Husbands Can’t Blame Wives Entirely After A Mutual Separation

How many times have we come across mutual separations where husbands later put the blame of failure entirely on their ex-wives? Television actor, Sachin Shroff in an interview to Bombay Times, blamed his ex-wife Juhi Parmar for the failure of their relationship. He says, “The divorce happened with mutual consent, amicably and in a dignified manner. Unfortunately, and by Juhi’s own public admission, she was never in love with me. One-sided relationships are doomed from the beginning. It’s said, ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. But the fact is that it hurts to have been in a loveless marriage. Nothing I did could make Juhi love me.”

Parmar, on the other hand, says that it was incompatibility that drew them apart, as they were never on the same page. But when a divorce is granted on mutual consent, it also takes away the right to blame a partner solely for the failure of marriage. A mutual separation means that both partners acknowledge that they made some mistakes in their relationship or fell out of love with each other. It expresses a mutual desire to part ways on amicable terms. Which is why Shroff’s statement sounds unkind to Parmar.

When a divorce is granted on mutual consent, it also takes away the right to blame a partner solely for the failure of marriage.

However, Shroff’s statement seems to be on similar lines with that of actor Hrithik Roshan. The Kaabil actor released a statement in 2013 to announce his separation from Sussanne Khan, where he passively blamed his ex-wife for it. The first line of his press release went, “Sussanne has decided to separate from me and end our 17-year relationship.” It earned him a lot of backlash for becoming a victim of heartbreak and blaming his ex for calling it quits.

SOME TAKEAWAYS

• Television actor Sachin Shroff recently blamed his ex-wife for their divorce, for which they went ahead mutually.
• When a couple opts for amicably parting ways, it seems unkind of men to later play victims and paint their silent exes as harsh and heartless.
• Amicable separation means that both the parties have mutually reached the decision that they cannot make the relationship work. 

It takes two to clap and quarrel

Today we find more couples opting for separation, than choosing to tow a dead marriage just to save face in the society.

Blaming his ex-wife entirely for the failure of their marriage, when they chose to part ways amicably makes him sound like a jilted lover, who is acting from a bruised ego. I understand that separations are hard. It’s not easy to make marriages work in modern times. Especially when life seems to be so much fun and uncomplicated on the single side.

The efforts needed to sustain a marriage for years are indeed exhausting. Today it feels pointless to make endless adjustments in your life for just one person, and yet be unhappy. Which is why amicable separations sound pragmatic.

But it has also led to an increase in blaming of women for failure of marriages. They are either blamed to be unwilling to adjust or having fallen out of love. Why is it that it is okay if a husband walks away from a loveless marriage, but it’s not okay when a wife does the same?

Why do husbands like Shroff and Roshan portray themselves to be abandoned, unloved and victimised? Despite parting ways amicably with their wives?

Must they not choose the dignified exit just like their wives, and let these women not be demonised by the media.

Perhaps it is their ego, which makes it difficult for them to stomach that their wives chose to leave them. A marriage isn’t just a woman’s responsibility. It isn’t just her job to make it work. So when it doesn’t, you either quarrel about it, tear each other’s hair out or avow to hold your contempt till you die and part ways amicably.

But if you do the latter, you cannot later drag the corpse of your marriage from its grave and perform a theatrical one-sided autopsy on it, coming out as the virtuous one. It is possible that Parmar may indeed be the one to call it quits, but by consenting for an amicable divorce, Shroff has waved away his rights to crib about it. Making such statements only put him in bad lights.

Picture Credit: NDTV

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Yamini Pustake Bhalerao is a writer with the SheThePeople team, in the Opinions section. The views expressed are the author’s own.