In the piece before this one, I wrote about how Indian marriages are chosen, and why the mismatch between arranged practicality and love marriage emotion creates trouble before a couple even reaches the wedding day. This piece is about what happens after, because in my observation, and in the experience of a great many people I have come to know over the years, the real difficulty in Indian marriages often begins not at the wedding but well after it, frequently around the arrival of the first child.
In a great many Indian households, marriage does not simply join two people. It places a man between two women, his wife and his mother, and asks him to navigate a loyalty that was never meant to be divided so sharply. A mother, though she will rarely say this openly, often feels a real sense of loss when her son’s attention shifts toward his new wife. Psychologists who study attachment describe this as a natural, if painful, response to a bond changing shape rather than ending, a mother watching the centre of her son’s daily life move elsewhere. At the very same time, a wife who watches her husband remain deeply attached to his mother can feel that she herself is not being fully cared for, that some part of her husband still belongs somewhere she cannot reach. The man in the middle of this is rarely the villain in either story. He is simply caught between two people he loves, each of whom is responding, in her own way, to a very human fear of being displaced.
This dynamic becomes sharpest inside joint families, where physical closeness leaves little room for the new couple to build their own rhythms without another set of eyes and expectations always present. I have come to believe, even knowing this will sound blunt to some readers, that one of the most protective things a newly married couple in India can do is move into their own home, separate from the extended family, as early as circumstances allow. This is not a rejection of parents, and it does not have to be framed as one. It is simply the creation of space in which a marriage can find its own footing before it is asked to survive the added weight of competing loyalties under one roof.
A second, quieter shift tends to follow the birth of a child. A father’s attention, understandably, moves toward the new baby, often without him fully realising how much of his time and emotional energy this now consumes. This shift is rarely acknowledged as a source of strain, because on the surface it looks like nothing but good parenting. But a wife who has just gone through childbirth, who is often exhausted and adjusting to an entirely new identity herself, can experience this redirected attention as a second instance of feeling less prioritised, coming not long after the strain she may already have felt around her husband’s bond with his mother. Psychologists have written about this postpartum period as one of the most vulnerable windows in any marriage, precisely because both partners are stretched thin at the same time, often without the vocabulary to say so to each other.
There is also a physical dimension to this period that deserves to be said plainly, because it rarely is. Childbirth brings a dramatic drop in oestrogen and progesterone within days, and that hormonal shift affects a new mother’s body and mind in ways that have nothing to do with her character or her commitment to her marriage. Most women experience some version of this as the so called baby blues, a passing stretch of tearfulness, irritability, and exhaustion that eases within a couple of weeks. For a meaningful number of women, roughly one in seven by most clinical estimates, it does not ease, and becomes something doctors recognise as postpartum depression, a genuine clinical condition, not simply tiredness or moodiness, and one that only gets that diagnosis once the symptoms are severe and persistent enough to interfere with daily life. A husband who does not understand this distinction can easily misread his wife’s withdrawal or flatness as a loss of feeling for him, rather than what it usually is, a body and a mind moving through a genuine physiological upheaval at the exact moment his own attention has shifted toward the new child. Layered on top of the mother in law tension and the redirected attention of a new father, this hormonal reality may well be a third, largely unspoken factor in why so many Indian marriages begin to crack in precisely this window.
It is around this same period, in many of the cases I have observed, that a certain restlessness begins to surface, in men more visibly, though not exclusively. Some psychologists and evolutionary theorists have pointed to an innate pull toward novelty that both men and women can feel over the course of a long relationship, a pull that has nothing to do with love having failed and everything to do with how human attraction is wired. I want to be careful here, because this is a genuinely contested area of psychology, and it is not destiny. Whether that restlessness turns into something that damages a marriage depends far less on instinct itself than on the values, communication, and commitment a person chooses to bring to the relationship despite it. But when a marriage is already strained by unresolved tension between a wife and a mother in law, or by the quiet neglect that follows a child’s birth, that restlessness finds far more room to grow into something a marriage cannot survive. I have seen it end marriages. I have, more than once, seen it end lives.
I have no hesitation in admitting that I have gone through experiences that turned my own life upside down. I was shattered, wounded, and there were several moments when I seriously considered ending my own life. What eventually pulled me back was strange in its own way. The same pain pushed me toward something productive, in my case, writing, and toward work that could bring some genuine positive change to society. Slowly, I stepped back from the entire logic I had been living inside. I chose to live separately, quietly continuing to fulfill my duties as a father, and built a life centered on my actual purpose rather than on the partnership I had once assumed defined me. Once I did that, things became clearer than they had been in years.
I do not believe any of this is spoken about honestly enough in Indian society, and I think our educational system carries real responsibility for that silence. We teach children mathematics, history, and science with great seriousness, yet we send them into adulthood with almost no structured understanding of what a long term relationship actually requires psychologically, how attachment works, how conflict escalates, what a healthy boundary between a spouse and a parent looks like, or how ordinary and survivable certain phases of restlessness or disconnection can be if a couple has the tools to recognise and name them. We treat this entire domain of human experience as something people are simply expected to figure out on their own, usually after the damage has already been done.
Part of the reluctance, I suspect, comes from how closely this subject brushes up against religious and cultural sensitivities. A serious, honest conversation about the psychological demands of monogamy, or about why certain family structures create predictable strain, inevitably raises questions that sit close to religious teaching on marriage, and few governments, in India or elsewhere, seem willing to wade into that territory directly. But the cost of that avoidance is not abstract. It is paid, quietly, inside individual households, by men and women who reach crisis points they were never given the language or the preparation to recognise, let alone navigate.
I believe this needs to change, beginning in our schools. Not as a single lecture bolted onto a health class, but as a genuine, ongoing part of how we prepare young people for adult life, covering the psychology of attachment, the realistic pressures that joint families and new parenthood place on a marriage, and honest, non-judgemental education about why relationships strain in the ways they predictably do. This is not an attack on marriage, or on the family structures Indian society has built over generations. It is an argument that those structures deserve to be protected with real understanding, rather than left to survive on tradition and silence alone. A society that teaches its young people how relationships actually work, psychologically and practically, before they enter one, is a society far more likely to end up with marriages that last, and with people inside those marriages who are not simply surviving them, but genuinely well.
But there is a deeper truth underneath all of this, one I had to learn for myself the hard way. Marriage is not your whole life. It never was. Somewhere along the way, many of us hand over our entire sense of purpose to a marriage that was only ever meant to be a part of a much larger life. The chains that keep people trapped are rarely the marriage itself. They are invisible: guilt, fear of judgement, the belief that you are only worth as much as someone else’s approval of you. Detach from those chains. Not from your responsibilities, not necessarily from the relationship itself, but from the fear that has quietly been running your life. Once you do that, you stop merely surviving your circumstances and start building the life you were actually meant to live.
A partner is needed. Someone to hold you when a day has gone wrong in ways you cannot explain to anyone else. Someone to lie beside you at night after the world has taken what it wanted from you. Someone who meets your need for closeness, for touch, for simply being wanted, the same needs every human body carries. If you have found someone who gives you even this, honestly, then you are blessed, whatever name you give to what the two of you are.
This piece reflects patterns observed specifically within Indian marriages and Indian family structures, and is written from that context.
If anything in this piece has touched on something you are personally struggling with, please know that support is available. Tele-MANAS: 14416 (24/7, free) | KIRAN: 1800-599-0019 (24/7, free)
In short:This piece continues the earlier argument that Indian marriages often unravel not at the wedding but afterward, in the quiet triangle between a man, his wife, and his mother, and in the strain that follows a child’s birth, compounded by real hormonal shifts like postpartum depression that go widely misunderstood. Drawing on a deeply personal account of nearly losing everything before finding clarity, the piece argues that Indian schools have failed to teach the psychology of relationships, and calls for real education on this front. It closes with a direct message: marriage was never meant to be a person’s entire purpose, and real freedom comes from detaching from the invisible chains, guilt, fear, and the need for approval, rather than from the relationship itself.
