If someone justifies an illicit relationship by saying that their spouse is unloving how do we respond?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, if someone finds the regular principle of no illicit sex, no relationship outside marriage as objectionable, because they say that you are from a stable family culture, but here I am feeling so lonely, so isolated. My husband and my spouse has changed completely, is unloving.
And I am so distressed that I need some affection, some solace. And that is why I have some other relationship. So, how do we explain to them in that situation? There are different points to be considered.
First, in the past, whether it was India or whether it was the West, there were joint families. And joint families meant that our emotional needs could be satisfied in different ways by different people. With the fragmentation of the joint family to nuclear family, the expectation from the husband-wife relationship is increased enormously.
Because at a close familial level, the two spouses have no one else to relate with. The children are a different generation and often the parents are not with them. So, that means all that, all the emotional needs that were fulfilled in different ways through different relationships, there’s an uncle, cousin, sister, brother, grandfather, whatever, nephews, all those things.
So, the various relationships that were fulfilled in various ways, all that now expectation is that it should be fulfilled through the marital relationship. And along with that, there is also an enormous upsurge in the romanticization of the male-female relationship. Now, romantic literature has always been there throughout history.
But the sheer amount of propaganda that is given to that, so many movies, so many novels, so much talk about that, that the happily ever after that is depicted in these kind of media, movies and novels, that also increases to an unrealistic level the expectation from the male-female relationships. So, given that, because both these factors, the social fragmentation and the cultural exaggeration, the cultural glamorization, excessive romanticization, so people in general expect too much from the marital relationship. And when they don’t get that, they feel I must get it somewhere else.
And further, with the cultural glamorization of even premarital, extramarital relationships, whatever reservations people had, that has also gone down substantially. So, before the 1920s, 1930s, even the sexual relationship was not so much, it was quite regulated. So, it is only after what they call a sexual revolution that happened in the wake of the ideas of psychology that Sigmund Freud propagated and others further propagated, so that free sex became such a common thing.
Even in the western world, divorce was very rare. So, we have to consider these cultural factors which are present today. And with respect to the specifics of a person justifying a particular illicit relationship because of not getting affection in a relationship, and we always need to put first things first.
If somebody is from a culture where sexual morality is not really the norm, then emphasizing sexual morality to such people will make us seem puritanical and will alienate people. So, at that point, we can primarily talk about how we all need to, in our longing for love, yes, it can be circumstantially fulfilled through various relationships in this world. We have the horizontal relationship that we have.
But along with that, we have a vertical relationship. That is the relationship with God, Krishna. And if you explain the conception of Krishna properly, how he is the all-attractive supreme, we talk about his six opulences, and how our longing for love can be fully and purely fulfilled in him.
When we explain this in a proper way, then people feel inspired to develop their relationship with Krishna. And as they start developing their relationship with Krishna, they get some amount of emotional shelter and emotional fulfillment through that spiritual connection. And through that spiritual connection, when that shelter comes, then gradually as they come to the mode of goodness, then their moral sense also awakens more.
And then they will be more able to give up relationships that are immoral. So, in our sharing, in our helping, our goal is not simply to talk about how pure we are living or how devoted to God we are. Our goal is to help people from wherever they are to move towards Krishna and to find real happiness by moving towards Krishna.
So, for some people, giving up a particular illicit relationship may not be the step that they can take towards coming towards Krishna. So, just as if somebody is eating meat and they may not be ready to give up eating meat, then we don’t tell them to give up meat as a precondition for their practicing bhakti. We just encourage them to practice bhakti wherever they are.
So, even if they are in some kind of relationship, we encourage them to practice bhakti from wherever they are. And over a period of time, gradually they will find out how best they can serve Krishna. So, as I said, people are coming from different cultural backgrounds.
And when they come from their particular cultural backgrounds, their individual situations, certain principles may be more difficult for them to follow than others. And we need to be understanding. There’s a difference between being understanding and being compromising.
Being compromising means we say that something is not important at all. It doesn’t matter. Being understanding means that we recognize that for this person at this level, this is not practical to follow.
This is going to be difficult. So, we focus on how we can connect them with Krishna from where they are. So, basically, compromising is about changing the truth.
Understanding is about adapting in a way that people from where they are can gradually come towards the truth. So, Shri Prabhupada, when he went to America, he talked with the hippies who were into drugs. And he encouraged them to chant Hare Krishna, however they were at that time.
So, just as an intoxication or meat-eating or these are harmful activities. Now, from a social perspective, illicit sexual and illicit relationships can be much more socially damaging. They can break apart families.
They can just rip apart the fabric of society if they become mainstream. But if that is what is already happening in a particular society, then we need to recognize that people can’t just jump up to a very high level from where they are. So, we encourage them to practice bhakti from wherever they are.
And I try to explain things in a way that makes sense to them. So, their emotional needs will not be fulfilled through, although it may appear like that, that okay, my emotional needs are not being fulfilled in my marriage, so I’ll have an illicit relationship. But that also causes its own turbulence.
That also causes its own anxiety. Now, ultimately, our emotional needs will be fulfilled only in our relationship with Krishna. And of course, that takes time.
And we can find various other engagements, other relationships through which we can fulfill our needs. But because of the cultural propaganda today, okay, if this doesn’t work, then why not experiment something else? Why not experiment something else? Because of the licentious culture, people think that, okay, if I’m not getting satisfaction in marriage, let me try outside marriage. So, the sanctity of the marital relationship has been very much downplayed and even derided in today’s mainstream materialistic, hedonistic culture.
So, if we present Krishna Consciousness properly in a way that people can take steps forward from where they are, then they can move onwards towards Krishna. And generally, if there is even a little bit of careful understanding, people see that actually trying to find relief through one relationship in another relationship, which is very illicit, that only leads to complications. It leads to enormous amount of complications in the long run.
And even if that doesn’t seem apparent to people, we just encourage them to develop their relationship with Krishna. And as they develop their relationship with Krishna,