If you want to understand how to become better allies to people with disabilities, then join us at Embracing All Abilities: Including People with Disabilities at Work.
When affairs are virtual - are they still 'real'? A look at virtual infidelity and what it means for relationships
Guest Blogger The Girl Next Door as the name implies, is just another ordinary girl with ordinary dreams and ordinary desires – but she likes to imagine that she leads an extraordinary life, in her own way!
R is a neighbour and a family friend. He is married and is a father as well. His family stays in India while he works abroad. He is hard-working and sends money home regularly – even funding his wife’s higher education. I’ve often heard him praising his wife and speaking fondly of his child. It appears that he loves and cares for them. I don’t believe that he consorts with other women in his wife’s absence and I’ve never seen him bring strange women home. However there is a particular aspect of him that I fail to understand.
R engages in intimate chats online with unknown women. He meets women online, chats for a few days and then proceeds to video chats – which involves sexual activity. Keep in mind that the women involved are fully aware of his intentions and in all probability they are also looking for the same thing – it is not as if he misleads them. Why does he indulge in this? He says that it gives him a thrill to ‘seduce’ these women.
R takes great care to not let his wife find out about this. But what if she did someday? Can one justify it saying that afterall R is away from his wife and he has his ‘needs’? In the spirit of ‘adjusting’ should the wife just thank her stars and feel glad that her husband didn’t have a ‘real’ affair?
With advancements in technology, rise of social networks and busy lives, it has become remarkably easy to create and maintain an alternative life online. Would you be okay if your spouse ‘friends’ unknown men/women online? Is it okay as long as they are ‘just chatting’? When ‘real’ affairs can get explained away with, “It was just sex – it didn’t mean anything!”, can we also say, “It was just chatting! I didn’t really do anything!”?
Virtual or real, to me this seems like infidelity. In fact if anything, it actually seems like a coward’s way to have an affair! While adultery is grounds for divorce, do such virtual affairs fall into the adultery category? I don’t know the answer to that. But what I do know is that if I found out that my spouse was having virtual affairs, I am pretty sure that I would experience the same emotions that a real affair would cause – and my marriage would never be the same again.
*Photo credit: rajsun22
Guest Bloggers are those who want to share their ideas/experiences, but do not have a profile here. Write to us at [email protected] if you have a special situation (for e.g. want read more...
Women's Web is an open platform that publishes a diversity of views, individual posts do not necessarily represent the platform's views and opinions at all times.
Stay updated with our Weekly Newsletter or Daily Summary - or both!
As parents, we put a piece of our hearts out into this world and into the custody of the teachers at school and tuition and can only hope and pray that they treat them well.
Trigger Warning: This speaks of physical and emotional violence by teachers, caste based abuse, and contains some graphic details, and may be triggering for survivors.
When I was in Grade 10, I flunked my first preliminary examination in Mathematics. My mother was in a panic. An aunt recommended the Maths classes conducted by the Maths sir she knew personally. It was a much sought-after class, one of those classes that you signed up for when you were in the ninth grade itself back then, all those decades ago. My aunt kindly requested him to take me on in the middle of the term, despite my marks in the subject, and he did so as a favour.
Math had always been a nightmare. In retrospect, I wonder why I was always so terrified of math. I’ve concluded it is because I am a head in the cloud person and the rigor of the step by step process in math made me lose track of what needed to be done before I was halfway through. In today’s world, I would have most probably been diagnosed as attention deficit. Back then we had no such definitions, no such categorisations. Back then we were just bright sparks or dim.
When Jaya Bachchan speaks her mind in public she is often accused of being brusque and even abrasive. Can we think of her prodigious talent and all the bitter pills she has had to swallow over the years?
A couple of days ago, a short clip of a 1998 interview of Jaya and Amitabh Bachchan resurfaced on social media. In this episode of the Simi Grewal chat show, at about the 23-minute mark, Jaya lists her husband’s priorities: one, parents, two kids, then wife. Then she corrects herself: his profession – and perhaps someone else – ranks above her as a wife.
Amitabh looks visibly uncomfortable at this unstated but unambiguous reference to his rather well-publicised affair with co-star Rekha back in the day.
Watching the classic film Abhimaan some years ago, one scene really stayed with me. It was something Brajeshwarlal (David’s character) says in troubled tones during the song tere mere milan ki yeh raina. He says something to the effect that Uma (Jaya Bhaduri’s character) is more talented than Subir (Amitabh Bachchan’s character) and that this was a problem since society teaches us that men are superior to women.
Please enter your email address