Wife-long Affair

Pawan Verma

“Man is born free”, said Rousseau, “but everywhere he is in chains”. The tragedy of man’s eternal bondage, which prompted the French philosopher to utter these words, started with an act of God Himself, when He created Eve out of a rib of Adam, placed her in front of him and said, “Go and choose thy wife”. In recent times, God seems to have delegated His powers to Eve, who now decides everything on behalf of Adam. The other day, in a wedding, as the priest asked the bride if she accepted the groom as her husband, she said, “I do”. When a similar question was put to the groom, she promptly replied, “Yes, he does”.

Yet, it remains a fact that all men are not slaves, some are bachelors also. Those who are lucky in love remain bachelors, realizing that it is better to have loved and lost than to do home work with three children. The ordinary mortal among the men, however, keeps on chasing a woman till she catches him and becomes his WIFE, which is nothing but a euphemistic abbreviation for “Worries Invited For Ever”. It is indeed a pity that while a woman takes 20 years to make a man of her son, another woman makes a fool of him in 20 minutes and hooks him for a husband.

Ideally speaking, all marriages are happy. It is the living together afterwards that causes all the trouble. Before marriage, a girl gets into her fiancé’s wallet as a photo, but after marriage she gets into the wallet herself. As a result, marital life becomes a matter of wife and debt. I know of a friend who didn’t report the theft of his credit card to the police for the simple reason that the thief was spending much less than his wife. Unfortunately, such marriages are doomed to end in divorce. As he loses his capital, she loses her interest.

Yet, there are husbands who profit immensely from their marriage. Their wives, generally speaking, are generally speaking. Quite often, such a husband undergoes considerable intellectual growth after his marriage, as his wife gives him a piece of her mind every day. It is precisely for this reason that King Solomon, backed up by his 100 wives, was considered to be the wisest man on earth. Sure enough, he gave them the best ears of his life.

The essence of marital wisdom lies in the realization that women are always smarter than men : they have figures to prove it. Therefore, any man who thinks that he is smarter than his wife, would indeed be married to a smart woman. Wise husbands discover quite early in their marital career that “man” is only a part of “woman”, that every “madam” has an “Adam” in it, every “she” has a “he” in it and every “lady” contains a ‘lad in it. Such realizations help a man graduate as a “perfect husband” early in life, which in essence means developing a belief that one has got a “perfect wife”.

(First published in Times of India, Edit page, dated 16.05.2001)