“Honey, my romantic feelings are more intellectual than visceral” said John whose brain was being mapped through an FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine by his wife Alice, a neuroscientist. “Shocker” she snapped back. “No romantic feelings light up in your brain at the sight of any romantic stimuli, for example pictures like a couple holding hands or a man giving a rose to his wife, but I could see lust sparking at the sight of scantily-clad women’s pictures.”
“ What’s new about it as we all known that men are from Mars and women from Venus and love blossoms only if the differences between men and women are respected,” said John.
“These differences have made me realise that we have completely different wavelengths about love and emotions.”
“C’mon, let’s not step on each other’s toes and here is an idea to cheer you up. Let’s go out for dinner today,” said John, who was in throes of anguish and wanted to save his marriage desperately.
John had fallen in love with Alice and married her recently. The resentment shackles down the newly wed work-spouse working together for a Neuromarketing company that studied consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive and emotional response to marketing stimuli. These surveys were used in fields of marketing and advertisements. Four healthy people’s brains were scanned towards these picture-stimuli to see the neural activation and John was one of them.
The relationship reeled when Alice started equating his emotions with her emotions. She started taking the scanned results too personally, which was meant for commercial use and this intrusion into his private mental zone through a machine precipitated insecurity in their relationship.
“Why don’t you take a lie detector test about your love and relationships?” asked Alice who had still not recovered from the disagreements and started to harbour doubts about her own attractiveness.
“I am not sure about the reliability of these machines regarding mapping emotions, but I know one thing that understanding love on a chemical level is tantamount to any impossible task.
Anyway, connecting love with chemicals — doesn’t it sound quite unromantic!” replied John.
Gradually marital conflicts bled over from personal lives into the office, jeopardising their married relationship. The couple started nitpicking over petty issues and was going through why-I-only-should-do-dishes-more-often-or-refill-toilet-paper phase. Probably it is right that everything boils down to human relationship. Sufficiently disenchanted, John decided to throw his current job and join another company in order to save his marriage. This is not unusual for working couples sharing a common work place. It also happens when one of them, especially the wife, forges ahead of her husband in her career, leaving them to compete with each other. But in John’s case, both of them were doing equally well and the reason that rendered him to step out of his job was the very excess of the couple’s togetherness. It became the catalyst to stir the relationship in wrong direction.
John was shattered. Earlier, the idea of making home an extension of office, travelling together, having common colleagues and having the same work environment where they could communicate in sort of shorthand manner, without elaborating much about the background, seemed delightfully ideal for conjugal bliss. He, in fact, thought it would constitute strong cement to hold their married life. But he was wrong as it became the recipe for disaster. For him, the minuses of working together started outweighing the pluses.
As they didn’t give the required space to each other, they both started getting on each other’s nerves. He finally realised that good marriage was not based on an opportunity to spend all their time together, but on being apart for some time to rejuvenate the relationship and create a healthy bond between each other.
Now the question is, does love cover a multitude of sins? Hope you all know the answer.
Ritu Dokania is an author based in Dubai.
