Divorce cases in Mumbai soar 86% in less than 10 years

Viju B, TNN | Jul 27, 2011, 01.09AM IST

MUMBAI: As the stigma around divorce dissolves steadily, an increasing number of couples in the city are choosing to end their marriage, sometimes soon after exchanging their wedding vows. Between 2009 and 2010, the number of divorces in Mumbai rose from 4,624 to 5,245, a spike of over 13%. Last year's figure is even more startling when compared to 2002's statistic of 2,805 - this means that the number of divorces has climbed by more than 86% in less than a decade.

Social scientists and psychiatrists explain this as a sign that the till-death-do-us-apart class of marriage is under strain. "Young couples marry impulsively and separate equally spontaneously. Divorce is now seen more as a corrective mechanism and a way to move forward in life," says psychiatrist Harish Shetty. Shetty states financial independence, multiplicity of relationships and ample career opportunities as some of the reasons for the increase.

"Gone are the days when the mother-in-law was the villain. Now you alone can save or break a relationship," he says. 'For today's women, divorce no longer carries a stigma'

As the number of divorce cases in the city rise, psychiatrist Harish Shetty cites financial independence and more career opportunities as some of the reasons behind this trend. There are enough instances to back Shetty's assertion.

Varsha Bhosle, who is in her late 20s, decided to end her two-year marriage after she realized that she and her husband "did not have any time for each other". Both of them worked in an IT firm at Malad. What proved the catalyst for the divorce was the husband's choice to move cities. "He wanted me to shift to Pune too. But I felt I had better career choices here. We were both ambitious anyway," Varsha says.

Kusum Singh, a financial consultant, got separated from her husband in January. "It was not that my husband was a bad person. But somehow we just drifted apart and I began seeing someone else. I felt bad for my husband, but after the initial heartburn even he understood ours was a loveless relationship," Singh says.

Lawyers say a major reason for the rise in divorces is that women have become more independent, financially and emotionally. They do not feel that ending their marriage would bring upon them a lifelong stigma. A majority of young couples these days, in fact, separate by mutual consent. "This saves them from the headache of going to court many times. One can get a divorce within six months and maybe two hearings," says Sajal Chacha, a family court lawyer.

Chacha adds there have been cases where young couples have divorced within six months or a year of marriage. "Elders in the family have become more accommodating and do not force their children into a second marriage if the first one fails," she says.

Is Monogamy Obsolete? New Books Challenge Our Ideas of Fidelity

by Jessica Bennett
June 9, 2011 | 12:59am

Anthony Weiner may insist his marriage isn't over, but we've seen this situation play out before. Wives leave husbands, the public condemns the cheating—and, inevitably, six months later, we learn about another scandal. Jessica Bennett on why we need to rethink our notions of fidelity.

As the urban legend goes, the woman is so desperate for a proposal that she cuts out magazine ads of diamond rings and wears them on her finger. In another tale, a girl marks up her calendar with “DID NOT PROPOSE” for each day her boyfriend puts off the looming question. If you judge by the number of Bridezilla shows on television—as well as the thousands of women who’ve made Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! a bestseller—it’s easy to assume that Americans are just dying to say "I Do."

The reality, of course, is that "I Do" is often followed by "I cheated." And it requires little more than the flip of the remote to find out all the gory details. Call girls. Prostitution. Sexting. A love child. Inevitably, we see wives leave husbands, and public condemnation—and watch it happen all over again six months later. The stories have become so common we could argue doing away with marriage altogether—and many have. "Is it obsolete?" wondered The Atlantic. "It's unnecessary," proclaimed Newsweek. Now new Census data reveal that, for the first time, married couples are no longer the majority. As one sociologist told me recently, speaking at a conference on polyamory: "The system simply isn't working."

But Pamela Haag, the author of Marriage Confidential, isn't so quick to call the whole thing off. Marriage is changing, she contends. But rather than giving up on it, why not simply redefine it in a way that works for each of us? Haag cites research showing that 65 percent of women—and a whopping 80 percent of men—say they’d cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. She spends time with couples whose relationships she deems “Oreo marriages”—traditional on the outside, but secretly transgressive on the inside. She describes “parenting marriages,” centered around the kids; the “life partner," who is perhaps more like a best friend than a romantic partner. And, most interestingly, she talks to couples who are working infidelity into their unions, instead of struggling to keep it out. Marriage, she says, isn't dying—it's just changing. "It’s just getting revised for this century," she says.

Many of these couples are what Haag calls the “new monogamists.” She interviews women who hack into their husbands’ emails, those who stray emotionally with online partners they may never meet, as well as those who are OK with it all, employing codes like “the 50-mile rule” (affairs allowed beyond 50 miles of the home) or marriage “sabbaticals” for those who really want a break. Like Weiner, many learn of their partners' indiscretions online. Others employ “don’t ask don’t tell” rules. Still others find out, and simply don't care. “The big romantic standard has always been one strike and you’re out,” says Haag. “But I really think that’s opening up."

Photos: A History of Multi-Partner Relationships

Article - More Ways Than Two GAL LAUNCH

It all sounds terribly transgressive—or unromantic. Except that these families aren’t freaks or outcasts, they’re starting to become the norm. (See: Is Polyamory America’s Next Sexual Revolution?) Haag notes that as many as 4 million married Americans consider themselves swingers—and the number of swing clubs in this country has doubled over the past 10 years. Over the past three years, books like Open by journalist Jenny Block, Opening Up by sex columnist Tristan Taormino, and support from the likes of celebs like Tilda Swinton and Warren Buffett have put open marriage on the map. (When asked, in 2009, how he made his open marriage work, Buffett replied cooly, “you have to be secure.”)

“Humans aren’t monogamous, we need to get over that,” says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. “We fool around. We do! And if you don’t fool around, you want to fool around.”

There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."

She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.) Even as far back as the 1950s, Kinsey was noting that 26 percent of married women admitted to having an affair by age 40, and an additional 20 percent had engaged in petting without intercourse, despite the assumption being that it’s men who most often cheat. More surprisingly, 71 percent of the women in this group reported no difficulties with their marriage—even though half said their husbands either knew or suspected there was something going on. "Humans aren't monogamous, we need to get over that," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. "We fool around. We do! And if you don't fool around, you want to fool around."

And yet monogamy is still the deeply ingrained—or delusional—rule to living happily ever after, and our views toward infidelity are comically naïve. "We cheat—and we also roundly disapprove of cheating," Haag writes—to the extent that we find the action more reprehensible than human cloning (really). It's the ultimate hypocrisy—lodged into every corner of our social existence, leading to the downfall of politicians, executives, religious clerics, athletes… the list goes on. It depends on what survey you examine, but more than half of Americans cheat, and yet 70 to 85 percent of adults think cheating is wrong. "We are fooling ourselves if we think people are as against cheating as they say they are,” says Jenny Block. “Jude Law cheated on Sienna Miller, for God's sake. JFK cheated on Jackie. Have we learned nothing from these scandals?”

Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let's just be honest about our marital motives.

Anatomy of a break-up

It happens every day, yet the bitterness of love turning sour always takes those involved by surprise. Mark Steel was in his forties a respectable father of two when his relationship fell apart. This is histragicomic account of its sad unravelling

Wednesday, 24 September 2008


It must be a trial to live with a comic and their disconcerting habits. Only comics, for example, feel such inconsolable anguish in a curry house, because they're halfway through telling a hilarious joke and it's trodden on by the waiter interrupting with "Your starters, please" and delivering your onion bhajis. Only comics come away from a funeral feeling numb and hollow because another comic's story about the dead person got a bigger laugh than their own. So my partner would probably have been able to make a case that if you're going through a period of manic volatile anxiety, it may not be advisable to be living with a comic.


For around 10 years, our awkward moments remained an unwelcome nuisance that we could learn to live with, like diabetes.

But then they grew, like the engine noise you know you shouldn't ignore, but do anyway until it suddenly clatters with doom. In some ways the more dramatic episodes were the most manageable. But when there was a low level of rumbling discontent, it was tempting to deal with it as a genuine argument, for example by exhaling a puff of exasperation and saying, "But you asked for custard." And that way we could descend into the world of the classic bickering couple, boiling with a sense of injustice while enunciating one word at a time with tensely bent fingers and a galloping heart, "You said turn left so I turned left."

There'd be the gruelling moments following a chilling exchange when neither of us would speak as we brushed past each other, each of us leaving a trail of unsettling frostiness.

Then a neighbour would call out "Hi, yoo-hoo, anyone there?" and my partner would suddenly abandon her scowl and cheerily discuss the latest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which makes you even more livid, unable to de-clench a single muscle while wanting to shout, "OY. We're supposed to be GRUMPY here. You might have been faking it for effect so you can switch it off as soon as an outsider arrives but I really fucking MEANT it er, sorry, Barbara."

Or we'd play out that dreadful scene in which you've snapped at each other with particularly malicious venom but you're not really in a position to leave the room to allow the acrimony to cool down. For example, having just been described as "a selfish shitty lump of shit", you've still got to sit next to each other for the foreseeable future because you've just turned on to the M6 at Lancaster.

From time to time we'd hold a series of informal summits, after the children went to bed, involving discussions that went on until about one in the morning, so that each session was probably longer than the United Nations take to discuss the crisis in Kashmir. And because I fidget, I'd make things worse by getting up to change the CD, which must be exasperating if you're midway through a heartfelt soliloquy about feeling unappreciated.

At one point my partner and I were referred to a doctor who might be able to help us out, but he couldn't find the key to his office so we conducted our discussion sitting in the corridor as hobbling men and kids with broken arms walked past us. Without looking at either of us he muttered, "Hmm, it may be depression" in a way that suggested that if you'd complained about chest pains he'd say, "Ahh, the problem is you've got an illness." After 10 minutes of questions like "What makes you angry?", he took me to one side and said, "Do you have sex?"

"Now and then," I told him hesitantly. "Try to give her more sex," he said, then walked off. And I got the impression he'd prescribe a similar remedy for food poisoning or bee stings.

One problem when a relationship is fraying is that the words that come out are difficult to decipher, as both parties find it hard to articulate the underlying cause of their anxiety. I'd hear, "The PROBLEM, as you well know, is what you KNOW it is and if you can't even KNOW what you've done, well then DON'T you think I don't KNOW." This is a delicate situation for anyone, but a comic has the overpowering instinct to say something like "That's the question for your philosophy exam you may turn over your papers and begin NOW." Which, I can testify, doesn't help.

Trying to answer the points raised, with however much sympathy, is just as useless because such anguish has its own language.

Reassuring someone that you haven't done what they're crying you've done is worthless, because that's not what they're really crying about. It even makes them more frustrated, like when you present a yelling toddler with a bottle of milk when they really want their teddy but can't say the word.

If there was an immediate solution, I couldn't find it, so I entered one of the most negative phases of life in which, despite having a house, a partner, children and middle-aged respectability, you find yourself sleeping every night on the settee. The question for any couple reduced to long-term settee status is how much bitterness must there be to make the settee preferable to the bed?

Settees are uncomfortable. You sleep at best fitfully and every morning a different bit of you is crunched and twisted. You wouldn't choose to sleep there when there's a specially designed piece of sleeping apparatus a few feet away, just because you'd had a row or were in a sulk. You'd have to feel as if you were two North Poles on a magnet, so that even if you were pushed into the bed, you'd ping backwards, twizzle round and land on the settee.

And somehow you get used to it, the journey from overwhelming love and passion to repulsion happening in such gradual increments that you accept it as normal.

I realised my life was in trouble when I started envying couples who had normal ferocious rows. They would be sitting opposite each other on a train, he fuming ahead, lips tight together, breathing heavily through his nose, while she turned each page of a magazine with a violent flick as if swatting away a strange green insect, when without looking up she would snarl, "I can't believe you're going to Dublin on my mum's sixtieth, Sean, you bastard." He'd give it two more snorts and a fume and splutter, "He's my mate, right." And I'd think, "Aah, how sweet." Because my rows had no logic and no plot. If anyone had overheard them, they'd have complained "I didn't enjoy that, there was no beginning, middle or end." They'd get going with an abstract complaint, such as "Oh yes, that's TYPICAL" and move rapidly on to random complaints such as "How DARE you? You couldn't even stand my CAT."

And yet to leave altogether seemed an awful, unimaginable prospect at every level from trying to calm inconsolable kids to having to set up a new broadband account. There's the stench of chaos: legal documents, financial agreements, access arrangements, finding somewhere to live, buying a new settee. And the dreadful finality and acceptance of failure. Despite the high number of families that break apart, each one is categorised as a "failed marriage". Aligned to this sense of failure is the humiliation of giving up. You used to gaze at each other across a table splashed with takeaway curry and communicate with tiny twinkling facial expressions, affectionate puffs and grunts, and it's achingly mournful to accept it's gone. You feel it must still be there somewhere, if only you look hard enough, in the same way that you search through the house over and over again, refusing to accept you've lost your favourite jacket.

To part in your forties with children in tow is so different from doing it in your twenties with nothing more to row about than who gets the blender. All continuity will be lost for ever; in 20 years' time there will still be awkward arrangements about who goes where at Christmas and there will be no time when everyone sits together joyfully recalling the years until now. So after a few months on that settee, it took only a half-decent week without a major cacophony to convince us to give it another go. I left the settee, and everything was marvellous. We held hands on the way to the shop, and some people came for dinner, and we had the floors done up, and we saw Crystal Palace get promoted in the play-off final. But of course it wasn't really marvellous, because nothing had been repaired. We were like an old car that's packed up, but then suddenly one day for some reason when you turn the ignition splutters along again for a while.

One night, after a particularly fraught five hours, I realised the front and back doors were both hidden behind a tower of chairs, planks of wood, buckets and assorted useless objects from under the stairs. "We've barricaded you in," said my son and daughter, "because we were afraid you might leave." These are the issues that are weighed up before anyone takes the decision to finally part from their family. Around this time, the Government and opposition were both suggesting financial incentives should be offered to families who stick together, to curb the blight of broken homes. Even that, they believe, comes down to money. They really haven't got a clue.

The final moments of a failing relationship are usually pathetically ordinary. Unlike in films, where there's a last brave embrace amid the hubbub of an Italian railway station, or a drunk but eloquent liberating speech delivered to a stunned family gathering, the last words are more likely to be "I think this is your mug."

There was a minor grumble, something to do with shopping, one sunny Saturday afternoon, that I think involved cat food, delivered with the intonation Al Pacino would have used if there'd been a cat food issue in Scarface. And immediately I knew that was the end. I had no idea a few minutes earlier that we were one small-to-medium-sized snarl from termination, but when it happened I just knew. I'd run out of tolerance, and it seemed as definite and beyond my control as if I'd gone to make a cake but discovered I'd run out of flour.

"That's it," I said, surprised. Just as there must be a definite point when someone knows, absolutely knows, "I am going to try to swim the Channel" or "I am going to explode myself in a public building" and they become mentally prepared for all that their decision entails. I knew right then that I'd soon be packing records and reassuring children, contacting the gas board and telling people they couldn't get me on that number any more.

One of the weirdest moments after moving out was the first morning I woke up in the new place. Not only was it chillingly still and quiet, this was what the place was always like. Before, there had been moments of quiet when everyone else was out, but it was always a slightly anxious quiet, a brief calm to be inhaled before doors crashed open and the natural beat of childhood urgency ricocheted once more round the building. It was the quiet of a stadium before the starting gun for a sprint final. Now there was a different quiet, a permanent quiet. I could make some artificial noise by putting on the Wu-Tang Clan, but there was no organic thud-thud "Aaagh" "Get OFF" "Dad can I have a Twix" "pewaaa waaa kachakach COOL I've shot a ZOMBIE on level 2."

Another thing that is odd is not having to tell anyone where you're going. You just leave the house, and don't have to call out, "Just nipping out for some Sellotape." To start with I'd wander up the road slightly disconcerted, as if there was some procedure I hadn't been through, perhaps a form to complete when I left the house, to send to the Town Hall. Quite simply, finding yourself on your own for the first time in 13 years is lonely. And the irony with loneliness is it can make you feel that all you want to do is be alone. Then, disaster I couldn't get cable. It wasn't available in the road for some reason. Surely there was a law somewhere that said if someone is lonely cable has to be provided as a basic human right.

Once you're no longer surrounded by the everyday torment of a fractious relationship, it becomes possible to view the squabbles and conflicts from a distance. Even in the midst of wrath and fury, you realise it isn't aimed at you, it's aimed into the air somewhere, at the universe, for being a bastard of a universe. But somehow there seemed to be no way of preventing the frustration from booming and crackling us into court.

As I walked towards the court on the day, I saw her through the window of Starbucks, reading the clinical legal documents of the case. And in that image lay the potential for total despair, the triumph of cynicism. What was the point of hope or love or the tingle of expectation if it could end sitting in Starbucks amending "related" to "pertaining" with a pink marker pen? Can there really be people who stride into court for a case against their ex-partners pumped up with the craving for victory, like American wrestlers? If so you have to wonder whether they ever were in love in the first place. My own overwhelming emotion in the courtroom was bewilderment at how this happened.

How do you end up dreading a visit from the person you used to drive all night to see briefly in the morning? You don't want to spend the rest of your life looking back with disgust at every picnic and curry you shared, regretting the times of ringing in sick to spend the day in bed together, recalling festivals, boat trips, backstage passes, crazy French bars, trips to the all-night beigel shop at five in the morning, the night the Tories were kicked out, the bewildered newspaper man in the snow, as merely part of a marathon mistake.

Of course those moments were as strikingly real and electrifying as you remember them. Which is why the only true victory in this kind of court case would be one in which both of you were sentenced to stay locked in the room until you could remember, for the last time, the thrill of the first glance, the gulp at the first eye contact, the smell of the hopeful decaying function room where you first met.

However vindictive either side may appear, what most shattered couples really want, I suspect, is to smile at each other one last time and mean it, and in that moment salvage all the memories of hope.