Man or woman, rich or merely comfortably middle class, we’re all desperately seeking something more from our lives.
Desperate Housewives captures that feeling in telling the stories of four suburban American women – and their men – as they seek answers to the questions we were never supposed to ask. Not into our accept-you-can’t-have-everything 30s and 40s. A stage in life when it’s always safer (and wiser) to remember: things could have been a lot worse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aur bhi gham hain zamaane mein and all that jazz. The fact that you and me are ‘luckier than most’ is especially hard to ignore in a country where every citizen can’t take two square meals a day for granted. But even as we lucky ones move from roti, kapda aur makaan to salad, short kurtis and SUVs, there remains – often unfulfilled – another basic need.
The need for intimacy.
The need for a man or woman in our lives.
Not just any man or woman but one who understands, who accepts and yes loves us for who we are. The man or woman many of us thought we were getting married to who, somewhere along the way, retreated into a Harry Potter-like Invisibility Cloak or left the building altogether – if not in body, in spirit.
If you take a closer look at the problems of the women of Wisteria lane – they all stem from this very same source. The longing for love and companionship. Acknowledgement and appreciation. As the desperate housewife who blew out her brains in the first episode observes from her permanent philosophical perch: “Human beings are designed for many things. Loneliness isn't one of them”.
Take Lynette, the career woman who gave up her job to raise 4 kids. She’s exhausted and frazzled and of course wondering “did I really make the right decision”. But what’s really eating her is a husband who seems to have no idea what she is going through. How could he even suggest they “take a risk” and have sex without a condom, when there are four such risks already running around the house in muddy shoes?
Then there’s Bree, the everything-must-be-perfect homemaker whose husband wants a divorce because he’s tired of living in a ‘detergent commercial’. But would things really be any different if Bree didn’t subject her family to gourmet meals every night for dinner? Her friend Susan manages to burn even macaroni and cheese, which makes her ‘human’ and ‘real’ – just what Bree's husband says he wants her to be. But hello - Susan’s husband left her for his secretary.
For all its popularity, Desperate Housewives is being called an idiot box illusion - a fantasy which gives the impression of reflecting reality. “The main characters are 21st-century women, with 21st-century wardrobes and attitudes, but they’re dropped into 1950s suburbia,” says one op-ed writer. A suburbia of domestic claustrophobia that does not exist anymore - at least not in America.
According to the most recent U.S. census, 52% of American marriages will end in divorce, so if you’re trapped it’s really out of choice - not lack of it.
But that, I think, is the brilliance of the show. Yes, there is always the option of walking out but even in a society where it is commonplace, people choose to pretend things are working. Or live on hope.
As Mary Alice summarises it from Up Above: “Each new day in suburbia brings with it a new set of lies… We whisper them in the dark, telling ourselves we're happy, or that he's happy. That we can change, or that he will change his mind… Yes, each night before we fall asleep we lie to ourselves in a desperate, desperate hope that come morning - it will all be true.”
If anything, Desperate Housewives reflects more accurately the state of affairs in upper middle class India, than suburban America. A society where divorce rates could potentially be as high as 52% but aren’t because couples somehow ‘adjust’ and carry on.
I once asked a shrink who treats mainly south Madras and yuppie types how many marriages, in his experience, would be classified as ‘happy’. He paused a moment and pronounced: “Three out of ten”. And then he added, “It's funny. That's worse than the cancer survival rate after 5 years!”
So why don’t 7 out of 10 marriages end in divorce in India? Simple. We learn to channelise the energy and passion that should have gone into the relationship elsewhere. Not just into extra-marital affairs – that, of course works for some. But most pour themselves into work, some into religion. For women, it's often their kids.
Marriage becomes a joint project: a lovely well run home in the right neighbourhood... Where the children attend the right schools, the men (hurts to say that, but it's usually the men) make enough money for annual foreign vacations and women quietly polish their life until it gleams with perfection. Except they're perhaps not as suicidal– thanks to domestic help.
Regarding the theme of "Desperate Housewives" and Divorce, there is conflict. Desperate Housewives is a show which predoimananetly exhibits the living culture and societies of west and if we compare them both then its like, we are comparing the exisitence of RAM in US in case they telecast it there both are different countires or rather say world altogether.
However the aping is there in india for western clothes their culture and living styles. But that is only at macro level inside we are still very orthodox societies where divorce/sepration is not an easy task or just a pulse reaction.
Even if a girl belongs to Mumbai or other metros, though the society might deal softer but the question remains the same? Why did not she ignore him the way he is? What is the guarantee if she finds the next one same to her expectations.
I truly agree that happy couples share a lot more than bed but in today's world when double salaries are dominant people prefer to watch cinemas on weekend rather sitting and home and have good chat.
Housewives in the metros lack communication with their spouses. One reason could be the time constraint.The fear of expressing or communicating leads them to frustration of their desires .In fact there are so many articles where women say that they always subject themselves to way pleasing to their husbands and that's where the mutual desires are not met and everything is one sided.
Intimacy may not be fulfilled only by sex.A women needs emotional fulfillment and inorder to get that she may give herself to a man.The lack of emotional fulfillment also leads to chat rooms on the net.At the end of it I think communication between spouses can always put an end to the so called loneliness and desperation.Women in india are totally different from the U.S. of A.One can go ahead and compare Bombay / Delhi to the U.S as whole but not the rest of india because India when penetrated further brings out a lot of cultural and religious truths.The place where i come from that's Udaipur, divorce is looked upon as a kalank whereas my same community, have a different opinion. But at the end of it, no woman/women should subject themselves to an abusive relationship.
One of the great american evangelist and advisor to many U.S Presidents, Dr. Billy Graham once said
"The family is always the a key to the society " that,s where the US fails miserably and India tends to stand strong.
I'm sure every housewife in suburban america looks like she just walked out of a cosmopolitan photo shoot and the police in every county are too busy chasing cats and dogs to worry about murders and crimes being committed right under their nose. I used to like the show in the beginning, but later on it just turned into another harlequin romance novel with twists and turns no different from any other soap opera whose characters are 5 minutes from leaping onto each other in a sex scene like 14 year olds in high school.
It reminded me a lot of that novel The Namesake from Jhumpa Lahiri and that one is famous in every south asian home. Plus Mira Nair's was directing it, i'm sure everyone's going to talk about how many barriers that film/novel broke without ever realizing the irony that its an insult to our ethnicity by a cheapening of our cultural differences by creating cross cultural stereotypes i.e. brown people in a white stereotype (desperate housewives but with indians etc.).
And no, this is not the last word on the subject.
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