True love travails

Is your partner having an affair if he shows all the symptoms of a heart with a conundrum?

BY sHeRYl dIXIT

An acquaintance called me up recently. The controlled excitement in her voice made me abort my hastilyplanned excuses to cut short her call. Her breathy, barely suppressed impatience at our mandatory small talk was a clear indication that she had some red-hot gossip to impart.

After a couple of minutes of polite dithering, she got down to it.

“I think M is in for a big shock!” she said dramatically.

The M in question is a mutual friend and actually, a sweet person with a wicked sense of humour.

“Really? Why?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“Her husband’s having an affair!”

“WHAT?” My yell must have blown off a good bit of her left eardrum but she didn’t seem to mind, as my reaction amply satisfied her desire to make an effect.

Now I knew the husband in question having met him a few times, and he seemed like a good husband and dedicated father of their two energetic kids. I knew he had a good job in the IT industry (where else), travelled moderately and liked lamb kebabs with his beer.

The lady on the phone was just about getting into her stride. “M spoke to me, you know, the other day, you know. She told me that she doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, he hardly ever speaks to her these days, you know. He doesn’t even seem to know what he’s eating, and he seems to be drinking even more, specially on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sunday nights, you know! He starts from noon,” she added in hushed tones which implied that this was the greatest of all his misdemeanours.

Resisting the temptation to tell her that “I knew”, I said, “But that’s no indication that he’s having an affair, men do that all the time.”

“Not my husband, you know he is devoted to me,” she said convincingly, which left me speechless for a minute. Were we talking about the same person who had, at a large social gathering, fallen into deep slumber with gentle snores as his wife recounted the fascinating details of her latest knee operation?

“M’s husband is also on his iPhone all the time,” she said. “He never puts it down these days. If she asks he gets irritable, he says why are you asking me so many questions? Suddenly sometimes he looks at his phone, even late in the night and either begins giggling to himself or swearing softly, you know. This is not normal, you know, not normal at all, for a man.”

“Oh!” I said somewhat lamely because I am not an expert at what’s abnormal for a man. Mostly they all seem fairly normal to me. Except the ones who fall asleep while their wives are talking….

“I told her,” she continued, progressing to the next phase, from delighted expressions of shock and disbelief to alleged good advice. “I told her to be careful. I had recently read an article in some magazine in which all these symptoms were clearly mentioned, you know. (I knew, I had read that damn article!)

First they are preoccupied, then they act mysterious, then they are always sneaking off to check their phone, they have secret messages which they share, they get moody, you know. I told her all the symptoms were that of a man having an affair!”

“Oh, so she didn’t tell you he was having an affair, this is what you worked out,” I said, finally seeing the sun.

“Of course, you know, what else could it be?” she said indignantly. “I told her, you know, work out your future right now. Think about your children and your finances. Find a good divorce lawyer on the internet, or I could give her my brother-in-law’s cousin’s contact, he is a good divorce lawyer, you know! He will not charge much because we know him. Make your husband pay, I told her, he has no right to treat you like this.”

By now, I had surreptitiously filled a bucket full of water to dunk my head and quench the fire raging in my ears. “Oops, there’s someone at the door, it’s a French student selling paintings, so I’ll speak to you later,” I said, abruptly hanging up.

I thought for a minute and then picking up the phone, I called M.

“I need to tell you something,” I said on hearing her cheery greeting. “For over a month now my husband goes through phases of moodiness and few ones of elation. He can’t seem to put down his mobile phone, he’s constantly sending out messages on it, even late at night. He manifests these symptoms only on particular days of the week. I don’t know what the problem may be, do you think he’s having an affair?”

“Hmm, do you really think so?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t worry,” she said calmly. “It will all be over before you know it, and things will come back to normal.”

“How can you tell?” I insisted.

“Because the cricket’s over, India’s gone home and the love affair is finished!” she said decisively.

“But the phone communication – those late night messages…”

“Just the boys getting out their angst via Twitter to anyone who’s willing to tweet,” she said.

“The drinking, the moods!”

“Who wouldn’t want to drown their sorrows at the way the Indian team’s been performing?”

“So, no hot, steamy affair that will build up into high drama in our lives, leading to divorce, destitution, despair and detestation?”

“Nope, not a hope!” she said, the grin in her voice building into a laugh. “I would know, you know, and you would know too, you know! If it wasn’t cricket, you know!”