The abuse wasn’t new. Delhi-based Supriya Sinha’s* husband would get drunk every day and beat her up. He once threatened to throw their baby down the stairs. Supriya had endured it over the two years of their marriage. Then the pandemic struck. Her husband’s behaviour worsened, and when he began to repeatedly call her boss and abuse him, she lost her job. As the lockdown confined the couple indoors, taking away the space and time between them, the relationship could no longer be saved. Supriya decided to leave her husband.
It wasn’t easy. It was an arranged marriage. “In Bihar, where I come from, divorce is not an option,” she says. But her parents supported her. “I would call them at 3 a.m. sometimes,” she says of the harrowing experience. Her daughter is now two, and Supriya has managed to get a divorce by mutual consent.
In Bengaluru, Malathi V.*, a 35-year-old mother of two, faced something similar. “Volatile” is how she describes her marriage. In her case, she had already been talking about separation when the pandemic struck. The lockdown accelerated the process of separation from her husband, and she filed for divorce. “While working from home, I realised my husband had no sense of personal space. He would get drunk and lose control,” she says. “My job and the lockdown gave me the courage to push back and walk out of my marriage. It was the catalyst I needed.”
Trapped, often in a toxic environment, couples find they don’t have the tools to communicate healthily | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Stress factors
The lockdown sharply increased the incidence of domestic abuse, both physical and emotional, with India recording the highest figures in a decade — the National Commission for Women reported more complaints filed in the 68 days after lockdown than in the corresponding period over 10 years. The Commission received 23,722 complaints in 2020, the highest single-year figure in six years.
But the crisis affecting relationships wasn’t just abuse. The institution of marriage itself seems to have come under a great deal of stress. Pay cuts, job losses, housework sharing, looking after children — all these took a toll. Added to this was the loss of privacy and personal space, the work-from-home scene that blurred boundaries, the absence of outings or socialising that would once relieve domestic tedium — all these seem to have contributed.
Bengaluru-based counsellor Sophie Christopher says that she has seen a 50% increase in new clients coming to her in the past year, of whom 35-40% reported problems with their marriage. “Many call and say they’ve been managing for so long, but suddenly feel they can no longer cope,” she says.
Many couples, like Malathi and her husband, already have strained marriages. According to Sukanya Ananth, a psychotherapist in Bengaluru, “Those with existing issues account for about 70% of the cases. The lockdown simply exacerbated old problems.” The reasons for conflict, according to Ananth, range from unequal division of parenting responsibilities and household chores to financial stress.
Trapped, often in a toxic environment, couples find they don’t have the tools to communicate healthily. “They suddenly find there was never a safe space for dialogue,” says Ananth. When it comes to domestic abuse, women find they have no safe refuge. “Worse, children find themselves exposed to the violence too,” says Ananth.
The pandemic has also strained the dynamic between parents and children, both young and old | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
For other couples, the issue was different. Their marriages were based on “doing” things together — shopping, partying, socialising. When those activities came to a halt, they struggled. “From ‘doing’ to just ‘being’ becomes a challenge,” says Ananth. Mumbai-based Shekar and Urmila Kumar* talk of how their marriage had a ‘pattern’. “We worked, we caught a movie, we came home and slept. With that disrupted, we were left staring at each other’s faces.”
COVID-19 also created a certain degree of health panic. Something as simple as different approaches to the pandemic — one person may have been more casual than the other — often blew up disproportionately.
Disproportionate share
The lockdown has inevitably been far more stressful on women, increasing their workload and decreasing avenues of escape. For Ujjwala Patel*, the crisis came to a head when she, her husband, and their young children went abroad during a window in the lockdown to stay with her in-laws. “I became very resentful of how he took care of his own needs,” says Ujjwala. “After a hard day’s work, he would go to the beach and surf. He is super organised and able to take care of himself. But as a mother, trying to restart work, and with the kids, I didn’t have those skills. I would get envious.” She began to fantasise about leaving him and living independently. She spoke to her therapist, who helped her through her feelings.
What worked for Ujjwala was deciding to speak frankly with her husband. “I was very unfiltered,” she says. She dredged up past resentments, old and new hurts. In hindsight, Ujjwala says, “As women we don’t know how to carve out space and time for ourselves. We don’t know how to make it non-negotiable.”
The Patels rode it out and are still together, but many others had to do more. To avoid the increasing stress, they had to take time off from each other. Some moved to different floors of a home, some to separate rooms, some shifted to a parental home or a friend’s spare bedroom.
Snigdha Ghosh’s* marriage was six months old when the lockdown started. Although the couple had known each other for a decade, their relationship “was riddled with issues”. Snigdha had quit her job and taken on the bulk of the housework; her husband was overworked at his office job. Slowly, Snigdha says, the environment at home became hostile, even toxic.
Her father advised her to take time off. So Snigdha went first to Mumbai and then to Goa to spend time on her own. Last December, she started seeing a therapist, and the couple is now working things out.
“We struggle with structures the world has set up,” says Snigdha, “the ‘right’ age to do something, the ‘right’ time to get a job or have a child. The lockdown challenged all that.”
Blurred boundaries
It is not just married couples who have struggled with the new normal. The pandemic has also strained the dynamic between parents and children, both young and old. The blurred boundaries between workspace and home, for instance, confuses younger children who make demands on their parents’ time. “When a parent steps out to work, children understand what that means, but when they work from home in the next room, it comes with a whole new set of challenges. Parents have to negotiate the space and time they need,” says Vandana Menon, the Chennai-based Executive Director of Sumedhas, which specialises in human process labs.
By confining families inside four walls, it has strained patience and frayed nerves | Photo Credit: Getty Images
There are other issues. With no school and 24/7 supervision not always possible, Menon has come across several cases of screen addiction, a major cause of anxiety for parents.
Many families in smaller homes have found conflicts and resentment arising from shared spaces — the father on a Zoom call, the child at online classes, the mother in a phone meeting. The lockdown made it impossible to draw a line between work and home, or school and home.
“As for older children, they find themselves in a limbo. They are on the cusp of finishing education and entering the job market, but it’s all been halted,” says Menon. Rohit*, 22, was about to begin final year at university when the lockdown forced him home. His conservative father could not handle his grown-up son’s idleness and nagged endlessly. Rohit had no place to hide, no job to take up. At one time, he even contemplated self-harm.
The loss of opportunities during the lockdown has led to depression and a breakdown of communication between parents and children, says Menon. “I know of children who have just shut themselves in a room and the parents have had to call counsellors.”
The pandemic has reminded people of their mortality and halted lives and plans. By confining families inside four walls, it has strained patience and frayed nerves. But if the pandemic has fractured bonds that were once taken for granted, it has also forced people to re-examine and re-evaluate their relationships. Some survived the scrutiny, some didn’t.
(*Names changed to protect identity.)