We live in a
changing society (now, does that sound dumb?) .
The definition of the words, family and relationship, may be getting
metamorphosed. ‘Open’ relationships and
‘Friends with Benefits’ are talked about.
While I leave it to the choice of the advocates of such relationships, I
DO NOT endorse them. Did extramarital or
clandestine relationships never exist?
No, they did exist. Despite them,
Lord Rama became the icon of loyalty to wife or Ekapatnivratya (Women were
always expected to follow their husbands, though). I vote for loyalty between the spouses for it
differentiates humans from their ancestors, the apes.
Anyway, the
discussion is not about the way society was, is or going to be. Each one of us has known of couples who were
loyal to each other despite challenges like familial pressure to separate,
inability to beget children (which is a valid ground to file for divorce),
chronic ill-health of one of them or politics, plain and simple, to inherit
property, so on and so forth. If there
were a re-incarnation of Rama in the 19th – 20th
centuries, he would have been called Ramakrishna Rao.
