Kriti is a beautiful woman and since Day 1, I have made sure to let her know how lucky I feel to have her in my life. But I felt she looked for validation outside of our space as if she needed other men to appreciate her beauty in order to feel better about herself.
My wife had an open social media account on which there were only selfies and pictures of her and barely any of us both. If a stranger was to check out her profile, they wouldn’t be able to tell whether she was married or not.
She had hundreds of likes from random men and comments that would irk me, but she was such a good wife to me that I never really questioned her about her virtual activity. You know in our generation of millennial couples, it’s considered rude to fight over social-media footprint.
A part of me knew that Kriti was up to nothing morally incorrect, but her quest for validation is something that I could just not wrap my head around. I didn’t know how to ask her why she did not have a closed profile or any pictures of us, without sounding ‘uncool’.
I was dwelling in the darkness of my own thoughts without realizing that my dismissal of her actions had begun reflecting in my attitude towards her and that she had started noticing. I had stopped giving her compliments, stopped doting on her as I did earlier, and obviously being my partner, she knew something was off in my attitude towards her.
So one day while in bed, she snuggled in with me and asked me what was up, and without thinking twice, I told her how her social media activities made me feel. She was totally taken aback. ‘Seriously? That’s your issue?’ She asked me. ‘I am trying to build an influencer profile for god’s sake! So that I can make some extra money off social media! My parents never let me become an actor or model, so I was just trying to fulfill a long-lost dream!’ Kriti explained.
I felt so embarrassed at that point, I wanted to die. My wife was just doing her own thing and I let my insecurities get the better of me. Just because she was married to me did not mean that she couldn’t do things she liked. She wasn’t looking for validation outside, she was just trying to build something for herself, and I was sitting and judging her as some uncles and aunties would - ‘She is married, how can she pose without her husband?’
I realized that I had been very selfish in forming opinions about my wife based on some baseless notions also concocted by my own self. I should have believed in my gut feeling that told me that she loved me and wouldn’t do anything wrong. I instantly apologized to her and promised her that the next time I feel a certain way, I will talk to her about it rather than grow distant. Communication, after all, can change the world - it changed ours for sure.
