Violence triggered by illicit affairs has led to many murders in Tamil Nadu, including some infamous ones like the Alavandar murder case in the 1950s, where the headless body of a man was found in a trunk box on a train. Earlier this month, Ramesh of Chennai was arrested for stabbing his wife who deserted him at a restaurant near the airport.
Apart from murders, extramarital affairs have also led to one of the partners committing suicide. National Crime Records Bureau data points to around 100 suicides in Tamil Nadu every year for which the suspected cause is extramarital affairs. Psychologists say often when a person finds out that his/her partner has breached the trust, it shatters the entire base on which their life rests.
“They would have invested several years of their lives into the relationship. When they find it was breached, it causes great grief. When the anger part of their grief is on the higher side, they tend to become violent. They just want the other to suffer the same pain they are undergoing,” argues Karthick Lakshmanan, a city-based counsellor. Police officers say extramarital affairs have become one of the major reasons for crime. Some officers say that in any given case these days they first look into this particular aspect.
“An interesting case I handled is when a woman alleged that she was threatened at knife-point by a robber in a deserted street and escaped with her gold chain. As the sequence of events she explained was incoherent, we started examining her phone records. It became evident she was having an affair with another man. She had given him the gold chain to help him in a financial crisis and we recovered the chain from that man,” says a senior police officer.
In several murder cases reported in the State, often the perpetrators turn out to be partners of the victims, who execute the murders as they consider their partners a hurdle to their affairs. The reason may be high emotional attachment that people tend to have in the marriage relationship. “An ideal option would be to go for a personality profile matching before marriage, which is essentially a western concept. In that we can find how much the personalities of the future partners complement each other,” says Lakshmanan.
“They can also be given a clear idea of what they can expect in the marriage and what areas they have to address. This may prevent such affairs to an extent,” opines counsellor Karthick Lakshmanan.