week spent watching his colleagues hook up with each other (and with strangers) on location, Suraj finally gave in to temptation. He cheated on his wife.
“It was a one-time thing only. I switched off from my wife because I wanted to be selfish. Marriage and its responsibilities had taken me by surprise and I felt that I’d lost an essential part of me somewhere in the relationship,” he says. “Though I still love my wife, I was feeling trapped.”
After the weekend, he returned to his Mumbai home on Monday.
The same night, he sat his wife down and told her what he had done. Pragya didn’t react immediately. In the following months, she forgave him “because it was the easiest thing to do,” she says. “Looking back, I realise neither of us was happy. We ignored that because we were desperate to make it work. I consider this incident a wake-up call, telling me that it’s not too late to get out. After all, if we’re feeling trapped in just two years of being together, things will only get tougher later,” she says.
Guilt holds you back Yet, neither of them is up to taking that final step. One of the factors holding them back is guilt. Though Suraj was the first to act on his feeling of being stuck, he didn’t want to let go because he felt guilty. “I hurt her though I never meant to. I want to make amends. It had taken us so long to get used to each others’ quirks and I ruined it all over one stupid weekend…,” he says, forgetting that it was a relationship in ruins that had driven him to the act of “stupidity” in the first place.
For her part, Pragya is candid enough. “I feel trapped too. It no longer feels right for us to be together. I’ve grown to love him, but we don’t have a lifetime of happiness ahead.”
Next one could be worse
Another powerful force that acts as a barrier to estranged partners breaking up is the fear of the unknown. You already know your partner well and though you may not be happy, you decide to endure a meaningless relationship because the next could be worse.
Suraj didn’t want to leave Pragya because there’s no guarantee the next relationship will work any better than this one did. “Like everyone else, Pragya has her flaws, but I’m beginning to accept those,” he rationalises.
What are these flaws he hopes to train himself to accept? “Unlike me, Pragya doesn’t like socialising much. So we barely ever go out for a meal or a drink. I started hanging out at home much more than I ever did. I’d even stopped meeting my friends,” he says.
He also finds her overbearing. “She likes things done her way, which is okay, but I had to change a lot of things about me in the process,” he says. “Every time I tried expressing my view, she’d throw a fit. Once, when she was driving, I panicked when I realised she wasn’t slowing down for a car turning ahead of us. I just told her to watch out. She screamed, got off, slammed the car door shut, and sat down in the rear without a word. I didn’t know how to react.”
Now he knows she has anger management issues. Over time, he says, he hopes to be able to deal with her anger. In the same breath, he worries that he’s “not getting any younger.” At 33, he wants to feel “settled”. He knows that breaking out and leaving a known partner behind is just the opposite of getting ‘settled’.
Sitting on the fence Like Suraj, Sara too is sitting on the fence for now. This interim period can be the most trying time in a break-up, and you never know how long this phase will go on. “Sometimes, especially in long-term relationships, you realise that though you’re not happy, you are comfortable with your partner,” says counselling psychologist Rhea Pravin Tembhekar. “It’s not like packing your bags and leaving for a holiday. You take your time weighing the pros and cons of a relationship.”
As for Sara, she says she’s been brooding over the decision for a year. “I know that just hoping things will work out won’t solve anything. But I don’t know what else to do.”
In KANK, despite their being disowned by their respective spouses, it takes Shah Rukh and Rani three more years before they start their new life together. Call it the Bollywood version of poetic (in)justice. Somehow, when it comes to relationships, it is always difficult to start afresh. The philosophically minded would perhaps argue that it’s meant to be that way.
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