What would you do if your spouse refuses to take the garbage out even for a day? Well, Sunita filed for a divorce. A middle-level manager in an industrial consultant firm in Chennai, 32-year-old Sunita might have had several other reasons to snap the nuptial knot, but that's what she told her lawyer as the ultimate provocation. Couples, especially the younger lot, are walking out of marriages at the slightest of provocations, feel marital counsellors and lawyers.
Psychiatrist and author of The Fifty-50 Marriage: Return to Intimacy' Dr Vijay Nagaswami analyses the modern day divorce as a break-up of a partnership. "Earlier, marriage was a sacrament," he says. "Today, it is a partnership. In a partnership, the partners seek mutuality. When mutuality is lacking, the partners walk out." He calls it a result of a liberalised living. Some others like clinical psychologist Nappinai Seran call it the complete death of tolerance.
"Young couples nowadays need only frivolous reasons to end their marriage. There is little tolerance and no time for patch-up. And often children are the worst sufferers of the separation," says Seran, who provides counselling to parents and children at the family courts in Chennai. Statistics show that the number of divorces in the city has been steadily up in the last ten years (see box).
Geeta Ramaseshan, senior lawyer at Madras high court, attributes it partly to financial independence of women who don't want to put up with a relationship she doesn't want. "At the core of urban divorces are mismatches of expectations. Women's expectations have changed in the last ten to 15 years. They could be expectations about sharing of housework, sharing of money or even expectations about the in-laws. Financial independence makes it easy for her to walk out of the marriage," says Ramaseshan, who believes that the woman has no go but to get out when there is marital violence. "Having a child makes it difficult. That's why it's not just young women who are seeking divorce. There are many women in their fifties who do that. These are people who have put up with a bad marriage but waited till the children to grow up before seeking divorce," adds Ramaseshan.
As for the cited reasons for divorce, Dr Nagaswami says there has been a sea change. "Earlier there were big issues like alcoholism, neglect and extramarital relationships. Today, a spouse feels the need for a divorce because he or she wants more space," says Dr Nagaswami whose waiting list of patients has gone up from a day or two ten years ago to two or three weeks now. So has the number of marital counsellors. From a handful last decade, today they are in hundreds in the city.