sleeping with the enemy?







Hmmmm, that's what I thought. Really! That is what every woman feels on getting hitched. Life is seen stretching for all eternity with the man besides you, if you are in love or wanting and waiting to be in love. You put all your hopes, your expectations, your wishes and desires on this one man who represents not just the future to you, but, essence and flavor of that future, the tone, the verve, the sound and music of it all that is is yet to come. He is then a beacon of light, a kind of an insurance against lost youth and loneliness, he is going to be there as yours, loving and caring for you, enveloping you in a kind of protective cocoon, to shield you from the vagaries of time and all that it brings with it. Marriage, then, becomes not an adventure of the present but a long term friendship, a life of togetherness of companionship, of being with each other through health and sickness, in life an din death.


When one relationship becomes so pivotal to a woman in her prime years, when so much hinges on this one person and this one bond, when, all her happiness, her way of being, her life depends so much on this one man - how tragic is it when that very man fails her. When your husband who is supposed to take care of you and protect you from al hurts, all the harshness of this world, when he is your wall that separates the cunning and cruel world from you when this very man becomes your enemy, how do you feel?


Am I being melodramatic? perhaps, but isn't this tragic? that the very man who was to love and care for you becomes hostile and strange. where do you go? the first and foremost thought that comes to your mind is that of complete dissimilitude, of being dealt a mean hand by fate - because it is all against the natural and done strain of things. Husbands are supposed to care for their wives (yes, I know - roll your eyes all you want) that is my perception, that is my world and it so just happens in my world. So what does one do when that very husband is bound to crush you literally, when he rejects you totally, when he arms himself against you, riles and insults you, cheats on you, abuses you, and maligns you and then simply and in plain words just does not want you, how do you react or how are you supposed to react?


I would say complete paralysis of mind and body is quite a close description. For when the world inverts around us, when the changes are so brutal, when what is becomes totally alien to what should be, then a woman thus scorned is on the verge of madness. What is madness? and how do we define it? I'v heard a lot of definitions but this one seems most apt to me - "madness is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result every time." She keeps on living expecting the man to behave in the way he ought to behave and not as he does. Is that denial, is that madness, is that lunacy - perhaps all of the epithets so mentioned, but that is how grim and sad reality is. We keep on going expecting reality to be exactly how we are taught to believe it should and may be and not the ugly face that it has acquired.

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