Couple let careers decide where they stay

It’s like having your cake and eating it too. Well, almost. Ask Tollywood superstar Rituparna Sengupta.  Married to tech entrepreneur Sanjoy Chakravarti for four years, the Bengali siren didn’t bat an eyelid when she decided to shift to Mumbai to conquer Bollywood.

“Sanjoy and I are too much into each other to let distance affect our relationship. It’s tough, yes. But you can’t sacrifice your career to be together 24/7,” says Sengupta. “I was the biggest star in Bengali cinema. There weren’t any challenges left.”

Here’s the new checklist: married, yes, happily, yes, separately, ummm… yes. If the ‘darned celebrities’ bell jingles in your head, here’s something to chew on. Thirty-four-year-old Rishab Saxena was married to Ritika for just a year when he got an offer to head an IT start-up in Bangalore. The decision, says Rishab, was a no-brainer.

“I fly down on weekends. Or else she joins me in Bangalore. Our marriage is rock-solid and so are our careers,” says Rishab. In fact, the separation has helped Ritika professionally. She now owns a boutique in Delhi. “You become a singleton again, only to feel married at weekends. It’s not all that bad,” she says.

The Saxenas are part of an urban tribe of ‘married singles’ — those married but staying in different cities for professional goals — that’s getting bigger by the day. A booming Indian economy has many opportunities.  And it isn’t holding back couples who want to push ahead, full steam.

“Good professionals are in short supply. And with both men and women being equally ambitious, companies are literally rolling out the red carpet for them. The number of married people working in different cities has been increasing over the years,” says Soumen Basu, vice-president of HR consultancy, Manpower.

The ones embracing such a lifestyle, mostly young, on-the-go couples on the right side of the 30s, are doing so by choice. The trend is mostly confined to the metros and comes with its share of ups, downs and frowns. 

“Your marriage becomes fragile. How you survive depends on how strong your relationship is,” says Rituparna “We catch up whenever we can. If that means signing nine films instead of ten, so be it.”

Varkha Chulani, psychologist, Lilavati Hospital, says such an arrangement invariably puts some amount of pressure on the marriage. “This maybe okay for a couple of months but it’s difficult to continue like this for long. It also depends on how you define marriage. Maybe, the partners are flexible about the loyalty factor. You can have relationships on the side,” she says.

“When you are young and staying away from your partner, you do feel a sexual and emotional void,” says Ritika. “You can get tempted into anotherrelationship. But it can also bring back the romance. When Rishab comes back on weekends, it’s like going back to our college days.”

Such an arrangement also means double expenses as two establishments have to be maintained. “But then it is part of the package,” says Delhi-based makeup artist Niharika Mathur, whose husband Vikram, a hotelier, stays in Cochin.

But what happens when kids enter this cosy arrangement? Kamalini Sengupta, a research fellow in the English Literature department of Calcutta University, whose husband Ved Prakash is a media professional in Delhi, says, “Today’s kids are smarter and sensitive. So it’s not all that difficult to bring up your child on your own.”

“Time was when women sacrificed careers for their husbands. No more,” says sociologist Krutika Agarwal. 

“There’s another way of looking at it,” Kamalini chips in. “Society demands more from women now. You have to be both a homemaker and a career-person.” But life does get tough at times.

Varkha says there have been cases where couples have simply drifted apart. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean this arrangement will not work,” she says.