The Indian Express | 1 week ago | 19-03-2023 | 11:45 am
In a departure from protocol in divorce cases, the Calcutta High Court let a distraught 13-year-old boy choose which parent he wanted to stay with saying he was “intelligent enough” to decide the matter. The child chose his father.The mother was granted visitation rights and a month’s custody per year.“The court should not allow such bitterness between parents to affect the child,” opined the division bench of Justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar, referring to a Supreme Court order that said the welfare of a minor child would prevail over the legal rights of warring parents. (Noteworthy, as in this case and so many more, one parent had filed a criminal case against the other.) Available online, in this judgment dated February 28, 2023, the court has quietly recognized fathers’ roles in child rearing and crucially, prioritized the feelings of the minor involved.We all know them. Couples embroiled in toxic fights hurling abuses at each other turning their children’s lives into a horrifying nightmare in the process. This is a problem that cuts across class boundaries; even the smartest, best educated (and nicest) of people aren’t able to “consciously un-couple” before causing irreparable damage (to themselves, most of all). It’s a familiar sequence of events playing out in family courts routinely — blinding rage, painful judicial procedure, stress, financial loss — till one exhausted, worn-out party eventually decides enough is enough and everyone moves on. Years of mudslinging takes its toll; there’s a huge opportunity cost to mind-space taken up by hatred. Must a breakup be a battle? It seems so because hearing of an amicable parting is rare.The culture paints a rose-tinted view of marriage, a socially compulsory life event dreamily projected as a happily-ever-after. Carefully filtered images of beautiful brides and perfect weddings flood Instagram, masking the truth: relationships are hard, and these days, worryingly fragile. Love or arranged, no one’s mentally prepared for a lifetime with another individual. So, it’s a huge shock when expectations don’t match reality. This is what needs addressing – instead of a superficial focus on getting married (our nosy families are great at drumming up partners), there need to be many, no-holds-barred conversations on how to survive marriage – forewarned is forearmed. Seeing so many marriages crash and burn, more people are seeking advice; www.justdial.com has over 50 listings for pre-marital counseling in the Delhi NCR region itself. They offer solutions on communicating and navigating conflict but they stop short of pointing out when to exit. However, any couple availing of these services will gain perspective and be in a better position to handle a separation, if it comes to that.Officially, India has one of the lowest divorce rates in the world; less than 2% marriages end, a suspiciously low number that just doesn’t add up with the reality around us. It isn’t always big issues like abuse or alcoholism that cause a split; sometimes, there’s simply nothing going on and both people are better off apart. A previous generation didn’t see a lack of compatibility as a good enough reason to end things. Youth today know, instinctively, that languishing in a dead relationship is soul destroying. Tolstoy’s oft repeated observation, that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is not entirely true — in fact, every unhappy home has one thing in common — invariably, the husband and wife loathe each other. Their misery drains the energy of the family who exist perpetually on edge, always waiting for a fresh blow to fall.This is no way to spend our short, precious lives. Eventually, as divorce becomes commonplace and people discover saving time matters more than plotting revenge, they’ll see the value in disentangling with as little drama as possible. It’s easy to bemoan millennial intolerance as the culprit of familial breakdown but from another point of view, people seem unafraid to wrest control of their futures. And when we fail as humans are apt to do, one thing’s for sure: we learn how to pick ourselves up again.The writer is director, Hutkay Films
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