Unfaithful : It’s all within our control
Unfaithful is 2002 romance/ drama which as the name suggest is about infidility in a relationship. Edward and Connie Sumner are married for 11 years with 8 year old boy, they live in the suburbs. They are considered happy, husband working and wife a homemaker. But Connie even though she loves her family and is attracted to her husband finds that her life lacks passion, the butterflies in the stomach kind of a love, a young love. She feels her everyday life so mundane, there is nothing exciting ( this is what I gathered from the movie). So as the beautiful and cinematic opening scene goes, its a very windy day, where she collides with a younger guy, she injures her knees. He calls her upto his apartment to give her first aid, but it is definite from his looks that his intentions are not really to be kind and compassionate to somebody. And somehow she fails to understand it or she understands it but plays along (I strongly believe the latter, that is the truth; she just plays along). Its a new kind of feeling and she is completely taken-in by it, so scandalous and thrilling. She keeps going to meet the guy over and over again and ends up having a toxic heavily attracted fling , she thinks she has it all under control but reality always hurts and it hurts the people who love us more than us (trust me!).
Her husband finds out and from there it all moves fast paced. When she had such a stable life and a loving husband who is very much attracted to her, why did she cheat? This question bugged a lot. Yet, I could see how steamy the affair was ! This movie points out sometimes love is not enough to stay faithful, nothing is! And that might be the reason infidelity among married people are on the rise. Being an Indian, it made me to immediately surf about the infedility rate in India and not so surprisingly it is roughly 50 % as of 2023. Infidelity can be cause by many reasons (some of them can even be silly):
- Physically attracted to somebody strongly other than your spouce.
- When your partner’s attention towards you lessens as per you.
- Desire to start a new whirlwind romance, something fresh and exciting.
- Not being sexual satisfied with your own spouce.
- Not able to emotionally connect with your spouce ie; feeling disconnected.
2021 marked, Karnataka to be the state with the highest number crimes related to infidelity. Bengaluru came to be called as the “Infidelity capital of India”.
As per the statistics of 2023, it is found that men cheat more compared to women, but that doesn’t justify women cheating in relationships ( being a woman I cannot take the side of a cheating woman ever! )
30 % of the divorce cases in metro seems to have infidelity as the reason.
Can’t we control ourselves from commiting adultery?
Yes we can.
But do we want to? , that is the bigger question!
Why cant we divorce our partners before commiting adultery by stating the reason loud and clear. And then, once you are granted divorce you can be with anybody you like, in this way you are not hurting people as much as you are doing by cheating. Truth is painful but lie is soul crushing. If you cannot be loyal to one person, might as well break it to them before its too late. Everything is within your control, specially your decisions. You can control the outcomes a certain way if you are being truthful . Its your choice!
You always need to think before leaping into any decisions you make, you need to consider a few people who mean something you, to whom you mean something. You need to be honest and transparent about your intentions even if you are being hated for it. You need to weigh in the pros and cons before its too late. Nobody is too stupid to say “ It just happened.”, they are pretending to be. You very well know you wanted it and thats why it happened!
