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Is Love an uninvited guest when found outside a marriage?

Chandigarh, August 28

We accept the love we think we deserve-Stephen Chbosky

Back in 2006, a film labelled much ahead of its time, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna directed by Karan Johar explored the concept of infidelity which creeps in unhappy and broken marriages. Behind the plush scale of its production, the mushy song sequences, protagonists strutting their butts around in Manish Malhotra ensembles and champagne-laced glamour, the film delved into the depths of the dark reality of some suffocating marriages where one partner feels completely misunderstood, unloved, boycotted and alone while anchored in the sacred institution of a MARRIAGE. 

What happens when that partner finds love outside the marriage? Should one bite the bait or not? What if the marriage in question was already long broken before a  partner finds a safe spot outside the seven rounds of fire in the promise of love because love they say like death can come unannounced anytime and take everything in its stride.

The film has recently completed two decades of its release on the silver screen and was one of Bollywood’s most debated dramas where the audiences and the critics were clearly divided over its bold exploration of marriages and the cracks which develop over time in some  marriages through which space is created for either partner to look for love outside the boundaries of a marriage leading to extra marital affairs. With the changing mind-sets  sometimes, these clandestine affairs are just formed to re-ignite the spark missing in one’s personal, emotional and sexual life too! 

In the film, Shah Rukh Khan’s character, Dev Saran mouths a dialogue which says, “We were crazy. We were strange. Different. Unlike the rest. Incomplete on our own, but whole together. We weren’t walking the ground anymore…We had already slipped. We were soaring, talking to the clouds. We didn’t care what the world thought because we had built one of our own. Our world.” And this dialogue clinches the whole essence of the subject in discussion.  

Forbidden love or a saviour 

KANK, when it first released ruffled many feathers, it was considered a film way beyond its time. But now in 2026, 20 years after the release of the film, we think the time is ripe to face the issues of straying in a marriage and finding love outside it valid enough to discuss and debate. When there is slow degradation in the quality of a marriage as it emotionally breaks down and turns into an unhappy prison which keeps two people bound in a relationship just for the sake of the society or when there are children involved in the marriage, how does one proceed? What happens when a husband and a wife turn into two dissatisfied strangers living in the same house but in two different rooms? Let’s not glamourise or justify infidelity, but let’s talk about the factors which lead to finding love outside of a marriage when it breaks down. And is it justified?

Ritu, a 40 year old homemaker from SAS Nagar, raises a valid question, “When a marriage breaks down internally between the man and the wife and the commitment between them dissolves, what is the harm in finding love outside the four walls of a home? Sometimes one partner is already involved with someone outside. Then is it even sane to expect the other partner to remain loyal to the one straying?” Marriages often die long before the legal recourse of separating in real life takes place. 

In the film, all the characters were basically humans dealing with their life and the journeys which life takes them through, each a victim of the circumstances surrounding their own life.

Advocate Ankita (name changed) from Sector 9 Panchkula, quips, “its loneliness and need for a genuine connection which is at the heart of people straying while in a committed marriage or otherwise. One person may feel stifled by his/her partner and feel an urgent need to connect to someone who lends them space and a safe harbour to reside in without being judged or taken for granted. It is a purely psychological need required very much to keep oneself mentally sane. Afterall human beings are social creatures.” 

Gagandeep Kataria, a practicing psychologist from Sector 43, analyses the reasons why extra-marital affairs are increasing in our society, “sometimes societal expectations suffocate one’s individuality and they reach a saturation point. I have seen many such cases, wherein a marriage starts feeling like a trap to a person who feels left out and alone in that relationship.Then a betrayal happens and the same leaves scars on the people and the relationship or marriage it touches upon. But sometimes things happen in a moment of weakness and sometimes it is the storm of love which cannot be controlled. But either way, the need and space for such a relationship to come through comes only when cracks appear in a marriage. It also happens when communication and the friendship lines blur between the husband and the wife.”  

Be it a need for emotional, physical or psychological fulfillment, the rise in extra-marital affairs in India is clearly pointing towards a distinct cultural shift from how narratives around an Indian marriage being a strictly monogamous institution is changing into a more open-ended one which is also largely a mirror of one’s personal value system. 

So coming back to Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, the film seems to make much more sense now than it did back in 2006, courtesy life and the labyrinthine ways it maneuvers through, even though love has always found its way in whenever and wherever it wants to with or without the stamp of a marriage endorsing it.

‘Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna’: A Love Story That Endures