10 Hard Truths About Why Extramarital Affairs Are Rising in India — and What Actually Protects a Marriage

By Dr. Narayan Rout | Author | Researcher |    Human Emotions  ·  42 min read  ·  Published: September 02, 2026

Contents of This Research Pillar

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Key Takeaways
3. 1. A Trend the Numbers Actually Confirm — Just How Much Has Changed
   1. Table 1. Three independent sources, one consistent direction
4. 2. From Crime to Civil Wrong — What Indian Law Actually Says About Adultery Today
   1. Table 2. Adultery’s legal status, then and now
   2. 3. The Sociological Drivers — Distance, Comparison, and a Phone Full of Alternatives
   3. Table 3. Three modern pressures on Indian marriages
5. 4. The Psychological Roots — What Childhood Attachment Has to Do With Adult Infidelity
   1. Table 4. Attachment risk factors, stated carefully
6. 5. India Is Not an Outlier — What Global Research Says About Why People Stray
   1. Table 5. What’s consistent across countries, and what isn’t
7. 6. How Affairs Actually Begin — The Slow Slide, Not the Sudden Leap
   1. Table 6. Shirley Glass’s four-stage escalation
8. 7. The Early Warning Signs — What to Watch for in Your Own Marriage, and in Yourself
   1. Table 7. Five signals worth honest attention
9. 8. What Actually Protects a Marriage — Building Walls and Windows on Purpose
   1. Table 8. Reversing the drift, deliberately
10. 9. If It Has Already Happened — Repair, Reconciliation, and Knowing When to Let Go
    1. Table 9. What evidence-based repair generally requires
11. 10. What Indian Tradition Actually Said About the Marital Bond — Grihastha, Sahadharmacharini, and a Question Older Than the Law
    1. Table 10. Two framings of marriage, side by side
12. Quest Sage Insight
13. What You Can Do With This
14. Conclusion
15. Frequently Asked Questions
16. References and Sources
17. Further Reading on Thequestsage.com

For most of modern Indian history, infidelity was a subject discussed, when it was discussed at all, in whispers — a family scandal contained within four walls, rarely a matter for courts, surveys, or parliamentary committees. That has changed with a speed worth taking seriously. In the space of less than a decade, adultery has been struck down as a criminal offence by India’s highest court, recommended for reinstatement by a parliamentary panel, tracked by dating platforms built explicitly for married people seeking partners outside their marriage, and cited by helplines and detective agencies as a rapidly growing category of distress and inquiry.

This article sets out to do three things carefully. First, to verify what the actual data says, since claims about infidelity are especially prone to exaggeration, selective sourcing, and platforms with a commercial interest in making the phenomenon sound larger than it is — a caution worth holding even while, as this article will show, several independent and more rigorous sources do confirm a genuine rising trend. Second, to explain why affairs actually happen, drawing on decades of psychological research into how ordinary relationships gradually develop the vulnerabilities that make infidelity possible, rather than treating it as a simple, sudden moral failure. Third, and perhaps most usefully, to lay out the early warning signs worth watching for in your own marriage or your own choices, what genuinely protects a relationship according to the evidence, and how couples who do face betrayal can realistically think about repair — or about knowing when repair is not the right path.

None of this is offered as moral instruction from a position of judgment. Infidelity is a subject where almost everyone has an opinion and relatively few people have looked closely at what the actual research shows about why it happens and what, concretely, reduces its likelihood. That closer look is what this article attempts.

This article verifies and expands on the actual data behind India’s rising infidelity trend — survey findings, NCRB crime statistics, and the 2018 Supreme Court judgment that decriminalized adultery — then examines why affairs happen, drawing on psychologist Shirley Glass’s research showing most begin as a slow boundary reversal rather than a sudden decision. It covers the early warning signs worth taking seriously in your own marriage, what evidence-based prevention actually looks like, how couples can realistically approach repair after betrayal, and closes with how India’s own classical tradition framed marital fidelity as lifelong companionship rather than only a legal or moral rule.

It is worth being skeptical, at first, of any single infidelity statistic, and one figure in particular deserves that skepticism before being accepted: the widely repeated claim that 55% of married Indians have cheated on a spouse. That number comes from a 2020 survey of 1,525 married individuals aged 25 to 50 across eight major cities, commissioned by Gleeden, an extramarital dating platform, and conducted by the market research firm IPSOS. It is a real, professionally conducted survey — not a fabricated statistic — but it was commissioned by a company whose entire business model depends on infidelity being perceived as widespread and socially unremarkable, which is a genuine reason for caution about how representative the sample and framing actually are of India as a whole, rather than of the specific, tech-enabled, urban demographic likely to encounter and respond to such a survey in the first place.

What makes the broader trend credible is not that one survey, but that independently sourced government data points in the same direction using an entirely different method. National Crime Records Bureau figures show that murders motivated by love affairs and illicit relationships made up roughly 7 to 8% of India’s total murders between 2010 and 2014, a share that had risen to approximately 10 to 11% by the mid-2020s. The 2024 NCRB report specifically recorded 2,802 of India’s 27,049 total murder cases — close to 10% — as linked to love affairs or illicit relationships, making it the third most common recorded motive nationally, behind general disputes and personal vendetta or enmity, with Delhi recording the highest number of such killings among India’s metropolitan cities that year. This is government crime data, not a dating app’s marketing survey, and it corroborates the direction of the trend even if it cannot corroborate the specific 55% figure.

A second, quieter kind of evidence comes from an unlikely source: private surveillance and detective agencies, several of which have publicly described a sharp rise in client inquiries specifically related to suspected spousal infidelity. One Bengaluru-based agency reported that such inquiries rose from roughly two to three per month in 2020 to more than forty per month by 2025 — a more than tenfold increase in five years that, whatever its limitations as formal data, reflects real client demand rather than a survey response typed into a dating app’s own questionnaire. Taken together — a professionally conducted if commercially motivated survey, independently verified government crime statistics moving in a consistent direction over more than a decade, and on-the-ground demand for infidelity investigation services — the honest conclusion is that something real is happening, even where any single number deserves to be treated with appropriate caution.

Source	What it shows	Limitation worth noting
Gleeden/IPSOS survey (2020)	55% of respondents self-reported infidelity	Commissioned by a platform with a commercial interest
NCRB crime data (2010–2024)	Love-affair-linked murders rose from ~7-8% to ~10% of all murders	Reflects only cases ending in violence
Detective agency reports	Suspected-infidelity inquiries up 10x+ in 5 years (Bengaluru)	Anecdotal, single-city, not nationally representative

Adultery’s legal history in India took its most consequential modern turn on September 27, 2018, when a unanimous five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Joseph Shine v. Union of India, struck down Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code — a 158-year-old, colonial-era provision that had made adultery a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison. The provision’s specific structure was what made it constitutionally indefensible in the Court’s eyes: only a man could be prosecuted as an offender, a married woman who had an affair could never be charged, and the law effectively treated a wife as her husband’s property, requiring his consent for her to be considered a lawful participant rather than merely a victim. The Court held this arrangement violated Articles 14 (equality before law), 15 (non-discrimination on grounds of sex), and 21 (the right to life, dignity, and privacy), while explicitly preserving adultery as a valid ground for civil divorce — a civil wrong between spouses, the Court held, but never a crime against the state.

The judgment did not end the political conversation. In November 2023, a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, examining the draft Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita intended to replace the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, recommended that adultery be reintroduced as a criminal offence — this time in gender-neutral form, holding both parties equally liable, specifically to address the discrimination the Supreme Court had identified in the old law. The recommendation drew immediate and pointed criticism, including from senior parliamentarians such as P. Chidambaram, who argued that a marriage is fundamentally a private, interpersonal contract, and that the state has no legitimate business policing the private conduct of consenting adults through the machinery of criminal law rather than civil remedy. As matters currently stand, this recommendation has not been incorporated: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, as actually enacted in December 2023 and brought into force in July 2024, contains no adultery provision. Adultery remains, today, exactly what the 2018 judgment made it — a legitimate ground for divorce, and nothing more, under Indian law.

The arguments on each side of the recriminalization debate are worth stating plainly rather than caricaturing either position. Supporters of reintroducing a gender-neutral offence argue it would protect the social institution of marriage, provide a moral deterrent, and offer an aggrieved spouse a form of legal recourse beyond divorce alone. Opponents argue that criminal law is a poor and often counterproductive tool for regulating private relational conduct, that treating adultery as a crime forecloses the possibility of a couple privately choosing reconciliation rather than being pulled into an adversarial criminal process, and that the constitutional concerns about autonomy, dignity, and privacy the Supreme Court identified in 2018 would apply just as forcefully to a gender-neutral version of the same underlying approach. This remains, as of this writing, a live and unresolved policy debate rather than a settled question.

Period	Legal Status
Before 2018 (Section 497, IPC)	Criminal offence; only a man could be prosecuted
Sept 27, 2018 onward (Joseph Shine judgment)	Decriminalized; valid ground for civil divorce only
Nov 2023 (Parliamentary Committee recommendation)	Recommended gender-neutral recriminalization
July 2024 onward (BNS in force)	Recommendation not adopted; status unchanged since 2018

Infidelity has existed across every documented human civilization, and no single modern factor created it from nothing. What has genuinely changed in recent decades is the specific combination of pressures and opportunities modern Indian life places on a marriage, several of which interact in ways that compound rather than simply add to each other. Fast-paced careers, frequent relocation for work, and increasingly common separate-city postings for dual-career couples create sustained physical distance between spouses that earlier, more geographically stable generations of Indian marriages rarely had to sustain for years at a time. Physical distance does not automatically produce infidelity, but it reliably produces emotional distance when unaccompanied by deliberate effort to stay connected — and emotional distance, as the research on how affairs actually begin will show, is consistently the more dangerous of the two.

Social media adds a second, more insidious pressure that earlier generations of Indian marriages simply did not have to contend with: constant, near-involuntary exposure to curated, idealized portrayals of other people’s relationships, bodies, careers, and apparent happiness. This steady diet of comparison breeds a specific and corrosive kind of dissatisfaction — not necessarily with one’s own life in absolute terms, but relative to a carefully edited highlight reel that was never an honest comparison to begin with. A spouse measured against an influencer’s curated marriage, or an ex-partner’s carefully selected vacation photos, will predictably come up short in ways that have little to do with the actual health of the marriage being judged.

The third and most structurally new factor is what researchers increasingly call digital infidelity: the sheer, near-limitless availability of alternative romantic and sexual contact that a smartphone places in every pocket. Where earlier generations required deliberate, effortful action to even meet someone outside their existing social circle, dating apps, messaging platforms, and even ordinary professional communication tools now make sustained, secret contact with an alternative partner available with almost no friction at all. Coworkers, old classmates reconnecting on social media, and strangers on dedicated platforms are now a message away rather than a chance encounter away — and, as the next section on the psychology of affairs will show, emotional intimacy with any of these contacts frequently develops and crosses a meaningful boundary well before either party consciously registers having decided anything at all.

Driver	What it Does
Work-related physical distance	Produces emotional distance if unaddressed
Social media comparison	Breeds dissatisfaction against curated, unrealistic benchmarks
Digital infidelity / app access	Removes the friction that once limited outside contact

Beneath the sociological pressures of modern life, a body of psychological research points to something considerably older and more personal: the specific ways early childhood experience shapes an adult’s capacity for secure, exclusive commitment. Attachment theory, one of the most extensively researched frameworks in developmental psychology, holds that the quality of a child’s earliest bonds with caregivers establishes internal expectations about closeness, trust, and abandonment that persist, often unconsciously, into every significant adult relationship that follows.

Adults who experienced significant childhood neglect, inconsistent caregiving, domestic conflict, emotional abuse, or the sudden loss of a caregiver frequently carry what researchers term attachment wounds into adulthood — patterns that can manifest as difficulty trusting a partner’s consistency, a persistent, hard-to-satisfy need for external validation, or genuine discomfort with the sustained emotional exposure that exclusive, monogamous commitment requires. It is important to state the limits of this research honestly rather than overstating them: a difficult childhood does not doom anyone to infidelity, the large majority of people with attachment wounds do not have affairs, and the large majority of people who do have affairs cannot point to a single traceable childhood cause. What the research supports is a probabilistic risk factor, not a deterministic explanation — attachment insecurity makes the specific vulnerabilities that lead to infidelity somewhat more likely to develop and somewhat harder to recognize in oneself, not inevitable.

A related and clinically well-documented pattern involves a chronic, underlying need for validation that a single relationship, however healthy, was never actually going to be capable of fully satisfying — a pattern sometimes associated with difficulty sustaining investment in one exclusive bond, and instead distributing emotional need across several looser, lower-stakes connections rather than risking the vulnerability a single, deeply invested relationship demands. This is worth naming clearly and without either moralizing or excusing it: it describes a psychological pattern with identifiable roots and, in many documented cases, a real capacity for change through therapeutic work — not a fixed character flaw and not a helpless compulsion either.

What the research supports	What it does not support
A probabilistic risk factor	A deterministic cause
A pattern that can shift through therapeutic work	A fixed, unchangeable trait
One risk factor among several	The single explanation for any individual case

India’s rising infidelity conversation can feel, from inside the country’s own media coverage, like a uniquely Indian crisis of values. The comparative research does not support that framing. Infidelity prevalence studies conducted across dozens of countries consistently find rates of self-reported extramarital involvement ranging roughly from 20% to over 50% of married adults, depending heavily on the specific population sampled, how the question is asked, and how honestly people are willing to answer a survey about behavior most cultures still stigmatize — a methodological challenge that makes any cross-country ranking considerably less precise than headlines built on such numbers usually suggest.

What the international research does support with more confidence is the set of underlying drivers, which recur across culturally very different societies: chronic emotional disconnection between partners, expanding digital opportunity for secret contact, work-related physical separation, and the specific psychological vulnerabilities attachment research identifies all appear, in broadly similar form, in infidelity research conducted in the United States, across Western Europe, and in East Asian contexts with very different cultural and religious attitudes toward marriage than India’s. Evolutionary psychologists have additionally proposed that certain baseline sex differences in infidelity patterns — broadly, a documented tendency for men’s affairs to more often begin as primarily physical and women’s to more often begin as primarily emotional, a pattern Shirley Glass’s own research specifically documented — may reflect deep evolutionary pressures around reproductive strategy, though this remains a genuinely contested area of research rather than a settled scientific consensus.

The most useful takeaway from the comparative evidence is not that India is worse or better than other societies, but that infidelity functions as a remarkably consistent human vulnerability rather than a culturally specific moral failing unique to any one country’s supposedly declining values. What differs meaningfully across cultures is not so much whether the underlying vulnerability exists, but how visible its consequences become — through legal systems, social stigma, divorce rates, or, as India’s own NCRB data shows in its most extreme form, violence.

Consistent across cultures	Varies by culture
Core drivers (distance, disconnection, opportunity)	Visibility of consequences (stigma, divorce rates, law)
Attachment-related risk factors	Precise self-reported prevalence rates

Perhaps the single most useful corrective the research offers to popular assumptions about infidelity is this: the overwhelming majority of affairs do not begin with someone consciously deciding to betray their spouse. They begin, according to the extensively documented work of psychologist Shirley Glass — whose research over more than two decades culminated in her widely cited book Not Just Friends — as ordinary, often entirely innocent friendships that gradually and almost imperceptibly cross a boundary neither person set out to cross.

Glass organized this gradual process into a specific, four-stage escalation worth understanding in detail, because recognizing which stage a friendship has reached is far more useful than waiting for a single, obvious moment of betrayal that, in most real cases, never actually arrives as a discrete event. The first stage is an ordinary platonic friendship, existing alongside a genuinely secure marriage — entirely healthy and, on its own, no cause for concern whatsoever. The second stage is a more intimate friendship developing specifically as an underlying marriage becomes less secure or less attentive, often without either spouse consciously registering the connection between the two. The third stage is a fully emotionally involved affair — involving deep intimacy, secrecy from the spouse, and a specific charge of sexual chemistry, even without any physical contact at all — developing alongside a marriage that has become genuinely emotionally detached. The fourth and final stage is a fully sexually intimate affair, occurring once the original marriage itself feels, to at least one partner, actively threatened.

Glass’s central diagnostic tool for locating exactly where a relationship sits on this spectrum is her memorable metaphor of walls and windows. In a healthy marriage, she argued, partners build a protective wall around their relationship — a shared, mutual understanding that certain kinds of emotional intimacy and disclosure are reserved for each other and not extended to outside friendships — while keeping a window of genuine openness, vulnerability, and honest communication turned toward one another. An affair develops, in Glass’s framework, precisely when these structures quietly reverse: a wall of secrecy goes up between the spouses, hiding growing intimacy with someone else, while a window of openness, understanding, and emotional exposure opens instead toward that outside person. Crucially, Glass’s research reframed infidelity itself in a way that remains clinically influential today: less as a simple moral failure of character, and more as a specific, identifiable form of interpersonal trauma — one that develops through recognizable, gradual stages rather than erupting from nowhere.

Stage	What’s happening
1	Platonic friendship, alongside a secure marriage
2	Intimate friendship, alongside an insecure marriage
3	Emotionally involved affair, alongside a detached marriage
4	Sexually intimate affair, alongside a threatened marriage

Given how gradually affairs actually develop, the single most protective habit any married person can build is honest, non-defensive self-monitoring — not paranoid surveillance of a spouse, but an honest, regular check on one’s own emotional traffic. Several specific patterns, identified consistently across the clinical literature on emotional affairs, are worth naming plainly as signals that deserve honest attention rather than dismissal.

A growing, specific reluctance to mention a particular friendship to one’s spouse, or a habit of downplaying its frequency or emotional significance when it does come up, is one of the most consistently identified early indicators — secrecy, more than any particular level of closeness itself, is the signal Glass’s research treats as most diagnostic. Comparing a spouse unfavorably to someone else in conversations with that other person — discussing a marriage’s specific frustrations or disappointments with someone outside it, rather than working through them with the spouse directly — is a second clear indicator, since it represents exactly the kind of emotional disclosure Glass’s framework holds should stay inside the marital wall. A third signal is an increasingly protective, defensive reaction to a phone, a messaging app, or a social media account — not necessarily proof of anything on its own, but a behavioral shift worth honestly examining rather than automatically explaining away. A fourth is noticing that a specific person has become who one turns to first with good news, bad news, or an unresolved worry, ahead of one’s own spouse — a quiet but significant relocation of primary emotional intimacy. A fifth, more internal signal is a pattern of actively looking forward to contact with a specific person with a charge of anticipation that feels qualitatively different from ordinary friendship, even in the complete absence of any physical or overtly romantic content.

None of these signals, individually or even in combination, means an affair has occurred or is inevitable. What they represent, taken honestly, is exactly the boundary-reversal Glass’s research describes already quietly underway — the wall shifting, the window opening elsewhere — at a stage where deliberate correction remains, in the large majority of cases, considerably easier than it will be later.

Signal	Why it matters
Reluctance to mention a friendship to your spouse	Secrecy is Glass’s most diagnostic indicator
Discussing marital frustrations with someone else first	Relocates disclosure outside the marital “wall”
Defensiveness about phone or messages	A behavioral shift worth examining honestly
A specific person becomes your first call	Signals a quiet relocation of primary intimacy
A distinct charge of anticipation toward one person	An internal signal worth noticing early

The research converges, with unusual consistency across different studies and clinical traditions, on one central protective factor above all others: open, transparent, non-judgmental communication between spouses, sustained deliberately rather than left to develop on its own. This is not a vague, feel-good platitude; it corresponds to specific, identifiable, learnable behaviors that couples counselors across very different theoretical traditions consistently teach.

Practically, this means reversing Glass’s walls-and-windows dynamic on purpose, before any crisis forces the issue: consciously directing the deepest emotional disclosures — fears, professional frustrations, private insecurities, disappointments with the marriage itself — toward one’s own spouse first, rather than toward a friend, colleague, or online contact who happens to be more immediately available or less emotionally risky to be vulnerable with in the moment. It means treating specific categories of interaction — private, ongoing messaging with a particular person, for instance — as legitimate topics for open discussion between spouses rather than either a forbidden subject or an unquestioned entitlement, since secrecy itself, more than the underlying friendship, is what Glass’s research identifies as the actual danger. And it means addressing chronic dissatisfaction, loneliness, or disconnection directly with a spouse, or with a couples counselor when a conversation alone cannot resolve it, well before that unmet need quietly finds satisfaction somewhere else.

For couples separated by work postings or long hours — a specific and increasingly common Indian reality — the research on maintaining connection across physical distance points to deliberate, scheduled emotional check-ins as a genuinely effective substitute for the casual, incidental closeness that shared daily presence otherwise provides for free. The underlying principle across every version of this advice is the same: emotional intimacy will develop somewhere, with someone, given enough time and enough unmet need. The only real choice available to a couple is whether that intimacy is deliberately built inside the marriage or allowed to develop, by default and by neglect, outside it.

Instead of…	Do this
Sharing frustrations with a friend first	Bring them to your spouse first
Treating outside messaging as a private matter	Make it an open topic between spouses
Assuming distance will resolve itself	Schedule deliberate emotional check-ins

For couples who are already past prevention — where an affair has occurred and both partners are asking whether the marriage can survive it — the research offers a more measured and, in some ways, more hopeful picture than popular culture’s usual framing of infidelity as an automatic, unrecoverable ending. Glass’s own clinical work, along with decades of subsequent couples-therapy research, consistently finds that marriages can and often do recover from infidelity, though recovery requires a specific, demanding process rather than simply the passage of time.

The first requirement, in Glass’s own recommended framework, is a genuine and complete end to the affair itself — not a vague promise, but a verifiable, concrete boundary with the affair partner, since any ongoing ambiguity here makes every subsequent step of rebuilding trust functionally impossible. The second is a difficult but consistently identified requirement: reversing the original walls and windows, this time deliberately, by having the unfaithful partner answer the betrayed partner’s questions about the affair with real honesty rather than protective vagueness, precisely so trust can be rebuilt on an accurate account rather than a managed, partial one. The third is sustained transparency going forward — not permanent surveillance, but a mutually agreed, generally time-limited period of increased openness that gradually earns back the space and privacy a healthy marriage ordinarily allows. Couples counseling with a therapist experienced specifically in infidelity recovery, rather than general marriage counseling alone, is consistently identified in the clinical literature as significantly improving the odds of successful repair, precisely because betrayal trauma has its own specific clinical patterns that general relationship counseling does not always address.

It is equally important, and equally evidence-based, to say plainly that not every marriage should or does survive infidelity, and that choosing to end a marriage after an affair is not a failure of forgiveness or a lesser moral outcome than choosing to stay. Repeated infidelity, an affair partner who refuses to accept the relationship’s end, or a betrayed spouse who, after honest reflection, finds the specific trust that was broken genuinely irreparable are all legitimate reasons a marriage may not be salvageable — and the research is consistent that a couple’s own honest assessment of their specific situation, ideally with professional support, matters considerably more than any generic rule about what betrayal a marriage should or should not be expected to survive.

Step	Purpose
A verifiable, complete end to the affair	Removes ongoing ambiguity
Honest disclosure to the betrayed spouse	Rebuilds trust on an accurate account
A sustained, time-limited period of transparency	Gradually earns back normal privacy
Specialized couples counseling	Addresses betrayal trauma’s specific patterns

Long before Section 497, and long before any parliamentary committee debated the merits of a gender-neutral criminal provision, classical Indian tradition had its own, considerably more relational way of framing what marriage actually asked of two people. The Grihastha ashrama — the householder stage, second of the four traditional life stages laid out in Vedic and Dharmashastra literature — positioned marriage not as a private romantic arrangement between two individuals, but as a shared social and spiritual partnership, jointly responsible for sustaining a household, raising children, supporting the wider community, and maintaining the ritual and economic life that the surrounding stages of renunciation and withdrawal from worldly life would, in the traditional framework, eventually depend on. Fidelity, in this framing, was never simply a private moral virtue; it was a functional requirement of a partnership the entire surrounding social structure was understood to depend on.

The specific Sanskrit term for a wife in much of this classical literature, sahadharmacharini — literally, “one who walks the path of dharma together” — captures something the modern legal and psychological framing of marriage often loses in translation: marriage was conceived, at least in its own stated ideal, as a shared spiritual and ethical journey rather than primarily a contract, a romantic arrangement, or a legal status. This ideal, it should be said honestly, coexisted historically with deeply unequal legal and social realities for women within the same tradition — a tension this platform has examined directly elsewhere, particularly regarding the specific legal provisions of the Manusmriti. But the companionship ideal itself, independent of how unevenly it was actually applied, points toward something the modern research in this article keeps independently confirming: marriages that function primarily as a shared journey, undertaken together with mutual transparency, prove more durable than marriages reduced to either a private contract of individual entitlement or a romantic feeling expected to sustain itself without deliberate, daily tending.

The Saptapadi vow this article opened with — sakha saptapadi bhava, become my friend, with the seventh step — was never primarily a romantic vow in the modern sense at all. It was, in its own original context, a vow of companionship, a promise that whatever else the marriage became, friendship would remain its foundation. Modern research on infidelity, arriving by an entirely different, data-driven route, keeps landing on the same conclusion the ancient vow already assumed: marriages are not protected primarily by romance, and they are not destroyed primarily by its absence. They are protected, and they are lost, by whether the friendship underneath the romance was ever actually tended.

Modern legal/individual framing	Classical Grihastha framing
A private contract between two individuals	A shared social and spiritual partnership
Fidelity as a personal moral choice	Fidelity as a functional requirement of shared dharma
Romantic feeling as the foundation	Friendship (sakha) as the foundation

What I keep returning to, having gone through this research carefully, is how rarely infidelity is actually about the thing it appears to be about. The data shows affairs beginning as friendships, not conspiracies. The psychology shows them rooted, more often than not, in an old, unmet need for validation reaching back to childhood, not a simple failure of willpower or virtue. Even the law’s own evolution — from a colonial provision that treated a wife as property, to a constitutional court insisting on dignity and equal treatment for both spouses — traces a slow move away from treating fidelity as ownership and toward treating it as a question of mutual respect.

I do not think this makes infidelity any less painful for the people who live through it, and nothing in this article is meant to suggest otherwise. But I do think it changes what the useful response actually is. Moral condemnation alone has never meaningfully reduced how often affairs happen, in India or anywhere else research has looked closely; the data on rising rates, gathered across a society that still overwhelmingly condemns infidelity in principle, makes that plain enough on its own. What has consistently been shown to work, in the research this article has gathered, is considerably less dramatic and considerably harder to sustain: ordinary, unglamorous, daily honesty between two people, practiced long before any crisis makes it urgent.

There is an old image, from the Mundaka Upanishad, of two birds sitting together on the same branch of one tree — close companions, the text calls them — one restlessly eating the tree’s fruit, caught up in every sweetness and bitterness it tastes, the other simply watching, steady, untouched by either. I find myself thinking of a good marriage in something like that shape: two people on the same branch, one of them often caught up in the day’s particular sweetness or bitterness, and the other’s steadiness — available, attentive, not looking away — being the actual thing that lets the branch hold.

• Run an honest, private check this week on whether any friendship in your life has quietly become somewhere you take feelings you haven’t shared with your own spouse first.
• If distance or long hours are straining your marriage, build a specific, scheduled emotional check-in with your spouse, rather than assuming closeness will simply resume whenever circumstances change.
• Notice, without judgment, if you’ve begun comparing your spouse unfavorably to someone else in conversation with that other person, and bring the underlying frustration home instead.
• If you or your spouse recognize early warning signs in an existing friendship, address it directly and honestly with each other rather than either hiding it or abruptly cutting it off without explanation.
• If betrayal has already happened and you’re genuinely trying to repair the marriage, consider a couples therapist with specific experience in infidelity recovery, rather than assuming time alone will resolve what a structured process is generally needed to address.

The data is now clear enough to state plainly: infidelity in India is genuinely rising, by measures independent enough of each other — survey research, national crime statistics, and on-the-ground demand for investigation services — to rule out simple coincidence or a single biased source. What the same data refuses to support is the comforting, simple story that affairs happen because someone woke up one day and chose to betray their spouse. They happen, in the overwhelming majority of documented cases, through a slow, mostly unconscious drift — a wall that quietly thinned, a window that quietly opened somewhere it shouldn’t have, long before either person involved would have called what was happening an affair.

That slowness is, in the end, the most useful and most hopeful part of the entire picture. A slow process can be noticed early. A gradual drift can be corrected long before it becomes a crisis, by the very same ordinary, unglamorous honesty that both modern couples research and an ancient marriage vow, arriving from entirely different directions, keep insisting on. Neither the law, nor the data, nor the psychology in this article can make that choice for any specific couple. What they can do, at best, is make the choice a genuinely informed one.

Two people, the old image says, sitting together on the very same branch. The tree will always offer sweetness and bitterness in roughly equal measure, to every marriage that has ever existed. What seems, on the strength of everything gathered here, to actually decide whether the branch holds is not the absence of temptation, distance, or difficulty. It is whether both people kept choosing, in the small moments nobody else ever saw, to stay close enough on that one branch to notice.

Joseph Shine v. Union of India, AIR 2018 SC 4898, Supreme Court of India (September 27, 2018).

Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs (2023). Report on the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Bill, 2023.

Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (enacted December 25, 2023; in force July 1, 2024).

Gleeden / IPSOS (2020). Infidelity Survey in India.

Gleeden Infidelity Study 2025 (city-wise data, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune).

National Crime Records Bureau (2024). Crime in India — murder motive statistics.

Deccan Herald, Telangana Today, NewsX (2025–2026). Reporting on NCRB 2024 murder-motive data.

Glass, S. P., & Wright, T. L. (1992). Justifications for extramarital relationships. Journal of Sex Research.

Glass, S. P. (2003). Not “Just Friends”: Protect Your Relationship from Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal. Free Press.

Baltimore Sun (2003). Shirley P. Glass, 67, psychologist, expert on marital infidelity [obituary].

Attachment theory literature on adult romantic attachment and infidelity risk (general review sources).

Cross-cultural infidelity prevalence research (general review sources, multiple countries).

Manusmriti and Dharmashastra literature on Grihastha ashrama and sahadharmacharini (classical sources).

Asvalayana Grihya Sutra and related sources on the Saptapadi marriage ritual.

• The Science of Forgiveness: 6 Remarkable Things — thequestsage.com/science-forgiveness-letting-go-body-brain/
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• Manu, the Fish, and the Fire: 12 Chapters in the 4,000-Year Story Behind the Manusmriti — thequestsage.com/manusmriti-history-manu-myths-dharma-shastra/
• 7 Layers of a Truly Healthy, Peaceful and Successful Life — thequestsage.com/healthy-peaceful-successful-life-purushartha-panchakosha-science/
• Grief, Trauma, and PTSD: 6 Ways to Distinguish — thequestsage.com/grief-trauma-ptsd-loss-healing/

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