Both Men & Women Cheat. But The Hows & Whys Are Very Different

Dear Men By Prachi Gangwani shows how Indian men across ages navigate romantic relationships in a country that is still teetering on the cusp of modern and traditional. An excerpt: Men and Women Cheat

Recently, I reconnected with a long-lost pen friend. He reached out to me because he was going through heartbreak and wanted to talk to someone distant, but safe. Someone he felt connected to but who wasn’t involved in his day-to-day life. ‘I’m trying very hard to wrap my head around this,’ he tells me over the phone.

We are pen friends from the snail mail era, and this is the first time we’ve heard each others’ voices. He has a baritone, and I can’t help but wonder what he looks like. Is he tall? Dark? Handsome? Is his hair thick and long or does he sport a crew cut? He sounds like he has a crew cut and a chiseled jaw. Perhaps a goatee. I resist the temptation to Google him because I want to preserve this old-school friendship where only what was shared was known.

Not unlike how he wanted to preserve old-school romance in his relationship. But his erstwhile lover wanted to open up the relationship, to experiment, explore, sleep with other men. ‘I get it. She’s young. We are young. She wants to explore. I don’t judge her. And I don’t want to stop her from doing it. But I…I can’t be with her while she explores.’

Dear Men By Prachi Gangwani

Another friend — his early thirties — had a similar story, but he chose to go with it. Though he decided to stay exclusive, he was okay with his partner not being so. They got married. His wife has decided to be monogamous for now.

Sonal is the younger of two sisters raised in a baniya family in Delhi. Her sister is fair and pretty, she tells me. ‘But look at me,’ she points to her dusky face. ‘My mother would always say, “Tu toh kitni kaali hai. Shaadi kaun karega tujhse?” .’

She got married young, to the ‘first decent guy’ who didn’t mind her dark complexion. After nine years and two children, she left her husband. It was a loveless marriage, as many arranged marriages are. At the age of thirty-four, she fell in love with someone else. After a year-long affair that she initially kept under wraps, she decided to walk out on her husband to be Vikas. Vikas was also married (unhappily) at the time they met.

Monogamy and loyalty have little to do with one’s sex or gender. The difference, however, lies in how we perceive male versus female desire. We believe men are driven by sexual desire and are naturally more inclined to have multiple sexual partners, while women are naturally inclined toward monogamy. Women, then, tend to be more secretive of their dalliances, while men are less afraid of being public.

During the one year that Sonal was seeing Vikas, she would insist on meeting in private. Hotel rooms. Vacation homes. The most public place she was okay with being seen with Vikas was at his best friend’s house. This was a sore point in their relationship as Vikas wanted more — he wanted to take his girlfriend out to clubs, dinners and movies. ‘I wanted my wife to find out. That would’ve made it easier to get her to divorce me,’ he told me. On the other hand, Sonal was worried that if her husband — or anybody else — found out about her affair, they would judge her character and make divorce proceedings needlessly difficult. She wanted the divorce first, and then come out about her relationship with Vikas.

In September 2019, on a trip to Goa, my girlfriends and I got acquainted with a group of three men. Two were married with kids. One was single. The married men flaunted to us pictures of their wives and children on their phones. ‘She is the love of my life! I can’t live without her,’ one told us. It was endearing. Later that evening, the men had escorts arriving from Delhi. The single man had opted out of flying in a foreign woman for a paid ‘girlfriend experience’, so there were only two escorts — one for each of the two married men. ‘Apne laundon ke saath vacation pe aaye hain, toh kuchh mazaa toh karna chahiye na! ,’ they explained. The single friend stole a moment away with me later and told me, ‘They feel cool and relevant when they do things like this. I think it’s some strange sense of achievement.’

Excerpted with permission from DEAR MEN: MASCULINITY AND MODERN LOVE IN #METOO INDIA By Prachi Gangwani published by Bloomsbury Publishing India.

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