In an email to Shashi Tharoor, Meher Tarar says feelingly: “... and so I guess I was right all my life. Friendship between a man and a woman will always be labelled incorrectly and even the woman who’s the love of your life will doubt your word against very circumstantial evidence,” to which Shashi replied that he’d been asked by Sunanda Pushkar to not be in touch with Tarar any more. “I hope you will understand and forgive me if I stop our phone and email exchanges,” he said.
In 'Hum Tum', Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukherjee have an interesting exchange about the friendship between a man and a woman. Meg Ryan argues with Billy Crystal about the possibility of a platonic friendship between the two sexes in 'When Harry Met Sally'. Such friendship might indeed be possible but with the Damocles’ sword of sex, attraction, lust and chemistry always hanging on its head — it is difficult.
So a man-woman friendship is like a diet which can anytime give into the forbidden chocolate gateaux, throw in the towel in a moment of laxness and often with destructive complications later. Especially when there are already dangers of matrimonial parameters being misunderstood. The fatal point is that this is like hurtling into Alice’s tunnel where the parties cannot or do not really restrain themselves.
With married people there is often regret in getting involved because they actually love their spouses and don’t wish to derail their well ensconced relationship for some moments of pleasure. Especially men don’t wish for discord or to disrupt their homes but women most often cannot bear another woman in the equation. Salim Khan, Salma and Helen are a rare case of friendship and tolerance.
I personally believe that if you wish to be married and are committed, then marriage is about loyalty, commitment and happiness of the partner. But times are a changing. Divorces are becoming the way taken in the face of any disquiet. It used to be that you worked at mending things than discard them for new.
It’s a personal belief that you should quit while you’re ahead and not tempt fate. If there is a chance of a friendship going the affair way — don’t even go that route. Keep your wife in the loop always and try to avoid solitary meetings to avoid temptation. The holier than thou self-confidence of not ever ‘being the kind’ may not work, and there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip!
All I can say is that it is luck and destiny and rare broadmindedness amidst the partners that might let the ideal situation of man, woman and a friend of the opposite sex survive. Maybe the man’s grand aunt could be his lady friend, the rest are all open to hazards and human frailties. Mankind’s downfall from paradise began after all with giving into the bite of the apple.
