Acharya Prashant: The question is from Sonali, “I got married after six years of relationship and five years of married life now. Due to contrasting personalities, my husband and I fight a lot. In April, we had a very big conflict and the police got involved. Now we are living separately and both of us are traumatized. And I do not know whether the situation will lead to divorce. I don’t want to go to the court. I don’t know what to do, I cry myself to sleep every night. He doesn’t talk to me. I love him a lot, I want him back. How to deal with the situation?”
Sonali, you want an answer, and you want an answer within the framework you have narrated to me. The framework involves attraction, conflict, repulsion, reconciliation, breaking up, patching-up. And you want to spend your life in this way? There was a time when your mind was full of romantic thoughts, and now your mind is full of anxious thoughts. In either case, the relationship is keeping your mind quite occupied and that too with the other person at the centre of all thoughts, all preoccupation.
That’s the framework of the common life in relationships. That’s the framework within which the so-called lovers operate. That’s the framework within which a married couple operates. That is also the framework within which divorced individuals operate. That framework includes everything — coming together, drifting apart, going to the court to solemnize your marriage, going to the court to dissolve your marriage, calling up the parents of the other one to beg for his or her hand, calling up the parents of the other one to threaten them with the clenched fist.
What remains common? — That you dial the same numbers and beat for contrasting purposes? Sometimes he is the prince charming on the white horse, the handsome knight in shining armour and sometimes he is the monster personified who must be accused of misogyny and harassment of all kinds and must be dragged by the collar to the police station and then to the court. One thing does not change. What is that? Your mind is full of that one person. When he is at home, you want to fight with him. When he is not at home, you worry about where has he gone. You are also apprehensive that he might be seeing someone else — applies to both genders more or less — so that’s the framework. Pretty comfortable, no?
