Wives In India Are Suspicious Of Husbands
January 24th, 2009 by GiGi
It seems like a scene straight out of the Bollywood film, Hud Kar Di Aapne, where the husband and wife hire detectives to spy on each other. In Lucknow too, generally known as an orthodox society, couples are increasingly roping in private detective agencies to check if their partners are cheating on them.
Take Vineeta Thakur (name changed), who recently approached the Introspective Detective Agency. She suspected her husband of having an extramarital affair, even fearing that he may get her killed. As it happened, her fears were unfounded.
The agency’s owner, Dinesh Srivastava, said: ‘‘She was not willing to believe the report, prepared after a month’s thorough investigation, that her suspicions were misplaced. It took a lot of explaining, with accompanying proof, to make her believe us.’’
Vineeta is not the only one of her kind. Increasing numbers of people are approaching detective agencies to keep tabs on their spouses’ fidelity. And more often than not, the suspicions are unfounded
According to Srivastava, till just a year back, there would be just three to four cases in a month. But now, the agencies get about 15 such cases. According to Srivastava, 70 per cent of his clients are women wanting to keep tabs on their husbands.
‘‘People come from all walks of life and majority of them are from the upper middle-class or the rich and the famous,’’ said Srivastava, who is also the secretary of the Ex-Policemen Resettlement Organisation.
While his fees begin from Rs 15,000, it often runs into many thousands of rupees. However, it isn’t that his clients’ fears are always unfounded. Srivastava recalled a case where the husband was actually planning to harm his wife as he wanted to marry someone else. ‘‘In this rare case, there was a real threat to the woman’s life. We warned her to be cautious,’’ he said.
According to reports, there are only two such private detective agencies in the city. And with the other one closed for some time now, Srivastava is laughing all the way to the bank.
But he claims that the job has its hazards as well. ‘‘We keep changing our detectives and never repeat the same person on the same case. This ensures that my detectives don’t come to know everything about a person and that they also don’t raise doubts,’’ said Srivastava.
Does he keep his clients informed about everything? No, said Srivastava. ‘‘If there is some minor information which doesn’t cause harm to anyone, we try to be discreet. But if we suspect something big, then we alert the client,’’ he informed.
This article courtesy of EXpress India
Technorati Tags: Bollywood, extramarital affair
Survey: Half your life is search for a mate
January 4th, 2009 by GiGiBy Martha Irvine, Associated Press
You could call it a real-life glimpse at sex and the city. A survey from the University of Chicago found that typical urban-dwellers spend much of their adult lives unmarried — dating and single. That has led to an elaborate network of “markets” in which these adults search for companionship and sex.
“On average, half your life is going to be in this single and dating state, and this is a big change from the 1950s,” says Edward Laumann, the project’s lead author and an expert in the sociology of sexuality. The results of the survey are part of the Chicago Health and Social Life Survey.
Laumann and his staff at the university examined how race and sexual orientation play a role in forming relationships and how multiple sexual partners and jealousy also work into the equation.
Among other things, they found that, between the ages of 18 and 59, those surveyed cohabited an average of nearly four years and were married about 18. The rest of the time — an average of about 19 years — they were dating or alone, with no steady companion.
Researchers interviewed 2,114 people in the Chicago area from 1995 to 1997, as well as police officers, clergy and social workers. They also took an in-depth look at neighborhoods with predominantly black, Latino and gay populations.
Divorce was, of course, one of the big reasons so many people were single. But so was the fact that many young people are putting off marriage — sometimes because of school, but also because many are approaching the institution of marriage more warily.
Transactional relationships are relatively uncommitted and often meant to be short-term. They happen when two people who don’t know one another meet in a bar, health club or other public place.
Laumann and his colleagues say markets also are often defined by racial group, neighborhood and sexual orientation.
- Young, upper-income people on Chicago’s north side were more likely to meet their partners at school or work.In Latino neighborhoods, for instance, family, friends and the church played a more important role in forming partnerships among those surveyed.
- Women surveyed were, for instance, less likely to meet a partner through work, church or other “embedded institutions” as they got older — making it more difficult to find someone. Laumann says that may be due, in part, to the fact that men in their 40s often sought women who were at least five to eight years younger.
- Many gay men in the survey focused largely on transactional relationships, while lesbians were far more interested in relational connections.
- Researchers also addressed the issues of multiple partners and jealousy. Overall, 23 percent of men and 31 percent of women said they experienced jealous conflict at some point during their relationships.
- And researchers found that cohabitation resulted in more jealousy — and physical violence — than it did among married couples.
- Men were more likely than women to have more than one sexual partner.
- Among those surveyed, 20 percent of men and 6 percent of women said they’d had sex with at least one other person during their most recent relationship.
“What’s going on now is making the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s pale in comparison,” says Eli Coleman, director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota. He called Laumann’s work the most comprehensive since that of acclaimed researcher Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed people about sex in the 1940s.
Still, Laumann and his staff found that social services, the church and law enforcement have been slow to address this latest sexual revolution.
For instance, they found no shelters in any of the studied communities for gay domestic abuse victims. And most churches they examined were not good at “giving guidance about how you manage a stable, but non-married relationship,” Laumann says.
“It’s not approved. It’s not talked about,” he says. “Or they just look the other way.”
Technorati Tags: single, dating state, Chicago, Latino