Adultery

The title of this post: now that's one subject that fascinates me a lot. I am sure it fascinates a lot of other people as much as it puts off many others. But what is interesting is that you never know who is fascinated by the thought of adultery and who is not. Most often, those who publicly treat the word 'adultery' like a contagious disease are the ones who take sips from the sinful potion on the sly. While those who keep plotting or dreaming of illicit sex, actually never gather the courage to indulge in it. And it is so much fun when you read their expressions: their eyebrows say something and their eyes something else.

Now, why am I writing about this subject tonight, even though I am too drowsy to even keep my eyes open, thanks to the two injections I received on my butt a few hours ago for a throat infection? That's because I want to take some load off my chest so that I can sleep in peace. Thoughts about adultery -- as a subject, I mean -- have been fermenting in my head during the last few days after conversations I had about it with a couple of friends -- both happen to be women. The conversations, in both cases, began with my posts on Shivani and then one thing led to another and in the end, I found a hand-grenade lobbed at me in the form of a set of questions: "How can one think of another man or woman while being committed? Doesn't commitment mean anything? And if you have to think of other men and women, why get committed in the first place?"

The answer, my friends, is simple. It is only after you get committed that the thought of other men or women crosses your mind. When you are single and footloose, the word 'other' is redundant and meaningless: all you are looking for is someone who could suit you the best in the given circumstances. Only after you make the commitment that this demon (maybe angel, in some cases) called adultery pops its head into your cosy tent.

So the argument -- that if you can't keep a commitment, then don't commit at all -- holds no water. Because when you make a commitment, you do so with the best of intentions: you have no clue at the time that, five years from now, you might be cursing yourself for having made that commitment in the first place. At that time, commitment must have felt like a secure palace, with the passage of time, it just might become a prison. You suddenly envy the people roaming freely outside.

What do you do then? Walk out of the prison? Many people strongly believe that if you can't keep a commitment, be honest about it and walk out, but don't cheat. If only it was that easy. If there is a small hole on your wall, you don't desert the house and build a new house, do you? You merely get a mason to plug the hole. And then, you go on to live happily ever after.

Adultery, according to me, does not have to be always about getting physical and making things messy. It can be about fixing that little emotional hole in your life. And masons are never hard to find.