Njan Prakashan in Punjab

 

On Gujarat's Love Jihad Bill

Mr. Mustafa raises a valid point about a woman's right (Hindu in this case) to choose who she wishes to cohabit with in a marriage. And therefore it follows that no one else should be allowed to influence this absolute right of Hindu women. However, this claim can be true only in the case of independent women who can carry on despite the failure of their choice. Women who have exercised their absolute right in choice of their mate should not expect their families (whose opinion they may have ignored) to rally around and provide for them when their choices fail them.

Please write in your comments on this matter.

 

The con behind every wedding

Anon in The Guardian

A lavish wedding, a couple in love; romance was in the air, as it should be when two people are getting married. But on the top table, the mothers of the happy pair were bonding over their imminent plans for … divorce.

That story was told to me by the mother of the bride. The wedding in question was two summers ago: she is now divorced, and the bridegroom’s parents are separated. “We couldn’t but be aware of the crushing irony of the situation,” said my friend. “There we were, celebrating our children’s marriage, while plotting our own escapes from relationships that had long ago gone sour, and had probably been held together by our children. Now they were off to start their lives together, we could be off, too – on our own, or in search of new partners.”

It’s bittersweet, this clash of romantic hope and lived experience. I am living it now, yo-yo-ing between the wedding plans of my daughter and son, both in their 20s, and the fragility and disappointment of my own long marriage. My days seem to be divided between excited chat about embryonic relationships that are absolutely perfect, and definitely going to last for ever, and remote and cold exchanges with a husband who has disentangled himself emotionally from me, and shows no signs of wanting to reconnect (I have suggested Relate many times; he is simply not interested).

To some extent, this juxtaposition of young love and old cynicism was ever thus: throughout time, weddings have featured, centre-stage, a loved-up duo who believe their devotion to one another will last for ever, while observing from the wings are two couples 30, 35 or more years down the line, battle-scarred by experience, and entirely devoid of rose-tinted spectacles – the parents of the bride and groom. And in the generation of “silver splitters”, these sixtysomethings are more likely than ever to be in the process of uncoupling, at the precise moment when their offspring are embracing the dream of lifelong partnership.

So how do we reconcile our cynicism – or, at best, our scepticism – for marriage and long-term love, with our offsprings’ enthusiasm to tie the knot, and embark on a life of seeming marital bliss? On one level, the phenomenon is heartwarming. It is testament, you could argue, to the resilience of the human spirit: however difficult our own marriages turned out to be, we war veterans look at our kids staring into each other’s eyes, and we melt inside. Yes, we think to ourselves, we made mistakes; we took paths that turned out to be wrong. Even, we think, we made fundamentally bad choices: we married the wrong men.

As a result, love was seriously skewed for us: but in the next generation – we nod our heads vigorously to this, while cheerily agreeing to a no-holds-barred expensive wedding – things will be different. True love will be theirs; the fairytale that eluded us will work for them, at last.

What hokum. As the survivor of a difficult marriage, this much I know: the biggest burden is the disappointment. And it is a disappointment born on my own wedding day in 1985: more than three decades later, the hopes of that morning still glint from the shadows. The expectations heaped on us, including by my in-laws whose own miserable marriage still had another two decades left to torture them, are the ghosts around the sad embers of our once-glowing fire.
So what can we do differently? Here’s the truth of it, as a wise friend said to me recently: in the 21st century, in a world in which women as well as men have choices and independence and long lives (all good), it will be increasingly difficult for one individual to answer the emotional, spiritual and physical needs of another, across many decades. Life is different now: we have bigger imaginations, we have higher expectations, we have more opportunities and, crucially, those opportunities continue well on into our 50s, 60s and 70s – and for all I know, into our 80s and 90s too. Even more significantly, we women have these opportunities: for men, they are less of a novelty. But their more widespread existence is the agent of seismic change in intimate relationships. We no longer need to put up with misery; we can alter the way we live.

I suggest that we, the parental generation, take a subtle lead in being honest with our twenty- and thirtysomethings about the realities of relationships, and love, and longevity, and choices. That we stop buying into the burgeoning and ever-more-elaborate wedding industry, a giant luxury liner that sails full-steam ahead, oblivious to the lifeboats and shipwrecks all around it in the water. At least begin to ask questions of the commercial interest that operates that liner, of its intentions and its fallout (not to mention its profits). There is more than coincidence, surely, in the way we seem to invest more and more resources in marriages that are less and less likely to survive.

How we introduce these notes of caution into our children’s lives is a much more difficult task. As parents, we want nothing more than happiness for our offspring: none of us wants to burst their bubble, at the precise moment it is so expanded.

As so often with parenting, though, we have to take the longer view. Sometimes I think that, even though my children may not understand or welcome some of the messages they get from me now, with me in my mid-50s and them in their mid-20s, there may be moments in the future when what I said, or how I behaved, suddenly makes sense. Parenting means filling your children’s backpack with supplies, and some of the supplies down the bottom of the bag may not be needed for many years to come.

One important factor in all this was raised by Sylvia Brownrigg in these pages earlier this year, and it is this: children are not interested in their parents’ relationships. They’re not interested in their parents’ marriage (beyond hoping that it is incident-free, and as calm as possible) and they are certainly not interested in their parents’ other relationships, if those happen or are ongoing. So we cannot weigh them down with the detail of why our marriages are failing, or unhappy, or disappointing – and yet, we must somehow signal to them that life is a long journey, and that it may be a mistake to invest too much in one central relationship on into the far distant future.

We are pioneers, us fifty- and sixtysomething mothers; we are walking a tightrope, and it is difficult to get the balance right. Sometimes we wobble; sometimes we fall right off. But the fact that we are walking the tightrope at all is the important bit. We are trying to be authentic, to our burnt-out marriages and to ourselves, as well as to our children and the realities of their future.

And choices cut both ways, too. Remember those mothers at the wedding party? My friend, as I say, is now divorced; but the bridegroom’s parents are having counselling, and have not ruled out the possibility of sharing their lives again.

Being more ambitious for ourselves doesn’t mean our marriages can’t survive, but it does mean a bad marriage can only survive if it can change. And that surely is the message, and the hope, we want to give our children, as they taste the realities of long-term love, or long-term what-was-once-love, and what just possibly might be love once again.

How to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life

The Guardian

 

‘Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem.’ Photograph: Microzoa/Getty Images


1 Accept that having sex with the same person for the rest of your life – unless it’s yourself (see later) – is hard and, at times, boring. But not impossible. The problem – actually, there are several and also lots of contradictions – is that the received wisdom has always been to spend more time with your partner to build something called “intimacy”, which will lead to The Sex. Actually, this may be wrong.

2 Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem. Do romantic weekends make you feel really unromantic and panicked? Seeing someone all the time is not sexy after the first few months. It leads to something called habituation, which must be avoided at all costs if you want to continue having sex with your partner. Habituation is when you stop really seeing someone/thing because you see them all the time, ie taking someone for granted, which leads to hating their guts. In one survey, a common answer to the question “When do you feel most attracted to your partner?” was “When they weren’t there.” This is because anticipation is a powerful aphrodisiac and distance lets erotic imagination back in, which leads to fantasy. Unfortunately, it’s often cruelly crushed when your partner comes back into view.

3 The major stumbling block to sex in a long-term relationship is that you’re after two opposing things: security, reliability – lovely anchoring things like that which make you feel safe – but you also want fire, passion, risk, danger, newness. The two camps are opposed. If you have one, you can’t have the other.

4 The answer is to try to get pockets of distance. Make sure you stay true to yourself. Do things for yourself and by yourself; socialise on your own sometimes. In another survey, respondents said that they found their partners sexiest when the partners were in their element: the life and soul of the party, doing a job really well. Being “other” to the person they knew as reliable and as their partner. Having sex at your partner’s place of work may be something to consider if you can avoid CCTV. You don’t want to watch yourself having sex with the same person over and over again on YouTube because you have become a meme.

5 All this said, you do need to spend some quality time together to keep the bonds going. Sharing good experiences is better than spending your money on stuff for each other. This is because memories of experiences shared become more golden with the passing of time, unlike mere things you get used to (see habituation). Also you can only throw things at each other in an argument that leads to sex if you are in a film starring Sophia Loren. In real life, it leads to hate and mess.

6 Masturbation is basically having sex with the same person for all of your life, yet no one gets sick of that. Why? Because you are safe to go into your own private head-place, and the chances are that there is a real dissonance between the erotic you and the you in the real world. The erotic you has no place in your every day life, the erotic you may not be very responsible (responsibility kills sex drive). The erotic you only has one goal. Orgasm. It isn’t the point, they always tell you that in sex columns, but it’s nice – otherwise, come on, what is the point of all that effort? It’s this distance that’s at the heart of keeping an erotic charge between you and your partner. Consider separate bedrooms.

7 Learn the difference between wanting someone and neediness. The first is sexy, the latter isn’t. Looking after someone because you want to is different from one person being cast in the parenting role to the other, which isn’t sexy at all and will lead to a lack of sex with your partner and, possibly, lots of sex with someone else who doesn’t need looking after.

8 Don’t expect your partner to be everything to you. There’s an oft quoted phrase in relationship circles: “don’t expect your partner to do the job a whole village once did.” Also be realistic: two centuries ago you’d probably be dead by the age of 50, now marriages can last longer.

9 But! Take solace in the fact that older people do have more sex. Last year, a study found that if you’ve been married to the same person for 65 years, you have more sex than you did at your 50th wedding anniversary.

10 The secret of sex with the same person for ever, says Esther Perel, the author of Mating in Captivity, is letting go of “the myth of spontaneity. Committed sex is willful, premeditated, focused and present”. She also suggests good tools for talking with your partner (or to find out things about yourself), for example, start conversations with: “I shut myself off when …” and “I turn myself on when …”

The housing crisis is creating sharp-elbowed husband hunters

Grace Dent in The Independent

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen, foretelling the British housing situation in 2016, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Oh how I struggled, as a sixth-former in the Nineties, with the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.

How hideous, I thought, that a time existed when a woman would marry a man for a house. Cut forward some two decades to the era of the £80,000 mortgage deposit. How odd that marrying bricks and mortar – with an added spouse as a bonus – seems pragmatic, rather than mercenary, today.

I very much enjoyed a recent column by the writer Esther Walker, in which she admits spying her then-boyfriend Giles Coren’s slightly neglected five-bedroom London townhouse, seven years ago, and being instantly smitten. With the house, that is. Coren, as alluring as he is, came second in the equation. First, Walker says, she saw the chipped front door, the replaceable carpets and all that lovely space. Here was a home in which she could live, nest, and raise children.

It is fascinating to me that, five short years ago, a confession as gloriously candid as Walker’s would have provoked feminists into bringing down the internet. I would have been among them, perhaps. Today, I greet the same news with a relaxed shrug of acceptance.

Just five short years ago, I remained convinced that if a young woman – or a young man, for that matter – dreamed audaciously and worked very, very hard, they need not be dependent on anyone for a home. I bought my own house through sheer slog and bloody-mindedness; why couldn’t Generation Buzzfeed do the same? 

But little by little, I’ve watched the rise of single men and women trapped in later-life house-shares. I’ve seen how grown-up children are reduced to squatting like cuckoos in their parents’ back bedrooms until well after it is polite. Eventually, I was writing about the rise of strangers in London sharing bunkbeds (out of grim necessity, I should point out, not as a niche hobby).

The future seemed rather infantalising. And for women, feminism may well have flourished, but owning the house you live in, like Beyoncé sang about in “Independent Women” has fallen on its arse somewhat.

The facts are sobering: recent research by the Resolution Foundation on inter-generational fairness shows that in 1998, more than half of those earning 10 to 50 per cent of the average national income had a mortgage. This figure dropped to one in four by 2015. Within a decade, if things continue as they are, one in 10 will have a mortgage. In the late 1990s, when I was a strident youthful thing, it took determined people like me three years to save up for a deposit. Today it would take 22 years. That’s a long time to share a bunk bed, even if it’s in HMP Holloway.

This is particularly bleak in the light of new research on the rise of the “crowd worker” – people paid through online platforms such as Uber, Upwork and TaskRabbit. Here, instead of fairly paid, pensionable work which impresses mortgage vendors, there is a generation tied to their phones waiting to accept or decline piecemeal “tasks”.

Crowdworkers tend to work without benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions or minimum wage guarantees. There must – I suspect, as I’ve never worked like this myself – be a feeling for crowdworkers of being tremendously busy and usefully employed. But meanwhile, financially at least, they are treading water. I’m not sure how you conduct a family life or a relationship around crowdwork, although I’m pretty sure the people who profit from it will say that it’s this versatility that is the unique selling point.

One thing I do know is that Walker’s confession unveils an unpalatable truth about the modern British relationship. We are, increasingly, a nation of clandestine Austen heroines in search of those “in possession of a good fortune”. Be you feminist or fervent bachelor, gay, straight, male, cis or genderfluid; for the average person, marrying into property will be your best shot at “owning it” these days. And if you can charm your name on to the mortgage deeds, well, even better. The housing crisis will make sharp-elbowed, radar-eyed Chelsea husband-hunters of all of us.

In another five years, I predict that Tinder will be outmoded by a simple database of single millennials who were lucky enough to inherit – or afford – a three-bedroom house with space for a homeworking office and a nursery. Or an app which lists unwedded people with sickly parents about to cark it who, in the meantime, happen to be sitting selfishly on a five-bedroom pile in Surrey. In the future, these property owners – not the slinky, the booby or the muscular – will be the sex gods of society.
These gods will woo you with their seductive talk of land registry documents, convertable attic space and the downsides of a 20-metre back garden. You will be powerless in the face of their Farrow & Ball catalogue and hopelessly impressed that their bed is on one level and not accessed via a ladder. You will swipe right for a place to call home. Sure, deep, real love will keep you warm in bed at night. But when the place is yours, you can stick in underfloor heating and a reliable combi-boiler.

Modern marriages aren’t made in heaven

Gurcharan Das in The Times of India

In the past few weeks, sexual tragedies have blighted some prominent and attractive lives. Sunanda Pushkar, wife of the writer and minister, Shashi Tharoor, died recently in Delhi. Around the same time, the French First Lady, Valerie Treirweiler, had to be hospitalized in Paris. Both events followed revelations of alleged sexual affairs. Sunanda Pushkar accused her husband of an intimate relationship with a Pakistani journalist. Ms Treirweiler was devastated by the French president, Francois Hollande’s liaison with an actress; France’s first family split a few days later. These are not only titillating sex scandals about glamorous celebrities — they reveal something deeper and infinitely sad about the melancholic human condition. 

The standard narrative in such cases is to blame the unfaithful man, calling him 'scumbag’ and 'cheat'. There is another narrative, however, which holds the institution of 'love marriage' equally guilty. Modern marriage combines three idealistic ideas — love, sex, and family — which make distinctive but unreasonable demands on a couple. To raise a family was, of course, the original idea behind marriage. To it has been added the second ideal of romantic love; and a third — that one's partner should also be a great performer in bed. 

We have a sensible institution in India called 'arranged marriage' which we contrast with 'love marriage'. Throughout human history arranged marriages were the norm in most societies. People got married to raise a family. In early 19th century, with the rise of the middle-classes, 'love marriage' emerged in Europe. It coincided with the Enlightenment, which incubated 'modern' ideas such as liberty, equality, individualism and secularism that quickly swept the world. These liberal ideas, along with 'love marriage', came to India on the coat tails of the British Raj. Initially it infected a tiny westernized minority but today it has permeated a larger middle-class. Most Indians received their ideal of 'love marriage' unreliably from Bollywood, which may explain why good old fashioned arranged marriage is still well and alive in India. 


In pre-modern times, men satisfied the three needs via three different individuals, according to the philosopher Alain de Botton's sensitively male perspective. A wife made a home and children; a lover fulfilled one's romantic needs clandestinely ; and an accomplished prostitute or courtesan was always there for great sex. This division of labour served men well. Given a chance, I expect, my grandfather would have lived thus. But today, we make impossible demands on a single person to meet romantic, sexual and familial needs. She feels huge pressure to fulfil all three roles plus make a career outside the home. What she mostly wants is a love marriage with good and faithful husband. 

The insane ambition of modern love marriage to satisfy so many needs places a huge burden and this might also help to explain the tragedies of Sunanda Pushkar and Valerie Treirweiler. It was certainly behind the tragedies that befell the heroines of two of my favourite novels, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Both women had enviable financial security but also loveless marriages. But both had modern, romantic expectations from life, and dared to fulfil them outside marriage. Society did not forgive their illicit love affairs and their lives ended in tragic suicides. 

Human beings may have become modern and liberal but society remains conservative. Who has not been tempted by illicit love? An affair with a beautiful stranger is a thrilling prospect, especially after years of raising children. There is also fear of death if one is middle-aged — life is passing and when will another chance come? But these exhilarating thoughts have to be weighed against hurting another human being. One must always empathize with the victim of adultery. Even the Kamasutra admits that dharma trumps kama. 

Does one betray another human being or oneself ? Either way one loses. If one decides to have a fling, one betrays a spouse and puts one's love at risk. If one abstains from temptation, one risks becoming stale and repressed. If one keeps the affair secret, one becomes inauthentic. Confessing to it brings needless pain. If one places one's children's interest above one's own, one is disappointed when they leave. If one puts one's own interest above theirs, one earns their unending resentment. This, alas, is the unhappy, melancholic human condition.

How does a polyamorous relationship between four people work?

BBC News 19 Aug 2013

Imagine one house, with four people, but five couples. How does it work, asks Jo Fidgen.

Charlie is talking excitedly about a first date she went on the night before.

Next to her on the sofa is her husband of six years, Tom. And on the other side of him is Sarah, who's been in a relationship with Tom for the last five years. Sarah's fiance, Chris, is in the kitchen making a cup of tea.

The two women are also in a full-blown relationship, while the two men are just good friends. Together, they make a polyamorous family and share a house in Sheffield.

"We're planning to grow old together," says Charlie.

Polyamory is the practice of having simultaneous intimate relationships with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all partners. The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2006, and such relationships are rare enough that Tom finds himself having to account for his personal situation time and time again.

"The number of conversations I've had with peers where I've started to explain it and they've got as far as, 'so, you all cheat on each other' and not been able to get past that. I've said no, everybody's cool with it, everybody knows what's happening, no one's deceiving each other."

If any of the four want to get involved with someone else, they have to run it by the others - all of whom have a veto.

"We can't use a veto for something as silly as, say, personal taste," says Sarah. "If you were dating somebody and I could not understand why you found them attractive, that would not be sufficient reason for me to say, no, you can't see this person."

What counts as infidelity, then?

"Lying," they chorus.

"For example," explains Charlie, "before I went on this first date yesterday, I sat down with each of my three partners and checked with them individually that I was okay to go on this date. Cheating would have been me sneaking off and saying I was meeting Friend X and not say that it was a potential romantic partner."

The rules and boundaries of their relationships are carefully negotiated.

When they had been a couple for just two weeks, Tom suggested to Charlie that they be non-monogamous.

"It was a light bulb moment for me," she says. 'I had been scared of commitment because I had never met anyone I felt I could fall completely and exclusively in love with. The idea of this not being a monogamous relationship allowed me to fall as deeply in love with Tom as I wanted to without fear that I would break his heart by falling in love with somebody else as well."

But how did she feel when, a year into their marriage, Tom fell in love with another woman?

"Well, Sarah's lovely," says Charlie. "I was just so happy that Tom was happy with her."

Sarah's partner, Chris, was less comfortable with the situation at first. They had agreed that they could have other sexual partners, but forming an emotional attachment with someone else was a different matter.

So when Sarah fell for Tom, she agonised over how to tell Chris.

"We sat down and talked about what it meant to be in love with more than one person, and did that mean I loved him less. Well, of course it didn't.

"It's not like there's only so much love I have to give and I have to give all of it to one person. I can love as many people as I can fit in my heart and it turns out that's quite a few."

Chris and Tom bonded over video games and became firm friends. Before long, Chris had fallen in love with Tom's wife, Charlie.

"It had never crossed Chris's mind not to be monogamous - now he says he could never go back," says Sarah.

This quandary over how to manage relationships is something that couples counsellor, Esther Perel, sees people struggling with all the time.

"You can live in a monogamous institution and you can negotiate monotony, or you can live in a non-monogamous choice and negotiate jealousy. Pick your evil.

"If you are opening it up you have to contend with the fact that you're not the only one, and if you are not opening it up then you have to contend with the fact that your partner is the only one."

So how do Charlie, Sarah and Tom handle jealousy?

Not a problem, they insist, and point to a word invented in polyamorous circles to indicate the opposite feeling.

"Compersion," explains Tom, "is the little warm glow that you get when you see somebody you really care about loving somebody else and being loved."

"There's always a small amount of insecurity," reflects Sarah, recalling how she felt when her fiance fell in love with Charlie. "But compare my small amount of discomfort with the huge amount of love that I could see in both of them, and honestly, I'd feel like a really mean person if I said my discomfort was more important than their happiness."

Jealousy has to be handled differently in a polyamorous relationship, adds Charlie.

"In a two-person, monogamous relationship, it's not necessary but it is possible to say, we just need to cut out all of the people who are causing jealousy and then everything will be fine.

"Whereas when you are committed to a multi-partner relationship, you can't just take that shortcut. You have to look at the reasons behind the jealousy."

If an issue does arise, the four may stay up all night talking it over.

"We do so much more talking than sex," laughs Charlie.

But some argue that it is natural for people to bond in pairs.

Our desire for monogamy has deep roots, says Marian O'Connor, a psychosexual therapist at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships in London.

"As children we need someone who loves us best of all in order to thrive. There's normally one main care giver, usually the mother, who will look after the infant.

"The thing about a monogamous relationship, it can give you some sense of certainty and surety, somewhere you can feel safe and at home."

Sarah, Tom and Charlie agree that a safe base is important, but see no reason why only monogamy can provide one.

"I feel safe and secure, with the ability to trust and grow, with Tom, Sarah and Chris," says Charlie. "It is from the base and security of the three of them that I face the world and the challenges the day brings."

"The way I see it, it's only a problem if I feel like one of my partners is spending more time with all their other partners than with me," says Sarah. "It just leads to people feeling hurt."

A shared Google calendar is the answer.

"We mostly use it for keeping track of date nights," says Charlie. "The couple who is on a date gets first pick of what film goes on the TV and it helps keep track of who's in what bedroom."

Sarah chips in. "So, for example, I have a weekly date night with Charlie. It's us snuggling up, us with the TV, us going to bed together and all that kind of business."

Perel sees polyamory as "the next frontier" - a way of avoiding having to choose between monotony and jealousy.

"We have a generation of people coming up who are saying, we also want stability and committed relationships and safety and security, but we also want individual fulfilment. Let us see if we can negotiate monogamy or non-monogamy in a consensual way that prevents a lot of the destructions and pains of infidelity."

But it's not an easy option.

"We get funny looks in the street," says Sarah.

"And every time you out yourself, you risk losing a friend," adds Charlie. "I'm preparing for 30 years of being made fun of."

Tom is cautiously optimistic that polyamory will become "average and everyday".

"Anyone who is expecting some massive social change overnight is terribly mistaken, but it will happen."

In the meantime, the four of them are planning an unofficial ceremony to mark their commitment to each other.

"Sometimes people just write the relationship off as a lazy way of getting more sex than you normally would. There are easier ways," says Tom wryly.

They all agree managing a multi-partner relationship can be exhausting.

"But we don't have a choice. We're in love with each other," they chime.

Family Matters Should Be Argued Only By Married People, Not Spinsters says Judge

A petition to Chief Justice of India asks him to remove Justice Bhaktavatsala of Karnataka High Court for his retrograde views against women against the tenets of the Constitution

From the petition:

On August 31, he went out of his way to counsel a young woman whose stated reason for not living with her husband was that he used to beat her. Justice Bhaktavatsala said, “Women suffer in all marriages. You are married with two children, and know what it means to suffer as a woman. Yesterday, there was a techie couple who reconciled for the sake of their child. Your husband is doing good business, he will take care of you. Why are you still talking about his beatings? I know you have undergone pain. But that is nothing in front of what you undergo as a woman. I have not undergone such pain. But madam (Justice BS Indrakala) has.”

The court asked the woman if her parents were present, at which her father walked up to the bench. The judge remarked, “Ask your father if he has never beaten your mother!” When the woman said her husband would beat her in the open, in front of everyone, Justice Bhaktavatsala remarked that it was she who was bringing it out in the open. The court was told that the husband would beat her in the middle of the night and had thrown her out of the house.

When the woman’s advocate produced photographs showing her swollen face, the court said, “You have to adjust. Are you just behind money? There is nothing in your case to argue on merits. You have to give him a divorce or go with him. Have you read about actor Darshan. He spent 30 days in jail after beating his wife. But they are living together now. What is on your mind and what is on your agenda?”
...
This is just not an isolated case in another case reported , a young advocate had not imagined she would be receiving a lesson on married life when she took up a case on behalf of an estranged wife. She was summarily told by Justice K Bhaktavatsala that she was unfit to argue a matrimonial case as she was unmarried. While the lady advocate was citing the allegations against the husband, Justice Bhaktavatsala stopped her midway and asked, “Are you married?” When she replied in the negative, the judge said, “You are unfit to argue this case. You do not know real life. Why are you arguing like this? He is your (client’s) partner,not a stranger. Family matters should be argued only by married people, not spinsters. You should only watch. Bachelors and spinsters watching family court proceedings will start thinking if there is any need to marry at all. Marriage is not like a public transport system. You better get married and you will get very good experince to argue such cases.”